We always expect too much of Prince, because it's difficult to accept that somebody who made records as astonishing as he did in the 1980s could repeat himself as egregiously as he has for the past 15 years or so. He hasn't been doing r&b-by-numbers or rock-by-numbers, which is why he gets away with it; he's just been doing Prince-by-numbers. And yes, he still brings it live. But his albums used to send everyone scrambling to catch up; now they're self-evidently whatever he deigns to knock out.
Princeophiles always have a few great recent songs we can trot out as evidence he hasn't really lost it. Last time, it was "Black Sweat"; this time, it's "Mr. Goodnight", a sticky-hot seduction rap that all but acknowledges the genre's latter-day debt to Smoove B. He rhymes "Moët" with "private jet," namechecks 3121 (maybe the album, maybe the club), shouts out "mp3!" and offers to lay out three dresses (so you can pick the one you like) and call you to find out which you've picked so he can wear a matching suit.
Most of Planet Earth, though, is textbook bad Prince. It's one thing to work from the assumption that he's the hottest thing on two legs, because he's never lost that. But when he works from the assumption that his political thoughts are deep and meaningful, he bricks. The title track is an ecological anthem so dopey it makes saving the world sound like a questionable idea; the closer, "Resolution", is an antiwar anthem so self-righteous it makes peace sound smug. "The main problem with war is that nobody ever wins," goes the first line, and as above-all-you-mortals as prime-period Prince's politics could get (remember "Hello"?), at least he never tried to tell us what the main problem with war was.
The rest of the album is stuff he's done before and better. "The One U Wanna C" is a blatant rewrite of "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" (right down to the declaration that "you ain't no one night stand") without the emotional depth, subtlety, or musical eccentricities. "Guitar", a reminder that he plays guitar, doesn't even have much of a riff. "Chelsea Rodgers" is an incoherently moralistic disco jam that squashes its groove between big, dangling quotation marks, as if it came to the West End Records sound by way of an Of Montreal tribute band. Where is the Thinker of Weird Thoughts who gave us "Raspberry Beret" and "Starfish and Coffee"?
Well, he's not entirely gone-- that's why we keep listening. There are always flashes of him, as at the end of the pedestrian slow jam "Future Baby Mama", where he goes into a purring little recitative, ending "deep down, I know what you want-- you want your girlfriends to hate you." Then he harmonizes with himself in one of his thick, layered harmony-clusters: "'Cause they can't get your man!" "Somewhere Here on Earth" is the kind of bedroom-eyed ballad he used to knock out one-handed in the Parade days, enlivened by his freaky but kind of fantastic Billie Holiday impression, but tragically oversold by witless jazz piano and an overdubbed "crackly record" sound. The album's cameo appearances by Wendy & Lisa and Sheila E. are overt signals that this is supposed to be a new manifestation of the prodigal Prince, the one who had all the hits; that he's going to spray us all down with his magical ejaculating guitar, just like the old days.
And, you know, he might. He doesn't this time, but he might yet; if this were his first album, it'd be really promising. It's entirely possible that Prince's problem isn't sputtering talent but QC on the fritz. A whack to the right part of the machine, and his next whole album could be as hot as "Mr. Goodnight" and "Black Sweat" and, I don't know, "Cinnamon Girl". As it is, though, he's firmly settled in a stylistic niche that's delivering diminishing returns-- and what made him great in the first place is that he never settled down anywhere for long.
