In defence of Prince’s late style

In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even. Only in hindsight did it appear somewhat needy, a litany not of what Prince was going to do, but of the things he had already done. On it, he pulled rank on his status — ‘I’ve seen the top and it’s just a dream / Big cars and women and fancy clothes’ — called out young rappers for their potty mouths, and declared himself ‘fresh and funky for the 90s’.

Context is everything. By 1992, Prince was still funky – but fresh? He had been, indisputably, pop’s premier agitator throughout the previous decade; as David Bowie was to the 1970s, so Prince was to the 1980s. Creatively restless, staggeringly prolific, sexually provocative, he juggled commercial viability with the artily off-beam. From Dirty Mind in 1980 up to and including Lovesexy in 1988, every album was an unmissable event.

And then, almost imperceptibly at first, he started losing altitude. Times changed. The ascendancy of hip hop presented a direct challenge. With rap, Prince finally discovered a musical pursuit at which he didn’t excel, not that it prevented him from trying. For the first time he was a follower, not a leader; his aura of invincibility slowly dissolved. Between 1995 and his death in April 2016, Prince’s reputation rested on his back catalogue and his prowess as a performer. In other words, by his mid-thirties he had succumbed to the fate of most of his peers.

Posthumously, his work has been subject to the standard revisionist blitz. While the emphasis has fallen on the 1980s, the latest releases focus on two relatively unheralded works, The Rainbow Children (2001) and One Nite Alone… (2002).