Prince certainly is full of himself. Before hitting the stage at Tiger Jam VII on May 29, he ran the entire Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech given about him by Alicia Keys, basically using another artist as the mouthpiece to declare himself one of the greatest artists ever to grace a stage.
Is he? Well, maybe. The near-capacity crowd at the Mandalay Bay Events Center definitely thought so, singing along at full force to a parade of hits. Opening with the title track to his new album, Musicology, and closing with the classic "Purple Rain," the diminutive funk star ran through over two hours of his most popular songs.
Make that snippets of his most popular songs. Maybe it was the effort to cram in all the hits along with new tunes, or maybe it was just a short attention span, but Prince and his eight-piece band played every other song as an extended medley, throwing in a verse or chorus or two of popular songs and then moving on to a long horn solo or simply the next familiar melody to get the crowd going. Early in the set, when one song combined bits of "I Would Die 4 U" and "When Doves Cry," among others, it sounded fresh, but by the end of the night, you wished the band would just get through one whole damn song.
Even the evening's highlight, an acoustic solo set, was one long medley, and just as the singer was really grooving on "Little Red Corvette," he switched gears into "Cream," and so on. Only when the full band came back for a funky rendition of "7" did they make it to the end of a song.
Supposedly retiring his biggest hits after this tour, Prince coasted on the audience's goodwill, letting them sing large portions of popular tunes as he just grinned sideburn to sideburn, flush with comeback success. "You made the right choice tonight," he said early in the show, perhaps referring to his cross-Strip competition from Madonna at the MGM. "Tonight, you are going to hear real music by real musicians," he announced later. "There will be no lip-syncing here tonight." Whether that was another Madonna jab or just a statement on the current musical climate, Prince and his crack band backed it up, and if the show was a little self-indulgent, it's nothing you wouldn't expect from self-described royalty.