Electric Circus

11/26/2002 8:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Dan Leroy

If Prince had ever successfully come to grips with hip hop, this is what the result might have sounded like. In a year when major labels have shelved plenty of adventurous urban music, Electric Circus sounds simply electric, a suite of rock, rap, and soul built on the genreless dreams his royal badness spent the '80s propagating.

It's no surprise, then, that Prince actually shows up on "Star 69," a spacey ode to phone sex that could have come straight off Sign O' The Times, but the most explicit result of his teaching is "New Wave," a stunning update of "Uptown" for the hip-hop generation, with Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier on the hook.

Of course, the folks who buy Electric Circus for its more conventional ballad "Come Close," featuring Mary J. Blige, may be scratching their heads as "Jimi Was A Rockstar" slowly rumbles into its seventh or eighth minute of psychedelic freak-out. But Prince once opened a lot of ears with that sort of bait-and-switch. With any luck, Common will too.