When you listen to the fantastic pop of the beginning of the decade, to the hungry minimalist funk that dominated it, you realize how much Prince altered our psyche, all the way back in the eighties. We required more than a decade to catch up with him, but eventually it happened. But Prince, during that time, went further and further into funk, and finally went too far. As often happens to great artists, he wanted to merge with the thing he was expressing, he wanted to be the essence of funk. In the middle of the nineties he changed his name to an unnamed symbol, a symbol that unifies the male and female signs, and signifies, as far as I understand, that Prince puts himself at the place where love is unified, before it breaks into the make and female elements. In his private life he drifted more and more into a world of his own, and although he kept on making tons of music, most of it sounded like something that may play well in his mind, but undecipherable to most of us. The content of his records became more mystical and religious, and eventually he turned to abstract jazz to manifest his spirituality. All that made him detached from what was going on in the pop world, and the pointless wars he conducts in recent years against websites that post his photos and vids is a sign of that detachment.
And yet, there are contrasting signs, hints that Prince is aware of the funkiness of contemporary pop, and digs it. To begin with, in 2000 he went back to the name Prince, and it was once again possible to talk about him on the air without having to waste time on thinking how to call him. Secondly, he churns three-minute-records, and the best of them reminds us that this is still funk's prince of princes, and that with all due respect to today's artists, they still have a lot to learn. 'Black Sweat' – what says funk more than that?
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