Musicology (2004)

Musicology, as Wikipedia dryly notes, is Prince’s 28th studio album. It’s also his first album under the name Prince on a major label (Columbia) in 10 years. What I remember about it is that it was sold at the counter of Starbucks outlets at the time, in the 2000s, when the corporate coffee specialist briefly entered into the business of selling albums. Get a coffee, buy an album, play games on your laptop with the free wi-fi. Or maybe play the album on your laptop? I think that’s how it might have gone for me, though without the laptop. At any rate it was marketed as a kind of milestone for him, though ultimately, all these years later, it feels to me more like another in a long line of slight misfires. But it won Grammys for the title song and for “Call My Name.” I have to admit I was surprised by all the attention “Musicology” got. It’s the first song on the album and was also released as a single. But I’ve never really noticed it much. The other single was “Cinnamon Girl,” which is a better song but not by that much. “Call My Name” was also kinda sorta released as a single—promotional, not official, though it did make it to the lower echelons of the charts. It’s the best of the three. All the songs on Musicology have high floors but generally lower ceilings. They’re good, they’re professional, but they are not that original or inspired. It often feels like the riffs and hooks have been used by him before. They’re just shuffled around and redistributed here. “Cinnamon Girl,” for example, feels a lot like “Raspberry Beret.” “The Marrying Kind” has a Dirty Mind vibe. Et cetera. I’d be more willing to write Musicology off as a running-in-place exercise except for the song “A Million Days,” one of his achingly beautiful torchbearer ballads, and one of the better ones. If my math is right a million days is about 3,000 years, a good long time. I keep it in mind as I tend to stop and play it on repeat at least a few times when I get to it on the album (third song in) and sometimes that’s enough, I’m not interested in the album anymore, or sometimes I stick around for “Call My Name” and that’s it. Prince was doubtless a towering talent but, by the time he was pushing 50 and 27 albums in, some thin gruel by comparison seems inevitable. Stream it on your laptop next time you hit a Starbucks for a little touch of 2000s nostalgia.