Prince Review

The improvement over the debut is immediate and it is mostly about hooks. I Wanna Be Your Lover is a perfect single, a bass line and a synth figure and a falsetto that never once drops into the chest voice, and it did what the first album could not. Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad is the other keeper, a rock song with a guitar tone he would use for the rest of his life. Sexy Dancer is a genuine floor filler built on almost nothing.

The rest is smooth, well made and forgettable, the sort of material that fills side two of a lot of records from 1979. Lyrically he is still writing what he thinks a soul singer writes, which is to say very little of consequence. He is still playing everything himself and the drums in particular have a stiffness the machines would later solve. A commercial breakthrough and a stylistic holding pattern, one year away from tearing the whole approach up.