Sun Ra once said that it was wrong what was happening with afro-american music, that ‘soul’ music wasn’t about your soul, it was BODY-music. And, Ra said, that focus was destroying people, chaining them to a doomed planet. I’ve only heard this one track, but for the first time I hear Prince wrestling with the reality that music is a uni-versal language, and realizing that what he says speaks directly to the creation and the creator and tells the universe who we are and why we do what we do. Prince is discovering the power of this goddess we call music and I think that is a good thing.

Even if he’s only now taking baby steps, the reason “teletubbies” was such a success was because the toddlers could relate, they could aspire to go where the tubbies would talk them, it wasn’t looking at the vast gulf of time-space between babbling and the eloquence of Mr Rogers (of which very few of us could ever hope to match), it wasn’t like the gulf between Gimme Your Love and Interstellar Lo-Ways, it was achievable, reachable, and in that, inspirational.

Maybe, just maybe that will be the effect of this new woken Prince, free at last from the expectations of ‘soul’ and ‘funk’ and all those other chains of family names.