Having spent the last two records separating the sheep from the goats, Prince was ready to call everyone home. He did it, of course, with a fever-dream about performance anxiety. This was his longest record to date: six cuts are over six minutes; three of those are longer than eight. It also represented his largest collection of synthesized sounds; his crew is limited to voice and clapping duty. He’d found his groove, and he ran it out. The record is frontloaded with the hits, the first of which is the indelible, self-aware title track. It begins audaciously: Prince is relegated to third in line for the mic, but he also gets to brag that he wrote this massive Carnival-style jam in his sleep. “Little Red Corvette” is itself a lucid dream, a Freudian battle between confidence and security, and “1999” got reissued a second time on the strength of “Corvette”‘s chart performance; that time, it stuck. The triptych of wheedley synths reaches its apex in “Delirious,” a rocking blues reduced to a twee essence.

The trap was set, and listeners who got that far were treated to the man sans metaphor. “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” twinkles like wedding bells, but the synthbass runs like a racecar as Prince gets progressively more louche. Eventually, he dispenses with singing entirely, in case even that obscures his lust. The piano-led slow jam “International Lover,” which again swings in that mid-period Joni fashion, drops to earth as soon as he begins his sexual-pilot act (“If for any reason there is a loss in cabin pressure/I will automatically drop down to apply more”). He pulls a variation on the trick for “Lady Cab Driver,” a disco/funk number that begins in ennui (“Trouble winds are blowin’, I’m growin’ cold/Get me outta here/I feel I’m gonna die”) and completely derails with a spoken interlude that depicts — at best — intense sex in which every stroke is a strike against family, politicians, and Disneyland tourists. (The tourists get mentioned twice, which makes one wonder about how strictly the height requirement was enforced at Space Mountain.)

Dialogue aside, the second half of the record is riddled with long static stretches. Soon enough, he’d tighten up his compositions; after that, he’d simply stock up on verses and solos. Here, he’s drunk with possibility, just listening to the tones go. However, the most arresting song in the back half, “Something In The Water (Does Not Compute),” gets out in a mere four minutes. But he would’ve been excused for lingering among the grey-sky synthbeds and detuned motif — a hook wrung out and inverted. It inspires his wildest cry and his sharpest art-pop instincts.