The ballad of Prince Rogers Nelson

Michaelangelo Matos, music editor at Seattle Weekly, wrote a book for Continuum about Prince's Sign 'O' The Times, the Purple One's best album and certainly the best double album in rock. Matos, who's a contemporary, is probably my generation's foremost Princeling. As for the book: no startling insights, just lots of fresh responses to a record that never stops astounding. Matos keeps up with Sign 'O' the Times' protean shifts; when he analyzes the proto-Timbaland track "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker (the most influential song of the last 20 years?), he manages to pin the song down, wriggling:

What's surprising about "Dorothy Parker"...is that its drum part sounds through-composed rather than programmed; it keeps twisting around, upending and then righting itself, keeping a constant groove without subordinating itselt to a monolithic beat the way "When Doves Cry" or "1999" or "It" do. The rest of the track mutates in the same way; the oddly detuned-sounding spider-web clavinet patterns and fluid bassline work in tandem with the drums. The groove twists and turns without ever seeming to resolve itself. When the radio's on and Joni Mitchell sings "Help me I think I'm falling" and the phone rings and it couldn't be as cute as you, the beat's stop-starts shadow the lyric perfectly.