With 20Ten, Prince sounded like his old self again. The one you used to go buy.
That started with “Compassion,” this thunderous, ass-shaking opener, in the style of every Prince album that mattered back in the day. “Beginning Endlessly,” firing off with a titanic keyboard riff reminiscent of Yarbrough and Peoples’ “Don’t Stop the Music,” then flowed seamlessly afterward.
In the space of a few minutes, the prickly, sometimes stupifyingly uncommercial Prince had embraced an old-school futurist sound and this jaunty stance that everyone would be forgiven for forgetting. Once upon a time, you’re reminded, nobody was more creative inside the staccato regimen of a drum machine.
Once upon a time, a long time ago.
Yet 20Ten arrived on July 10, 2010 from a much different place. It sounded like Prince was having … fun? How long have we been waiting for that? Couple that with his curious throwback announcement earlier in the month that “the Internet’s completely over,” and all of sudden, we’re partying like it’s 1979.
Prince hinted at a penchant for analog redux on that minimal “MPLSound” portion of the three-disc Lotusflow3r from the year before. But he finally, blessedly, went all the way back on 20Ten.
“My reputation proceeds me,” Prince sang, “call it a claim to fame. They know me around the world. You want me, just the same.” Maybe, we do. That didn’t keep some – yeah, including me – from finding much of what he’d done over the decade previous to 20Ten a bit too overwrought, too repetitious or too long, in some combination.
Now, there remained curiosities here: The recording was initially issued in the UK, Ireland and Belgium, while plans for a U.S. release remained unclear. 20Ten came out 12 days later in Germany and France, but ultimately became ineligible for Billboard certification before anybody officially heard it in the states.
Then there was “Sticky Like Glue,” which started out as a scrunchy piece of falsetto- and keyboard-driven funk, and maybe the best throwback in a record stuffed with them – before Prince rapped the middle verse. The broadly talented Prince did very many things exceedingly well, including but not limited to laying down track upon track of soul-lifting, almost mythical dance-floor grooves all by his own self, surviving a disastrous conversion of his brand to an unpronounceable symbol and tricking Apollonia into baptizing herself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. (“That ain’t Lake Minnetonka.”) Rapping, however, was not one of them.
So, we quickly moved on to the joys of “Act of God,” a point at which Prince completely inhabits this record’s third-act redemption. At first, that might be attributed to these sweeping synth washes, offset by thin-set guitar riffs. But the tune also harkened back lyrically to the topicality of his triumphant Sign O’ of the Times, focusing here on how the twin devastations of our economic downturn and war-making in the Middle East had challenged the country’s values.
There’s a commonality, in both cases, to our fates: “Funny how nobody’s holy books are the same,” Prince sang. “Everybody’s god has a different name. But the day that it’s over, it’s the end of the game.”
Less interesting was an ultimately rote ballad like “Future Soul Song,” and the consecutive downers of “Walk in the Sand” and “Sea of Everything.” They seemed to be seeking out the silky lusciousness of “Diamonds and Pearls,” but ultimately sounded more slick than smooth. He couldn’t summon the hard beauty of “The Beautiful Ones” anymore.
Something changed after that. 20Ten had a post-modern, trance-like electronic rhythm that, once it was broken, became hard to get re-involved with. By the time the hard-partying closer “Everybody Likes Me” zipped in, you’d shaken yourself awake again. The spell was broken.
Thank goodness for the bonus track, “No. 77.” Powered along by this atmospheric, billowing signature line on the synthesizer, the song was highlighted by an exhilarating sequence of way-back disses. (At one point, a remarkably loose Prince called himself, no kidding, “the Purple Yoda.”) Ragged, almost out of control at times, we’re reminded again of what Prince once was, and what he could still be.
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