Or Madonna, who has become a grim parody of herself in her desperation to stay current. So this is a problem all great pop stars face: once you’ve disrupted the musical order, where do you go from there? Many crank out increasingly unconvincing imitations of their younger selves, like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes-think of the Rolling Stones or Brian Wilson. If it’s not up to his best work, what is? No one performs white hot forever it’s just not possible according to the laws of both art and thermodynamics. That might work great for Beyoncé in 2016 (especially when she can also enlist HBO), but less so for Prince in 2015.īut cheer up! I’m with Rolling Stone: Hit n Run Phase Two is a fine album and to the extent that it now serves as Prince’s farewell, it’s an apt one, brimming with the near-profligate musical inventiveness and seemingly casual-seeming virtuosity that drew audiences to him in the first place. Rolling Stone was more positive: 3.5 stars and a headline that declared, “Prince is back in top form.” Still, the album didn’t chart on the Billboard 200, though this was no doubt due in part to its being released with no pre-publicity and, at first, only on Tidal.
Pitchfork rated it 4.7 and called it “another underwhelming entry in his catalog.” AllMusic didn’t even bother to review it. Two weeks ago, of course, it was just one more later-day Prince record, his 39th studio album, indifferently received like most of his output since the early 1990s. (I hope the news that Prince had no will won’t doom all that music to a years-long legal limbo.) But at least for now his unexpected death last week has transformed Hit n Run Phase Two into an inadvertent last testament, an unwanted valedictory.
It surely won’t be the final Prince album ever: if rumors are true, he left more tapes in the vault than Tupac Shakur, John Coltrane, Elliott Smith, Jimi Hendrix, and Richard Nixon combined. In August, “The Versace Experience - Prelude 2 Gold,” a Prince promo tape distributed only at a 1995 Versace fashion show, sold for $4,087, the highest cassette sale price the site has ever recorded.The final Prince album of his lifetime, Hit n Run Phase Two, was released this past December. Marketplace cassette sales grew almost 40 percent this year, though they’re still far outstripped by sales of vinyl, which account for 6,691,144 of the site’s 8,311,646 total sales. Without artists misspelling their own album titles, dying unexpectedly, or releasing limited-pressing 7-inches on whimsically colored vinyl, record collectors would have a lot less to collect. Other serious collectors are easier to figure, because they are reliably drawn to mishaps and scarcity - the DJ copy with Scotch tape covering a misprinted label, the elusive first pressing. Nostalgia-driven record collectors are a huge section of the market, but their buying patterns are unpredictable, because everyone is nostalgic for different things.
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