RECORDS
Seven albums and one false retirement into the deal, and we pretty much expect cracked behavior from Prince. True to form, his eighth LP isn’t just a Parade, it’s a freakshow. It’s Prince’s strangest album yet, providing a march through 33-and-a-third genres-per-minute, from the last LP’s psychedel-ick leftovers to Euro-jazz to mariachi to movie muzak, picking up enough sub-genres along the way to cause a world hyphen shortage.
RECORDS
CHRISTOPHER’S CROSS
PRINCE Parade (Paisley Park)
Jim Farber
Seven albums and one false retirement into the deal, and we pretty much expect cracked behavior from Prince. True to form, his eighth LP isn’t just a Parade, it’s a freakshow. It’s Prince’s strangest album yet, providing a march through 33-and-a-third genres-perminute, from the last LP’s psychedel-ick leftovers to Eurojazz to mariachi to movie muzak, picking up enough sub-genres along the way to cause a world hyphen shortage. I guess you could call the whole shebang aural-Fellini—an eccentric description I’m sure Prince would love to death. After all, how better to preserve your image as an Innovator and Visionary than with music that’s known for being bent?
This element of willful weirdness stops just over half of Prince’s new numbers in their tracks. But the rest—equally weird but without the selfconsciousness—are what pop life 1986 ought to be all about,