A Minor Musical Miracle Upstaged by a Big Packaging Blunder: Prince's Planet Earth
Written: Jul 31 '07 (Updated Jul 31 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A healthy, necessary reminder of what the letters R and B stand for.
Cons: What's the album called? Um, what's this song called? Damn, no credits even?
The Bottom Line: In which the author simply refuses to download a 14 page booklet for a CD he bought, but the songs are good.
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| plorentz's Full Review: Planet Earth by Prince |
At least since the mid-90s when he willfully self-destructed his career as a musician, Prince has had a serious problem with his package. Not that package, you big silly, but with the way he packages his work. In the last 15 years, Prince has dropped more product than a mob truck, and much of that product has been just as suspect, the vintage, the pedigree, the origins, the very purpose of the music that made up albums like Come or The Vault or New Power Soul (to say nothing of the massive 4-CD Crystal Ball) so ambiguous that even the most loyal of listeners would have a hard time managing expectations. There's certainly a place for Crystal Ball in the catalog of one of our most prolific and respected artists, but without any explanatory notation, it's really just 4 CDs of public wankery. Moreover, the art direction of Prince's albums since the early 90s has been almost uniformly tacky, with cheesy computer generated graphics often relying on misguided gimmicks (see the triangular fold-outs of NEWS).
Ironically, one of the most beautifully and elaborately packaged albums Prince has released in the last decade - The Rainbow Children - was an artistic nadir, an "official" album that was somehow even more unlistenable than one of his many mid-to-late-90s toss-offs; while one of his most ambiguously and cheaply packaged albums - Chaos and Disorder - is also one of his most musically satisfying. Since about 1993, it's become virtually impossible to tell where Prince's wankery ends, and where the audience can really expect a decent show. Packaging counts, dammit! And just as a four star chef should be able to explain to the people eating his food exactly what they're eating, Prince has a responsibility to his audience to let us know exactly what we're buying when we're buying it. And in his defense, since his Hall of Fame induction almost five years ago, Prince has gone a long way to cleaning up his act in this respect, saving the wankery for his various websites and subscription services while releasing two good, solid, well-produced albums of decent, new, finished-sounding material, packaged in a way that says to the audience, hey, this is a real album you just spent 15 bucks on.
Unfortunately, he takes a couple great leaps backward with the release of his latest album The Planet Earth, which comes in a cardboard digipack, with a plastic hologram panel glued somewhat rudimentarily to the front cover flap (another one of those misguided gimmicks), and, aside from a broad list of thank you's and contributing musicians, virtually no notation. No lyrics. No specific song credits. No song titles even. Even the album title is missing in action. It's true that we can all go to Prince's website to download a fourteen page CD booklet, but seriously, in this age of digital downloads, the few folks who are still buying CDs are expecting liner notes as part and parcel of the product they just blew their money on. If these things weren't important, we'd just hit up iTunes. Of course, this would merely be an annoyance if the album were just another toss-off. What's really depressing (and infuriating) is that The Planet Earth is actually a very good record. And yet, everytime I hear about it, whether it's an e-mail from a friend who just bought it, or a posting on a message board, the first thing people have to say about it - the first thing I have to say about it - is how much its packaging sucks. And when bad packaging can upstage good music in listeners' minds, the Artist has a problem.
Packaging ado notwithstanding, there's much to love about The Planet Earth, and its casual - at times, reminiscent - atmosphere is key. With a title like The Planet Earth, I was sort of expecting something grandiose, something as panoramic and pretentious as, say, the 1992 "symbol" album. But while the record as a whole feels finished, nothing here feels terribly fussed over; there's nothing too otherworldly, no dubious framing concept, no self-indulgent sketches or narrations, no special effects to get in the way of the musicianship of one of the last great funk-rock ensembles in existence... and the whole thing is remarkably short - 10 songs clocking in at a wholly manageable 45-or-so minutes - and catchy, in a way that's damn near nostalgic. The churning, slow-burning rock-gospel groove that opens the record feels as effortless - and necessary - as respiration - even as it makes room for some freaky jazzy interludes - culminating in a ceremonial chorus that will, in its shameless pomp and circumstance, remind many listeners of Prince's mid-80s perfect purple storm. Throughout the record there are percussions that sound like they were sampled from "When Doves Cry", and the voices of Revolution-era Prince associates Wendy and Lisa shine distinctly like beacons from glories past on the title track and the funk celebrity elegy of "Chelsea Rodgers", a character sketch whose combination of funk, sex, and character sketch and social comment would have found a cozy home on Sign O' The Times 20 years ago.
It almost feels as if Prince set out to make nothing more and nothing less than a really good, classic Prince album. Which not only means that he breaks out his guitar every now and then (which has too-long taken a secondary role on Prince's records, though definitely not in his live shows), even professing an almost pathological love for it on the album's lead singer, the appropriately titled "Guitar". The six-string pyrotechnics here are never really as dazzling as, say, that closing solo of "Let's Go Crazy", or even the fiery rhythm riffage of latter-day songs like "Endorphinmachine" and "The Same December"; he never hits a groove so transcendentally sex-charged as 3121's glorious "Black Sweat" (which may be the single greatest single he's released since his ignominious departure from Warner Brothers). But he does deliver a series of immediate, unassuming pleasures in the form of lightly chugging rockers like "The One U Wanna C", and disarmingly goofy come-ons like "Mr. Goodnight". And where, ten years ago, Prince was desperately pandering to dj's for airplay with covers of falsetto-heavy Philly-soul classics "Betcha By Golly Wow" and "La La Means I Love You", on The Planet Earth, he invents his own falsetto-heavy Philly-soul classic in the form of "Somewhere Here On Earth", a gorgeous make-out session set to hushed horns and strings, tickled flirtatiously by a bit of old school Holiday Inn lounge jazz piano.
Like the similarly casual (though seriously dissimilar musically) Chaos and Disorder, you fall in love with the effortlessness of The Planet Earth more than any of its individual songs, which, at times, border on the downright trivial. You fall in love with just how tight the performances are, and you admire the sexy interplay that happens between the musicians, the intimacy inherent in the performances of a group of people who seem to be so in tune with each other that they can predict each other's improvisations. At a time when so much of what we might call rhythm and blues is blippy and staccatoed, full of samples, programmed rhythms, synthesized beats, and roboticized voices, there's something a little miraculous in a sound that feels this organically powerful, and, especially, this approachably human.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The Planet Earth" by Prince
NPG/Columbia Records
Released 7/24/07
Produced by Prince
46 min.
SONGS: The Planet Earth - Guitar - Somewhere Here On Earth - The One U Wanna C - Future Baby Mama - Mr. Goodnight - All the Midnights in the World - Chelsea Rodgers - Lions of Judah - Resolution
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
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