Featured MP3s

• Buffering playback...
  Artist: Bad Brains
  
  Track: Universal Peace
• Buffering playback...
  Artist: TV On The Radio
  
  Track: Wash The Day
• Buffering playback...
  Artist: Wilco
  
  Track: What Light
• Buffering playback...
  Artist: Timbaland
  
  Track: Give It To Me

I’ve been saying it since Sunday. If I had an extra $400 (and I do mean extra), I’d go again in a heartbeat. Prince is a shrewd man. His residency at the Rio in the circle-shaped club called 3121 that holds no more than 1,000, by my untechnical estimate, can cost you (just for a GA ticket) between $125 and $250. The DJ psyches up the club with a set of popular favorites that begin to feature, as the past-midnight performance time approaches, more and more material by Prince, the Time, Vanity 6. And if the show I saw on March 31 (technically April 1) was any indication, he tends to leave you wanting more. His band played for about an hour and 45 minutes, and he was on stage for only about 90 minutes of it. But the atmosphere was so electric, the club shaped and sized just so, that each moment was full of his presence, him seeming both enormous and human-sized (or Prince-sized, considering he’s my mom’s height).

Seems like some weird hyperbole, but I’ll clue you in on the fact that I’ve been listening to the man’s music almost exclusively for a month, and I’ve been studying up on his persona, too. People have been rediscovering his singular magnetic qualities recently, and this is good, because at just under 50 years of age, he’s still in full possession of them. A good way to describe the double-faced charisma of Prince (as he put it in “My Name Is Prince” from ‘92’s Love Symbol Album, “I got two sides and they both friends!”):

1. Early in the show, he gave a mini-sermon about time (no, not The Time), and how it doesn’t exist, since Jehovah God is eternal. “Stop celebrating birthdays!” he shouted. “It’s paganism!” And then a sly addition: “Oh, you didn’t think we were gonna go there tonight, did you?” (This, just after the song “Satisfied,” which features the assertion “I ain’t talkin’ about nothin’ physical/ Foreplay begins in the mind.”)

2. A classic line delivered classically during his performance of the uber-sensual “Pink Cashmere”: “I’m so funky I can’...