Hip-hop was a mighty flood, welling from below, covering the earth. More than a few boats were lifted, and a lot of good folks drowned. So adept at toggling between musical signifiers, Prince seemed to view rap as a child’s puzzle, but one that quickly and obviously eluded him. The Black Album offered two cracks at hip-hop, one a side-eye (and side-mouth) take on the phenomenon, the second some pitched-down inside-baseball bullshit. There was also the funk vamp “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton,” as if Dr. Dre was losing sleep over how much Prince’s bass popped.

By Diamonds And Pearls, Prince threw up his hands and went in, coming up with “Gett Off,” a tangy mix of CL Smooth and the Bomb Squad. He’s content in his lower register, hanging back while the flute hook and his bgvs cover the high end. It was a hit, but unlike “Cream” and “Diamonds And Pearls,” it missed the top ten, which probably averted some future tragedy. It may be the best thing on the record, but the softer stuff hits with a force and volume not seen since his early days. “Strollin'” has that Nightfly feel, a peppy smooth-jazz ode to a slightly smutty summer date. The title track gets airborne on a five-note bass figure, dispensing the stale “pearl/girl/world” rhyme scheme with the master’s touch. He cooks up a kind of auteurist bubblegum soul-pop on “Walk”; the ghost of “Funky Drummer” haunts the backbeat, and car horns finish the wordless melodic hook.

Oddly, it’s the famed Minneapolis sound that hits less hard, sounds less urgent. Newly promoted New Power Generation member Tony M flexes brawny over the static funk “Jughead”; he continues the Chuck D-jacking on “Push,” which can’t figure out the scratching but totally gets the peculiar string cross-melody. Give Prince credit, though: his rap kinda predicts ODB. He calls himself “Daddy Pop” here, just one more nickname he takes for a walk; on the track by that name, Rosie Gaines’ keyboard bottles some of that bygone blue-eyed R&B sound while her employer does some top-40 self-mythologizing. Relatively speaking, Prince would spend the next couple years in the chart wilderness. “Cream” — an alternate-universe Billy Idol smash with Gaines’s “96 Tears” organ — is his last Number One to date. He went fishing for more of that crossback love, and spent the next few years — unfairly, of course — as a punchline, the very definition of a pretentious artist. But had he not earned that pretense?