TIME TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT PRINCE AGAIN, I GUESS

If you were as brain-raped by his Super Bowl performance as I was, you need to do what I did and get someone more obsessed with the little guy than you are to send you a copy of The Undertaker. It's a bootleg, half studio and half live. The live stuff is hot, including a great version of Stevie Wonder's "Maybe Your Baby," but it's kinda poorly recorded. The studio half of the disc, which comes up first, is the revelation. See, what was so great about the Super Bowl show was that all you could hear was the guitar and the drums, and The Undertaker is Prince in power trio mode - guitar, bass, drums, end of story. And he's tearing it up. The first song, "The Ride," is 11 minutes long, and the title cut is nearly 10. There's a cover of "Honky Tonk Women" on here that, in terms of joyful demolition of the original, is somewhere between Eddie Hazel's take on "California Dreamin'" and Neil Young's version of "On Broadway" from Eldorado. "The Ride" is like the Band of Gypsys rhythm section playing for narcoleptic strippers while Prince feeds his guitar into a wood chipper on top. If this and the Black Album are any indication, Prince hasn't been right about what to release vs. what to shelve since Sign 'O' The Times. He should have forced the label to release this as a full-on album, if as the story linked above asserts they wouldn't let him give it away to Guitar Player. Critics would have shit gold Twinkies.