Is there anything sadder than the words “a return to form?” They say volumes less about the object than the speaker: someone yearning to be delighted in a familiar way, someone who demands heroism or nothing, someone who’s not up for finding their way into a dispatch from where the artist is now. But it’s just as sad when the artist buys into it. The title track is one of those noxious back-in-the-days tracks, its shuffling funk masking the terror that time is marching on. He name-checks the usual suspects: Earth, Wind & Fire, James Brown, Chuck D, Jam Master Jay, offering easy succor to one half of his audience, condescension to the other. For an advance on the mainstream (Columbia distributed the record, the first such arrangement in five years), it sure looks like a white flag.

It’s the new tricks that tend to excite. Prince cribs from Missy Elliott for a brief chant on “Life O’ The Party”; on the track, he unveils a new persona: an unwelcome party trickster. “When U read it in the paper 2morrow,” he promises, “U gonna hang Ur head & cry.” He’s been many things in his career, but a purple Cat in the Hat is something else. The staccato funk of “Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance” shares DNA with all those twitchy hip-hop hits from the dawn of the decade; it sounds like an attempt to create the sparest, flattest funk imaginable. Speaking of Missy, there’s an uncalled-for joke about her body on “The Marrying Kind.” An unholy synthmetal baroque set piece, it finds Prince goes full heel as he schemes to poach his friend’s girl. It ain’t pleasant, but it’s compelling. So is “Cinnamon Girl,” a pop-rock tune — complete with a terse riff on the refrain — about the casualties of the War on Terror. What it lacks in eloquence (“9/11 turned all that around”… ouch) is balanced by punch and empathy. Give the man credit: he’s not trying to rewrite “When You Were Mine” or “Controversy”. (Whether he could is certainly up for speculation.) Instead, he’s updated the Minneapolis sound, only without the sense of possibility. The grooming is impeccable, but he was always more interesting when he didn’t give a fuck what he looked like.