Normally, this series takes on an artist who’s a bad person and whose “badness” has tempered his or her ability to make quality albums with consistency — in other words, those who have more or less stumbled onto a good album or two in their careers. If someone is too busy getting arrested, treating people like crap, letting his ego get in the way of other people having creative input, and spending his time punching gift horses in the mouth, it follows that his musical career will suffer. With this as my starting point, there shouldn’t be any write-up about Prince, namely because he’s remained generally successful for more than 25 years and was a superstar for most of the ’80s and the first half of the ’90s. On top of that, he put out a number of very good to excellent albums during that time, from Dirty Mind in 1980 to The Gold Experience in ‘95.
But then something struck me in the past week: it’s been more than ten years since Prince has put out anything really decent. I don’t agree with the gushing praise some people (I’m looking at you, All Music Guide) have given his last two albums — they’re paint-by-numbers bland. Maybe this is due to Prince getting older and “running out of things to say,” not to mention funky ways of saying it, but maybe it’s because his badness (as opposed to His Purple Badness) has finally caught up with him after all this time.
