MINNEAPOLIS – Prince is sipping hot tea in his softly lit recording studio. The unrelentingly steamy lyrics of Insatiable, from his upcoming Diamonds and Pearls album, pervade the room: “Like a wildcat in a celibate rageI want U alone in my dirty little cage.”
“There I go corrupting children again,” he cracks, adding abruptly, “Want me to skip to the next song?”
“Why, are you embarrassed?”
He shakes his head. It’s hard to imagine what would embarrass pop’s controversial sultan of seduction, whose erotic stage vignettes and sexual lyrics have thrilled fans and appalled parents since 1980’s Dirty Mind reveled in oral sex, incest and carnal kicks. Prince says he’s never self-conscious performing sex-oriented material. “When I’m onstage, the audience has come into my room. I’m in control.”
Notoriously press-phobic and as inaccessible as Michael Jackson, Prince, 33, has managed huge critical support and commercial success without courting the media. Yet today he is granting a rare audience at his 65,000-square-foot, pyramid-peaked Paisley Park empire.
Throughout a daylong encounter, Prince laughs easily and is chatty and polite while maintaining an aristocratic air. Incense burning nearby competes with a heady cologne of exotic spice and wildflowers. He’s in canary yellow snug pants, a billowy shirt knotted at the midriff and spike-heeled boots. “I’m creating a sound nobody’s heard before,” he says as Daddy Pop explodes from the speakers. “There aren’t a lot of electronics this time. I’m bored with electronics.”
Unlike 1989’s Batman and 1990’s Graffiti Bridge, Diamonds was not tethered to a film, leaving Prince free to explore new realms.
“Making hits is the easiest thing I could do,” he says. “But it’s like taking a ribbon for a race someone else won. I can’t do that. I can’t repeat myself.” “Diamonds” is his fifth album in five years. Hell tour in October. He oversees the Paisley Park entertainment complex and his Glam Slam nightclub, whips up eye-popping videos, produces new artists and collaborates with .everyone from Madonna to Miles Davis.
“I can’t wait four years between records,” he says. “What am I going to do for four years? I'd just fill up the vault with more songs.” At last count, the vault held 385 unreleased finished recordings. (The locked safe is tucked in a trophy room crammed with awards, gold records, Grammys and his Purple Rain Oscar, which bears a warning label; “Do Not Touch.”)
He’s mum on his love life. Still, sex is a running theme, even in unrelated topics. The bond with his New Power Generation band is “a lot like copulation. When Jon Bon Jovi asked me if he could do a song with my band, I went, 'What? No!' It was like he wanted to make love to my woman.”
Prince is less voluble on the subject of religion and his tendency to entwine sacred and sexual themes in song and onstage. He’s also vague on specifics of a recent spiritual transformation.
The widely bootlegged record reflected negative and angry aspects of his former personality, he says. Lovesexy chronicled a spiritual renewal, lavishly re-enacted in the tour that followed.
“The Lovesexy tour was hard,” he says. “I was reliving this metamorphosis every night It was draining.” Upstairs in his spacious office, Prince screens new videos. The room is a neo-psychedelic boudoir. A peace sign is embedded in the door’s stained-glass panel, and a giant heart-shaped mirror hangs over a bed crowded with pillows. Smitten with theatrics and Broadway-scale grandeur, Prince has immersed himself in a series of plot-connected videos. But he’s not actively constructing a movie, he says.
Last year’s critically savaged box-office bomb Graffiti Bridge is a sore subject that stokes his defensive ire. Negative attitudes poison the entertainment industry, he says. “I always see myself described as arrogant or pretentious. I just do what I want. I don’t consider that arrogance. “We should stop arguing and stop attacking each other. The first time I heard Yoko Ono sing, I went, 'Hey, you got to quit that today!' But I had to stop myself. How can I say she shouldn’t sing? Maybe she feels a strong need to express herself.”
He is charitable toward peers, heaping praise on George Clinton, Joni Mitchell, Sinead O’Connor, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle. Miles Davis “can do more in 10 minutes of playing than anybody who ever put lips to a horn can do in a lifetime.” He’s also enthusiastic about the New Power Generation (“the best band I’ve ever had”) and the female artists he’s cultivated, including Martika, Ingrid Chavez and soon-to-debut rapper Carmen.
He’s not dismayed by pop’s current crop of manufactured video-genic stars. “Education is the real problem,” says the self-taught prodigy, who played all the instruments on his early recordings. “Nobody’s learning how to make music, how to read and write it, and how to play. I worry that we’re raising a whole generation that’s going to turn out nothing but samples and rehashes.”
With that remark, Prince snaps off the television and prepares to leave. The office is nearly dark, and Paisley Park is deserted. His band has headed to a concert, but Prince is going home to work on a video. “No sleep again tonight,” he mutters.