| This week marks the seventh anniversary of Prince’s death, at his boxy, sprawling estate, Paisley Park, in his native Minnesota. The house, now partly a museum (it always sort of looked like one), has few windows, but the walls are painted sky blue, with white, cottony clouds. There is a marble-floored atrium, a basketball court, and a cage of pet doves preserved in the singer’s memory. On special occasions, the exterior glows purple after dark. “Prince seems the self-conscious culmination of every dream that rock and roll has ever had about itself,” the New Yorker pop critic Mark Moses wrote in 1988, in his review of the singer’s album “Lovesexy”—the dirtiest batch of songs in Prince’s boundary-testing career. (At the time, much of the country considered the cover of “Lovesexy”—featuring the singer perched naked on big, open flowers—too sexy. Some stores wrapped the album in black, or banned it entirely.) While Moses complained about the record’s dull “philosophical junk”—flimsy notions about God and love, emanating from somewhere on high—he admits that it also “sticks in your craw” in a way that makes you forget about the singer’s shtickier impulses. It’s “The Black Album,” however—which Prince never officially released, and Moses reviews in bootleg form—that places the singer among his own kings: James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton. One difference is that Prince—an emblem of impatient, percussive eighties pop—can do without all the old-school equipment. “He could have a hit single,” Moses writes, “using only his elastic voice and the clomp of his footsteps.” | 
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