Prince: Rock and Roll Love Affair
Details
Pros:
Neatly soaked in familar Prince grooves, harnesses Rolling Stones' rock style. Video puts performance before art.Cons:
Visually lacks creative direction, despite the hues and camera shotsA love affair with the Stones? Probably so.
A love affair with the Stones? Probably so.
Prince could shut the book on his catalog for good if he wants. He’s done enough to win millions of souls to his warchest of hits, some being the greatest rock ‘n pop songs of the 20th century. The recent output of the Purple Man has been at times underwhelming and sometimes sweetly nostalgic (see Musicology or “The One You Wanna C”). For devout fans of Prince’s relics, like myself, it’s pretty easy to bite on the stuff of yesterday. “Rock and Roll Love Affair,” an uploaded YouTube single, may be his muse in dealing with today’s ever-changing world of technology, but it’s clearly a tune surrounded by his own craft along with homage to Jagger/Richards-esque riffs. If you listen closely, some of the melody actually revisits a line from “Take Me With U.” Carefully produced in a marinade of retro bluesy guitars and intimidating ’80’s synths, the tune adds more lyrics to his third-person narrative of “The Greatest Romance Ever Sold:” “This kind of love don’t come from a prayer/Ain’t talking rebound, born of despair.”
This isn’t his greatest shot at poetry. At times, Prince seems like he’s singing a story at an open mic night. “She believed in fairy tales and princes/He believed in jazz, rhythm-and-blues and this thing called soul, he believed in rock ‘n roll,” he sings halfway into the song. Judging from the video, it seems to look that way. Prince – rocking a natural and his best Disco Stu outfit – is performing at a microphone stand before an intimate small crowd, while a sexy female drummer pounds away at the very beats Prince mastered in the studio. The sepia tint used in the visuals is just another careful reminder of the glory days. Fans of Prince can definitely appreciate this as being another gentle cruise down the familiar boulevard , but it’s far from a 90 m.p.h. drive down the freeway….in the little red corvette. But even he knows it’s time to slow down.
