As of this writing the album has re-entered the top-ten, marking fourteen weeks on the charts. The album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200 album chart, a feat that, according to Billboard, it would have accomplished even without including concert-distributed copies of the album as sales (the numbers have been reported separately) (Christman and Mayfield 1). However, the SoundScan reports do not support this conclusion. Including a “free” copy of the album with each concert ticket and then counting those as “sales” in the SoundScan reports certainly seems like a transparent ploy to boost the album’s chart position. The trade press, meanwhile, has spent more time discussing the novel business model Prince adopted than the music itself. 1 Yet the comeback label has stuck in the popular press. The songs on internet-released albums such as The Slaughterhouse(2004) and The Chocolate Invasion (2004) have much in common with the material on Musicology both in terms of thematic focus and stylistic influences, and it is largely the lack of major-label publicity and distribution that prompted many reviewers to ignore them. Musicology’s songs are based upon musical influences that have always been in Prince’s work, and their particular deployment displays the same mix of R&B and pop production styles as his last major-label partnership, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999).
More recently, Prince supported his adventurous, jazz-influenced 2001 album The Rainbow Children with the One Nite Alone tour (2002), which drew capacity crowds and critical praise around the country and was released as a boxed set that has sold briskly despite a high price tag. Prince’s millennial New Year’s Eve concert at his Paisley Park complex showed him in top form, and the resulting Pay Per View broadcast was released on DVD to good reviews. He has also toured continuously for the last decade, and the strength of his live act remains undiminished. Prince has never ceased recording and releasing songs and albums, though many of them have only been available through his website. On the other hand, considered in light of Prince’s many releases since the end of his tenure at Warner Brothers, Musicology is but a drop in the bucket. In this light, the well-deserved attention that Prince’s Musicology album and tour garnered makes the project seem like a return to form, and a refutation of the critical stance that Prince is past his prime or is no longer relevant within a music industry whose racial boundaries he boldly challenged in the 1980s. After a very public feud with his former record label Warner Brothers, and a much derided name change, Prince had little in the way of favorable press or a mainstream hit, in quite some time. On the surface, Prince has “come back” in a very real way. Many reviewers received Prince’s recent album and tour as a return to form, a “comeback.” In classic fashion, Prince bristled at this appellation, and rightly so: there are numerous reasons why Musicology (2004) should not be characterized as a comeback album.