‘ART OFFFICIAL AGE’: How Prince Reasserted His Relevance In The Digital Era

The recording: “I’ve been hearing the funk through the walls!”

While Prince spent the remainder of the year honing 3rdEyeGirl’s funk-rock sound both on stage and in the studio, he also sought out a collaborator that would help him affirm his status as an R&B innovator. After discovering that Joshua Welton, husband of 3rdEyeGirl’s drummer, Hannah Ford-Welton, was working on his own music while his wife powered through all-night jamming sessions in Prince’s Paisley Park studio complex, Prince handed the young producer a hard drive containing recordings for an unfinished song and set him a challenge.

“He had given a copy of the same stems to these two other producers in the big studio and he wanted to see who could finish the song better,” Welton told Smokey D Fontaine in 2015. Unaware that Prince’s personal kitchen backed on to the room he was working in, Welton plugged away in earnest, and Prince soon expressed his approval: “Josh, I’ve been hearing the funk through the walls!”

With Prince sometimes doing as little as adding his own parts to Welton’s original beats, at other times completely rearranging the material, ART OFFICIAL AGE’s 13 songs took shape, as did its overarching concept. “I’ve finally got something that is a cohesive statement,” he told Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter and longtime Prince watcher Jon Bream of the album, which was framed by the notion that Prince had woken up after being placed in suspended animation for 45 years and was now surveying a new musical landscape that, arguably, had only just caught up with the boundary-pushing music he had created in the 80s.

The songs: “The Afro-futuristic tradition of Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic”

Although the concept gave Prince a platform from which to express his views on everything from social media’s encouragement of relentless self-documenting (CLOUDS: “When life’s a stage/In this brand-new age/How do we engage?”) to the antics of artists who tried to up the ante on his risqué past while missing the spiritual nourishment that music can offer (THE GOLD STANDARD: “U don’t need 2 B rude/U don’t need 2 B wild/If what U play take Ur troubles away/And make somebody smile”), ART OFFICIAL AGE was at its most revealing when the then 56-year-old Prince looked inwards.

Never usually one to linger on the past, he made plenty of room on the album for contemplative slow jams. Immediately ranking among his finest ballads, BREAKDOWN found him facing up to mortality (“Give me back the time/You can keep the memories”) before unleashing one of his trademark age-defying screams, while on WAY BACK HOME he outlined just how far he’d come, framing his creative endeavours as a continued search for inner peace (“In my dreams I roam/Just trying to find/… My way back home”).

Threading the songs together are spoken “affirmations” from British R&B singer Lianna La Havas – billed as “Charlotte Anne Telepathy” – whose accent and careful enunciation add their own otherworldly quality to what the Chicago Tribune heard as Prince’s contribution to “the Afro-futuristic tradition of Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic”. As WAY BACK HOME’s central motif returns to bring the album to a close, La Havas seems to offer Prince the resolution he seeks: “Remember, there is really only one destination, and that place is you. All of it. Everything is you.”

The release: “A cocky demonstration of Prince’s ability”

Released in tandem with his 3rdEyeGirl album, PLECTRUMELECTRUM, ART OFFICIAL AGE hit the shelves in Europe on 26 September 2014 (UK and US releases followed on 29 and 30 September, respectively) and proved that, whatever phuture-funk sounds spilled out of him, and despite the reflective mindset he was in, Prince could still make an impact in the here and now.

Peaking at No.8 in the UK and No.5 in the US, and topping both countries’ R&B charts, ART OFFICIAL AGE was hailed as “a masterful battle cry” by Paste magazine and welcomed by The New Yorker as “something understandable and fully human” from an artist “in his 50s, grappling with loneliness, aging, creative inspiration, self-doubt, a shifting cultural landscape, and love”. Yet for all the consensus over Prince’s maturing world view, references to everything from Daft Punk’s “more arena-ready moments” (The New Yorker) and The Weeknd’s redefinition of “the form and feel of R&B seduction ballads” (Chicago Tribune) made it plain that he remained at the cutting-edge of pop, presenting what The Guardian heard as “a cocky demonstration of Prince’s ability to bend whatever musical style he chooses to his own ends”.

The legacy: “I think he was straddling two realities”

As some of his collaborators saw it, Prince wasn’t just capable of bending sound; he could also bend the laws of time and space. “He really was not completely planted on earth,” Michael B Nelson, Prince’s long-term trombonist and string arranger on his final albums, told this author, for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince. “I think he was straddling two realities… It was like he was phasing in and out of wherever else he was drawing from.”

If ART OFFICIAL AGE was perhaps the sound of Prince trying to fuse those two realities – the corporeal world his body existed in and the state of transcendence he found in making music – then it was also, as Paste put it, “a tribute to the escape of making art itself”. He released two more albums before his shock death, in April 2016, HITNRUN Phase One and HITNRUN Phase Two, but it’s arguably ART OFFICIAL AGE that best sums up Prince’s response to the fate that awaits us all.

“He was just in a flow,” Nelson said of Prince during this era. “It was really fun to have those moments with him in those last years… because when he was happy and having fun, it was really nice to see.”

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