LOTUSFLOW3R - "This music is nasty, but it's not dirty"

Photo from here.org.uk

There's no rest for the re-reformed, especially if your name happens to be Prince.

Yes, everyone's favorite ageless androgyne is back in business with the latest in Web 2.0 total-package music delivery systems. Now, and for a limited time only, visitors to the new website LOTUSFLOW3R can stream three brand new tracks gratis, courtesy of His Purple Majesty.

According to Rolling Stone, "Fans will eventually be asked to pay a subscription fee to open up other areas of the site, with music, lyrics, animation, photographs and video (including Prince's cover of Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella last year.)"

As it happens, the new music is also pretty good. When you access LOTUSFLOW3R, you're presented with this very spooky, very cyberpunk nighttime environment. To your left you'll see a TV that flashes intermittently, static which, when selected, unfurls a hallucinogenic swirl of the Prince "logo" and a bunch of generic graphics like lazy placeholders. Then, as you scan to your right (across all the broken asphalt), there are a couple of torn newspaper excerpts from Sign O' The Times (yup, that's All Prince, All The Time), fragments which offer some recent fan feedback on an exclusive concert the Minneapolitan singer held yesterday in his presumably jaw-dropping Beverly Hills manse (RS notes that the set included a series of diverse originals, as well as covers of the Cars, the Troggs, Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sly Stone).

The real reason you should visit this site, though, is to click on the little purple cassette tapes at the bottom right of the screen. These are the three new jamz. The first, "Colonized Mind," is unmistakable Prince, effortlessly sexy and unapologetically frozen in mid '80s synthesizer limbo. The second, "Discojellyfish" is, well...an instrumental. The best track, though, is "Another Boy," a song performed by protégé Bria Valente and (I'm assuming) produced by the Artist.

So, cheers to my man for never giving up on his dream of releasing an album as a super diva.

Seriously though, the song sounds like the '90s and kicks off with the sultry, whispered acknowledgment, "Minneapolis style."

We all know what that means, right?