By the early 90s, Prince was torn between a desire to make an album-length statement and his inability or unwillingness to let his sound be condensed to just one thing. His 1992 album with the New Power Generation encapsulates that paradox perfectly. On the one hand, this is one of Prince’s most accessible, diverse and exhilarating collection of numbers since Purple Rain, moving between dance, funk, hip hop and pop with restless abandon. On the other hand, Prince had formally renounced his name in favour of the unpronounceable “love symbol” that also constituted the title of the album, while also replacing all his personal pronouns on the liner notes with an “eye” symbol. Between those two gestures lie Prince’s dual desire to be an album artist and to remain unarticulable within the commercial landscape of album releases.
This means that the Love Symbol album, as it came to be called, is yet another iteration of the complex textual genealogies that had characterised most of Prince’s output since the mid-80s. Apparently, Prince began the Love Symbol album with a grand gesture of cohesion – it would follow an elaborate mythological and narrative arc, replete with an expository introduction, and eight segues featuring Kirstie Alley (!) in the guise of reporter Vanessa Bartholomew, interviewing Prince about his life and career. In other words, this would both be another cinematic conceit along the lines of Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge but would also be a reintroduction to Prince, a restabilising of his celebrity persona in the public eye, starting with the opening track “My Name is Prince.” In classic Prince fashion, however, the purple one decided at the last minute that he wanted to include a recent composition, “I Melt With You” and the effect was to melt the entire album, since he was forced to remove the introduction and most of the segues, meaning that the mythological apparatus, which was already fairly obtuse, now made absolutely no sense.
Just to add to the disorientation, the two remaining segues obfuscate rather than illuminate Prince – in the first, Prince hangs up on Alley’s reporter; in the second, he distracts her with obvious fictions about his life and work. Like Purple Rain and Graffiti Bridge, the Love Symbol album was also meant to be part of a broader music-film crossover, in the form of 3 Chains O’Gold, a 73-minute direct-to-video promotional film that in contained all the segues and elaborated further on the myth of origins of the Love Symbol and Prince’s new era. Not only did Warner Brothers hold back from a simultaneous release of 3 Chains O’Gold, destroying any sense of the Love Symbol album being a soundtrack, but when it did come out in 1994, it didn’t even contain all the songs on the album, although it was the 69th best-selling video that year, a ranking that Prince would have surely relished in his own sexually arcane numerology.
All that just makes the diversity and buoyancy of the Love Symbol album all the more resonant though, since Prince’s push-and-pull between cohesion and sprawl seemed to thrive on exactly these kinds of last-minute reworkings and setbacks. Track for track, it’s one of his strongest 90s albums, pairing every conceivable sound with hip hop, as occurred in Diamonds and Pearls, but discarding most of the synthier textures for a harder and more propulsive funk-rock vibe. Weirdly, you can feel and hear the mythology behind it all, even if it’s you can’t comprehend it, which is perhaps the most poetic way to experience this tribute to Prince as a new unpronounceable, genderless and post-human entity.