“Don’t you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?” Prince asks on his new single, Musicology, leading an album of the same (awful) name. The answer, of course, is yes. Back in the day Prince’s album Purple Rain could sit at No 1 in the US charts for 24 weeks. Always prolific, in the Eighties he was a one-man Heath Robinson hit factory.

Head-turning, life-changing music poured out of Prince so quickly that he had to create off-shoot bands to mop up the excess — the Time, Vanity 6. He shrugged off Top Ten hits (Manic Monday to the Bangles and Nothing Compares 2 U to Sinead O’Connor) like so much extra baggage. He gave us the licentious post-punk of Dirty Mind, the apocalyptic pop of 1999, the dizzying stylistic range of Purple Rain, and the twisted house party of Sign o’ the Times. His musical virtuosity, androgynous sexuality, enigmatic pronouncements and demonic stage presence set a celebrity standard that remains unmatched.

So yes, Prince, we miss the feeling. For however maverick and perverse he seemed, Prince always cared about commercial success. His signature tune, the power ballad Purple Rain, was a calculated move to cross over into the Middle American mainstream.

And now, after several years of subscription-only internet releases and consistently disappointing “returns-to-form”, he has recently joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, stolen the show at the Grammies, embarked on a major tour, and persuaded Sony-owned Columbia Records to take up the mantle of Musicology. Will it give us back that elusive feeling? It seems unlikely. The single is a jolly, tight funk jam, referencing Prince’s mentors James Brown and Sly Stone. It tastes pretty good, but, unsurprisingly, it’s not the prelapsarian pop apple we have all been waiting for.

If His Royal Badness himself isn’t going to give it up, we need to look elsewhere for our fix of Princely spirit. Where to start? Well, I’ve gone to a dingey North London pub, where I’m watching five white boys rock backwards and forwards across a tiny stage like milk bottles on a float. Over a clip-clop machine beat, a stop-start bassline and a saw-tooth synth, the short bespectacled one sings in an impassioned falsetto: “I’m sick of motherf***ers trying to tell me that they’re down with Prince.” I’m laughing in disbelief, but this isn’t a joke — it’s exhilarating. They are Hot Chip, and they are, as their first EP trumpets, “Down with Prince”.

“I was so tired of people namedropping Prince that I decided to retaliate,” said vocalist and bandleader Alexis Taylor, when the EP was released in February. “What we’re trying to do is serious. Everyone is trying to pastiche Prince, so we thought if we do it in the most blatant way possible, it might still stand up in its own right.”

Hot Chip’s mission is a timely one: as Prince’s own popularity sinks, his influences are bubbling to the surface. His heirs are said to include Alicia Keys, Beck, Basement Jaxx, and OutKast. But what’s the criteria? Soul sister Alicia Keys covered the Prince B-side How Come You Don’t Call Me? while the mercurial Beck created a whole album — Midnite Vultures — that sounds freshly torn from the Purple One’s songbook. “I wanted to like it, but there’s no real love for the music there; it feels like a joke,” Taylor complains.

But there are worse offenders. The wittily monikered Har Mar Superstar makes a career out of his Seventies porn reject looks and clownish, Prince- derived electro-funk sex jams. Electric Six, the band behind last year’s ubiquitous Danger! High Voltage!, smother themselves in camp carnality. When Britain’s favourite band is a Queen tribute act (the Darkness), is the empty jest of the novelty nostalgia act threatening to eclipse original pop music altogether?

There is still hope. Thankfully, the Princely spirit also works in slightly more mysterious ways. The trademark falsetto returns in Justin Timberlake’s swoon-inducing Justified, and OutKast’s inventive hip-hop crossover success, Speakerboxx/The Love Below. The Brixton dance duo Basement Jaxx harnessed Sign o’ the Times’s use of skipping drum-beats and synth riffs in their second album, Rooty.

But perhaps Prince’s richest legacy can be found in those whose claims are not so obvious. Taylor points to the hip-hop producers the Neptunes (who have worked with Kelis, Britney Spears and Timberlake) and Timbaland (the studio genius behind Missy Elliott): “The people who I admire are the ones who are inventive in the Prince tradition without Xeroxing his songs.”

The essence of Prince survives in sparse, spacious productions like Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, which made the bold move of removing that vital funk/hip-hop ingredient — the bassline — just as Prince’s wonderfully strange When Doves Cry did in 1984. A return to the simple magic of the drum machine and synth informs many of these pop successes, like Kelis’s insistent, innuendo-led Milkshake.

Unlike OutKast or the Neptunes, Hot Chip might not yet have much commercial clout in the bid for Prince’s vacant throne. They evoke suburban barbecues rather than decadent sex sessions. They sing about driving around Putney in a Peugeot. But by compressing a huge range of influences into stripped-down, fresh, oddball pop, they show an understanding of what golden era Prince was all about: assimilating, innovating, surprising. “Don’t you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?” Well, actually, no. It’s still here. You’ve just got to look in unexpected places. See you in Putney, Prince.

The Musicology album is released on Monday. Hot Chip’s debut album, Coming on Strong, is released on May 10, on Moshi Moshi Records