Just a year after “Sign O’ The Times” came “Lovesexy.” It’s not nearly the revelation that the previous album was, at least for me, and while the tracks are strong, it never connected with me in the same way. It may be the religious context of a lot of it, which is always hard for me to get past or even to ignore. On the strength of my love of “Sign,” I bought this when it came out in mid-1988 – a time when I was preparing to go to grad school fulltime, and money was pretty damn tight, so there weren’t a lot of spare dollars for new entertainment lying around. So I’m certain I gave this a lot of plays back then, but in later years it fell off
Some real strong tracks, like “Alphabet Street” and “Lovesexy” stayed with me; there are some others that are perfectly pleasant but don’t hit me like the best Prince songs can. After this, I just didn’t pay much attention to Prince. Even though I enjoyed it, I didn’t buy the “Batman” album for a bunch of reasons, including the over-hype of “Batman” generally. After “Batman”, my awareness of any new Prince songs went off a cliff – I wasn’t listening to much radio, and I don’t think my local stations were playing him anyway. “Lovesexy” was the end of my short string of Prince albums; it would be about 30 years before I’d buy another.
Not gonna lie, the phrase “Cat, we need you to rap!” pops through my head all the damn time.
