COMMENTARY : Enough Already! : Have Madonna and Prince shown us more than we wanted to see? Their new albums are sinking fast, the mystery long gone

Whither Madonna and Prince?

Everywhere, of course, in their pop-cultural omnipresence, if you haven’t been on a hype fast in Walden Woods or Somalia. Nowhere at all, though, if where you’re looking is the Top 10 album chart. There, these two are ghosts , leaving just a wisp of psycho-sexual revolutionary residue spread across the SoundScan registers in the wake of their rapid flight from favor.

Within a year of signing respective multimedia mega-deals supposedly worth $50 million to $100 million each, their new musical efforts are sinking like lead-lined vaults in the Hudson.

Back in October, everybody assumed that Madonna’s “Erotica” would lead the Billboard chart through the fall. Instead, it entered at No. 2 and has been on a steady decline ever since, currently resting at No. 25 in week 8. Prince’s slide has been even more precipitous. After an impressive debut at No. 5, his latest has done a dramatic dive-bomb, to an astonishing No. 70 in its ninth week out. And these were expected to be two of the blockbusters of the holiday season.

It’s not just a matter of displacement by more powerful or provocative forces in pop. Their respective naughtinesses are currently being outsold several times over by the minor likes of Christmas albums by Neil Diamond and Amy Grant and a Disney soundtrack. (Alert Tipper Gore: It’s safe to let the kids loose again in the Top 10.)

How is it that there isn’t a soul in America without an opinion on these two--feminist gadfly Camille Paglia has virtually made a cottage industry out of hers--yet it’s suddenly hard to find anybody who actually wants to bother to listen to their music? How is it they still interest us as icons, but suddenly bore us silly as pop artists?

Chalk it up to twin cases of terminal self-consciousness.

Madonna and Prince are both as fascinated by their own iconography as we are--at the expense of the iconoclasm that first turned us on. Magnified, the sensationalism isn’t so sensational anymore. They’ve taken the tics that initially made them so intriguing and blown these quirks up into successions of bigger-than-life stunts.

Once, they felt compelled to explore those compulsions that pushed their buttons, but now seem interested almost exclusively in pushing ours--to keep careers going, or just to keep our attention. Finally, their insatiably addictive desire to provoke has made them immeasurably less provocative.

Conservatives might naturally want to make moral hay out of this surprising disinterest in Prince’s and Madonna’s latest recordings, writing it off to the middle American minions finally getting sick of smut. But if it were simply that the culture is on a prudish bender, that would leave unexplained the phenomenon of Madonna easily selling out the entire initial press run of her joyless dirty-picture book at $50 a pop. Her highly touted upcoming sex-thriller film, “Body of Evidence,” could also be a hit, as will anything she can do that carries the lurid appeal of an accident on the other side of the freeway. She can flash her breasts any time and America is guaranteed to slow down to watch.

What happens when she flashes us her soul is a different matter.

And that kind of exhibitionism is what a great pop record is supposed to be about. Try as she might to sell “Sex”--the book--as some kind of deeply personal expression, there probably aren’t that many people out there who honestly believe that Madonna really desires carnal relations with cocker spaniels. But songwriting is an inherently more personal and more believable medium.

It’s in music--not in movies, moguldom or any of the other black arts Madonna might practice--that fans figure they’re most likely to find what makes the artist tick.

As a precaution against the overexposure factor, perhaps--as if to assert I’m really a private person --Madonna has boldly claimed in recent interviews that, despite what we might presume, even now no one really knows the real her.

This, after she’s produced a documentary about herself, dipped heavily into the confessional school of songwriting in documenting her marriage and family, done myriad interviews covering the minutiae of her sexual personae, and issued a lavish photo album detailing just what it is that gets her through the night.

So, like, she’s still holding out on us? Right.

Despite her protestations of a psyche yet unrevealed, “Erotica”--the album--hints that there’s not much left to live to tell. The chilly title song reveals that she digs sadomasochistic fantasy role-playing. “Where Life Begins” breaks the shocking news that she rather enjoys oral sex.

On the heavier side, “In This Life” informs us that she’s a sensitive soul who’s very, very upset people are dying of AIDS. “Bye Bye Baby” and “Thief of Hearts” let on that she might have some unresolved hostility left toward Warren Beatty.

With these passing for new personal revelations, is it any wonder that America has opted for the butch-lesbians-holding-knives-against-her-crotch shots instead?

A pair of the recording’s best songs, “Bad Girl” and “Secret Garden,” transcend the studied tackiness and remind us why she’s been such a terrific singles act over the years. But to make another compelling album, Madonna would need to tell us something about herself we don’t already know. Unfortunately, at this late date that may literally be impossible.

Prince is another one who looks to have already shot his wad, revelation-wise. But unlike Madonna, he’s at least tried to cultivate a mysterioso image--avoiding interviews like no one else in pop except Michael Jackson, swearing employees to secrecy, planting silly rumors about trysts and psychic happenings that can never be confirmed. For a while, this bizarre reclusiveness, combined with the strange Gnostic religiosity of his records, was successfully intriguing.

But multimedia ambition got the best of him. Following a decent but flukish hit film (“Purple Rain”), megalomania set in and he had to direct himself in two of the most awful music movies ever made (“Under the Cherry Moon” and “Graffiti Bridge”). When sales slowed, he still avoided interviews but came out of his shell enough to perform on seemingly every TV show that would take him, reaching a low point with his 1991 MTV Video Music Awards appearance--an utterly unarousing orgy set to “Gett Off” in which Prince partially bared his buns, setting the stage for Howard Stern’s completely butt-naked appearance the following year. So much for getting into the mystic.

Suddenly, we had glimpsed much too much of this clothes-less emperor. Pay no mind to the little man behind the purple curtain.

While Madonna has gotten more outrageous sexually, Prince has gotten less so, if certainly no less explicit. Circa the groundbreaking “Dirty Mind” album in 1980--when he first made a real impression as a one-man-band combination of James Brown, John Lennon, George Clinton, Todd Rundgren and Henry Miller--he had the nerve to sing about incest, among other taboos. “Am I straight or am I gay?” was the question posed the following year in “Controversy.” No wonder he got booed off the stage at Rolling Stones shows. He made folks a little jittery about what might lay within the recesses of their own filthy noggins.

But nowadays Prince wouldn’t offend any superstud’s sense of voraciously heterosexual propriety. He’s not only appropriated rap music into his work--an uncomfortable fit at best--but he’s completely adopted its worst sort of one-dimensional braggadocio, too.

Once he sang about a “Private Joy,” but now he’s full of very public superstar boasts like “My Name Is Prince.” He does get around to exactly one taboo on his latest album--deflowering an underage virgin, complete with a description of the resultant bleeding--but it’s shockingly out of place amid all the other safely mainstream, lowest-common-denominator booty-shaking and rump appreciation.

His videos are increasingly painful to watch, filled with his newfound “Gangster Glam” style, an unfortunate melding of “Barbarella,” “Godfather” and hip-hop influences. He plays the foppish macho gang lord to the hilt in the “Sexy M.F.” clip, his most recent career nadir.

There, Prince--brandishing a phallic gun microphone--and his posse invade a private card party in order to kidnap the fabulous babes, even as he promises the lingerie-wearing strangers he’s about to abduct that it’s “not cha body, (but) yo mind u fool” he’s after. (Be sure to watch for the follow-up, in which Prince stages a terrorist raid on a Mensa pajama party.)

Needless to say, amid all the oddball Roger Vadim tributes and sonnets seemingly right out of Penthouse’s letters section, Prince’s characteristically confused sense of religiosity--here, with a totally incongruous nod to the Book of Revelation--makes things really a mess.

Prince’s case is a far sadder one than Madonna’s. She’s savvier and a wise chooser of collaborators, but he’s one of the most talented pop musicians of his generation, a bona fide senseless genius auteur in search of a good editor who can stop him before he soils again. His big-band funk-pop fusion with the New Power Generation is good for its share of fun grooves--there’ll always be huge dollops of brilliance in his banality--but there’s no challenge left in anything he does, except maybe the challenge not to snicker at how low he’ll go to go multi-platinum.

We know you want it , Prince and Madonna both seem to think, based on their prior successes teasing the bejesus out of us. Well, we did, probably, but did they have to give it to us in such ubiquitous spades? Even in the cynical age of safe-sex video voyeurism, most folks still want a little mystery to go along with their vicarious titillation. And mystery’s the one thing that the self-oversold Madonna and Prince, for all their once and future charms, will never be able to provide again.