Prince’s Chaos and Disorder

Two-Page Mojo Review - This Time, He Rocks (Aug 1, 1996)

This time, he rocks

He's back, and he's loud: (TAFKA) Prince has plugged in his funny guitar and cranked it up to 11 all the way through his new album.

A sort of musical honeymoon, one presumes: flushed with post-nuptial bliss after snatching mighty Mayte, the abdominal show-woman her- self, right from under the nose of the editor of this magazine, Squiggle gathers up the NPG (now once again featuring the deeply fabulous Rosie Gaines), hauls 'em off to a studio in Carl Hiaasen country, and cuts the kind of album he only seems to create when jaded commentators and connoisseurs start to suspect that he's lost touch with the known universe and vanished into warp space.

In other words, this one rocks. In the vernacular, it rocks like a bastard, and that's 'rock' as in P-Funk, Sly and live Cameo (in their hot phase between She's Strange and Word Up!, natürlich) as well as 'rock' in the guitar-crunching tradition of Who-Hendrix-Pistols and the little guy's own Dirty Mind and Purple Rain phases. Check it out: 30 seconds into the stomping Hendrix- plus-Hammond opening title track and it's like Lenny Kravitz never happened.

Apart from the occasional poppy, radio-friendly pace- changer - Dinner With Dolores, complete with R.E.M. ish acoustic arpeggios, sounds like a trailer for some forthcoming TAFKAP Unplugged special; Into The Light and I Will are faintly twee inspirational piano ballads which itch to be covered by Meat Loaf or Cher; Had U is a string-laden throwaway closing snippet yer man has his funny-shaped guitars plugged in and cranked all the way to 11. He hasn't spanked this much plank on record for a very long time, and the range displayed here stretches from scratchy nuevowavo rhythm guitar in the Cars-Costello bag through lotioned funk motion to 57 varieties of hardrock filth: Jimiesque wah-wah gobbles, Billy Gibbons squeals, Creamy Claptonian woman-tones, Stevie Ray Vaughan snarls, Santana rhapsodics, Townshend chord-monoliths.

And if you've had enough of Himself being pompous (about sex, God, his career and everything), then rest assured that he appears to feel the same way. Chaos And Disorder is as light of heart and feet as it's heavy on the one, and on the loud pedal. Zannalee, for example, is an exuberantly rocking blues shuffle which sounds like a young T-Bone Walker high on E in the year 2000, I Like It There is as free-flowingly carnal as rock gets these days, and Dig U Better Dead is a way-cool exercise in post- P-Funk dancefloor candy.

But the album's real murderer is I Rock Therefore I Am, the 'dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player

ILLUSTRATION BY IAN WRIGHT