Prince is the first to let the world know that he is still here.  True, he has, through the years, embarked on a journey of discovery—one that might define who he really is and why he creates the kind of music that he does.  He admits to being afraid of looking at himself in the mirror, for fear of facing the kind of reality of what lies behind the stage-painted image.

Hello America!  Given all that has happened, then, it is perhaps unsurprising that, like many pioneering black artists before him, Prince has sought solace in the church. Though he was brought up as a practicing Seventh Day Adventist, he has recently, like Michael Jackson before him, become a Jehovah's Witness.

The story of his conversion broke in a typically surreal fashion, when an old friend in his hometown reported how a married couple had answered their door to find Prince proffering a copy of the Watchtower. Though they were orthodox Jews, and it was Yom Kippur, they were also Prince fans. They welcomed him into the house where, with his friend Larry Graham, erstwhile member of Sly & the Family Stone, one of Prince's core influences, he spread the word of Jehovah for 20 minutes before moving on to the next house.

Although he has always spoken openly about his religious beliefs —'The Cross' from Sign 'O' the Times was a veritable hymn —and his conversion had been signaled in retrospect by his album "The Rainbow Children," which  is now considered as a paean to his new-found faith, the media viewed his outing as further confirmation that Prince was now second only to Michael Jackson in the pop oddball stakes.

What this means in terms of his musical direction is probably of interest to none but the most diehard of Prince fans. The rest of us, many of whom anticipated Prince's future releases with the kind of excitement that only attends the work of the truly gifted, suddenly looked forward to the release of Prince's music with a mixture of resignation and wishful thinking.

"Of course, we hoped against hope for him to come back and cut it like he used to," says DJ Norman Jay, a man who played at several Prince parties in the '80s, "but, unfortunately, with every hyped record that was turned out happened to be just another Prince album, that hope diminishes. He's the classic illustration of the old A&R adage that if you give an artist total creative control, you'll destroy them. He was allowed to release far too much stuff, and he surrounded himself with people who were telling him everything he touched was great. That's a recipe for pure self-indulgence even —especially —where genius is concerned."

At 47 Prince is struggling to regain relevance, he has fanatical followers and they would not agree with me, but there remains a massive gulf between the Prince on his 3121 album and the Prince on his earlier works and his classics (his first release "For You" had Prince producing, arranging and playing all the instruments on the album himself). On this album, the need to maintain a balance between his current admission of being a Christian and the musical sexual revolutionary Prince of old, sees him constantly tempering his once lewd and hugely suggestive references; on the first single off 3121 "Black Sweat" he goes "I'm gonna make you scream my name as if it was divine/ But we both know that we gotta praise the one who made ya." Rather tame from a man who once sang "Can't u see I'm harder than a man can get/I got wet dreams coming out my ears" (from "Sexy MF" on "Prince and NPG").

The album boasts the eccentricity of the title track "3121," the call and response pop commercialism of "Lolita," the rock tinged Latin smoothness of the ballad and second single "Te Amo Corazon" and the electro feel of the first single "Black Sweat." Then there's some more pop on the R&B infected and predictable "Incense and Candles"; this is a Prince looking to win back fans so the odd pop song or two or three, previously unacceptable on classics from a funk genius like Prince, are forgivable considering the depths of mediocrity he's waded in for the last few years in his battles with his old record company.

On "3121" Prince grabs back some of the funk he helped to pioneer but really doesn't seem to know where to take it; he draws a lot on what we know he has —the ability to infuse brilliant funk into his music, ever present on this album —but fails to break new ground like he used to. Apart from the impressive horn arrangement from Maceo Parker and the '70s live funk feel on "Get on the Boat" and the summer breeziness of "Beautiful, Loved and Blessed" (featuring Tamar), the second half of the album doesn't quite live up to his own high standards.

Prince set the bar earlier on in his funk odyssey but struggles to match or scale these bars on "3121." A very listenable album, in spite of my unfulfilled desire for a "Sign O' the times" or "Purple Rain," and hopefully an indication of the resurgence of a pioneer.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT!  Jerry Lewis toting a gun?  Police say they confiscated a gun belonging to Jerry Lewis that was found in the 82-year-old entertainer's carry-on bag as he prepared to fly to Detroit from Las Vegas. Las Vegas policeman, Bill Cassell, said this week that the actor was cited recently for carrying an unloaded concealed weapon at the Las Vegas airport.

Lewis's manager, Claudia Marghilano, says the handgun is a hollowed-out prop gun that Lewis sometimes twirls during his show. She informed this column that the gun couldn't fire.

Marghilano says Lewis didn't know the gun was in the bag along with other props. Cassell says if the gun were merely a prop "it wouldn't be a weapon and we couldn't cite him for carrying a weapon."

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