Prince's boffo Super Bowl show a bit too 'phallic' for some

Stephen Colbert reacted with mock outrage on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report Monday night: "They knew that they were dealing with a lustful, pansexual rock 'n' roll deviant," said Colbert, who joked that the sheet hid (not enhanced) Prince's "demonic guitar phallus."

In recent years, Prince has scaled down his performances, which were once renown for their gymnastics. His mini-concert at the Colts-Bears game in Miami included parts of Purple Rain, Let's Go Crazy, Baby I'm a Star, Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, the Foo Fighter's Best of You and Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary.

The Minnesota native has attracted controversy before. Tipper Gore launched a campaign to place a warning sticker on his 1984 album Purple Rain because of the lyrics to the song Darling Nikki. Though his musical style has been expansive, he's best known for funky, sexually charged songs like I Wanna Be Your Lover and Get Off.

Prince's previously most talked-about performance came at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards, where he donned yellow, butt-baring pants, (a stunt later spoofed by Howard Stern). Always eccentric, he famously changed his name to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, then to simply a symbol and finally back to Prince. He also became a Jehovah's Witness in the mid-`90s.

But Prince's halftime performance, though celebrated, came in a much different cultural environment, where even the fleeting outline of a man and his guitar could, for some, suggest shaded depravity.

"If people want to be hypersensitive, they can be hypersensitive," says Rolling Stone's Edwards. "Those trombones are phallic, too. What are you going to do?"