Prince off the Path

The occasional occupant of 61 The Bridle Path hasn’t really been sighted around these parts during 2005 – compared to the preceding years, when Conrad Black might’ve been right to fear a knock on his pied-à-terre hideout door from a diminutive black man named Prince, crusading on behalf of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Family members of Prince’s wife, Manuela Testolini – who was raised on the less glamourous side of Don Mills – apparently keep the estate warm in their absence, though. Prince has been most recently preoccupied in Marrakesh, shooting a video directed by Salma Hayek, which gets unleashed today online along with a simultaneous 11 p.m. video premiere via seven different Viacom-related outlets – five different VH1 channels, plus online and mobile platforms. This saturation coincides with the news of Prince signing a distribution deal with Universal, his fourth different major record company pact in the past decade, after three previous arrangements failed to supply him with the elusive adult contemporary crossover hit. But without the indentured corporate survitude he protested through the ’90s, Prince has been limited to an oldies arena act – so, could a slinky Latin ballad charm the snake of chart success? Maybe elsewhere on the planet – hence a single titled "Te Amo Corazon" – but it’ll take more than one day of media overkill to generate interest in new material from a sanitized Prince, no matter how hard he’s trying to distance himself from the kind of deviant who’d compose an entire concept album simply to incorporate a word like "sexsomnia".