The-Dream: "Fuck My Brains Out"

That “Fuck My Brains Out” very closely resembles a Revolution-era Prince song is an obvious and therefore maybe critically uninteresting aspect of its design, but the comparison here has greater significance. The-Dream has seemed heir apparent to the wilting Purple One for some time now, with last year’s excellent Love King borrowing from the master liberally (and always to great effect), but never before has a Dream track declared its thieving intentions so explicitly. This isn’t so much an homage in and of itself as a retroactive confirmation of his influences, or final vindication for anyone who saw through “Yamaha” to the Purple Rain (1984) cuts to which it was indebted.

What’s crucial, though, is that The-Dream remains only heavily influenced by and not, at least for the time being, derivative of his idol, a distinction which elevates his work above the simple imitation his contemporaries trade in so freely. Perhaps it’s a testament to his competency as a producer and songwriter (roles he performs just as adroitly for others as he does for himself) that, over the course of just three solo albums, The-Dream has managed to take basic materials borrowed from pop and R&B luminaries and shape them into something already recognizably his own—even when, as on “Fuck My Brains Out,” the origins of the materials are perfectly clear.

Still, it’s difficult to fault The-Dream for leaning on his influences so heavily when the results, frankly, are every bit as good as the stuff he’s emulating. “Fuck My Brains Out” is, in my estimation, a better Prince song than any song Prince has released in at least twenty years—23 years, in fact, if you share my enthusiasm for Lovesexy (1988) and consider The Black Album (1994) technically a product of 1987. If we’re going to be honest about it, “Fuck My Brains Out” is the kind of song Prince should be releasing himself in 2011, as opposed to the actual music he’s releasing in 2011, which is of course quite shit. (The closest the man’s gotten to anything as fresh and as lively as what The-Dream drops on a regular basis is “Black Sweat,” but even that was five years and five bad albums ago now.)

The-Dream restores vitality to the time-tested formula by marrying it to a distinctly contemporary pop production sensibility—one with a much-needed post-Timbaland touch thrown in, for one thing—which is something that Prince himself, with his continued dedication even in the twilight of his career to writing and producing all of his material himself, lost a long time ago. But even if Prince has nowhere left to go but ever-downward, at least, with The-Dream cranking out new music as often he has been, we’ll still have new Prince songs.