REVIEWS:
Listening to Prince's whole catalogue is like diving headfirst into a 5,000-foot-deep lake filled with starved, man-eating sharks because some guy told you that there was a five-dollar bill at the bottom. Even if you manage to make it, you're scarred and disfigured for life, there's no going back, and, on top of all that, it wasn't all that great of a reward to begin with. The fact that, in various forms, there are somewhere in the area of twenty Prince albums in my music collection has never really boded very well as a bargaining chip for telling fellow music nerds how cool I am, nor has it really impressed the ladies, so one might wonder why I even bother with the man. It's because he's interesting, dammit. The guy may have slammed into every rock, soul and rap cliche in the pop music dictionary on his quest to fulfill whatever artistic ambitions the religion he happens to be following today told him to achieve, but he does such a colorful job of it in the process that I don't mind coming along for the ride. Plus, I don't think that I paid more than four dollars for any of his albums, and cheap things are baller.
--Rich Bunnell
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COMMENTS
I don' t know if the reviewer will get this but.... I found the reviews to be hilarious.
Holy cow... for a long time fan of Prince's, it really puts into perspective what an enormous ego this guy has.
However, I must add : Prince's recent material, and live shows seem to show that he is ready to delve deeper into that interesting side of his brain again.
The Rainbow Children, musically it's up there with the best stuff he's ever one.
One Nite Alone, again, beautiful piano based songs that don't sound like he spent too much time over producing.
The live album is the best live thing I've ever heard.
What do you think of those ?
Ronny
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Prince’s debut is so insignificant that it’s barely even there, sort of like his equivalent to Empty Sky or From Genesis To Revelation if it sounded at all like either of those albums. The thing is, this fact hardly makes it a bad album, and as far as late ‘70s lite soul goes it’s actually kinda decent. It’s a bit lacking in musical meat for me to be able to rank it alongside his more adventurous and pretentious works, but it deserves special mention for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a total one-man show – Prince played every instrument on this sucker, and rather well considering the circumstances, I might add. Secondly and most surprisingly, it’s totally lacking in any sort of self-obsessive ego. That’s right, folks – on not one moment on this album does Prince sound like a dick!!
Even with this in mind, the approach doesn’t really result in generally coherent and distinctive songs, and most of the album just sort of drifts by in its own little laid-back soul-pop groove. Granted, it doesn’t outwardly offend, which isn’t something that can be said about, say, Bowie’s Young Americans, which actually shoves itself in your face as a totally, thoroughly awful pile of crap. Still, the only songs on this album that really jump out at me as even lower-tier Prince classics are the catchy “In Love,” with an almost carnival-like stomping groove, and his debut single “Soft and Wet,” driven by a slinky if dated-sounding synthline and one of the first examples of the sexuality that the guy would so soon take into such blatant overdrive.
Otherwise, there really isn’t a lot that can be said – I could waste time trying to describe “Just As Long As We’re Together” and “My Love Is Forever,” but you could pretty much just look up a description of any other anonymous soul track from the ‘70s and come up with words that were just as fitting. In no way is this album bad, and things like the a capella title track even show vague signs of Prince’s burgeoning adventurousness, but if he’d continued in this direction there is absolutely no way he would’ve lasted longer than maybe three albums before his label realized how much money they were wasting. Unlike these days, where he can waste the money of any record label he wants because, like, he’s Prince, man.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is seen as a huge jump over For You in the eyes of many of my esteemed colleagues (or the few of them who're actually willing to admit that they listen to Prince), but I think that I'm going to have to turn a blind eye to that particular opinion and respectfully disagree. Honestly, I get pretty much the exact same level of enjoyment out of this album as I do the skinny dude's debut. The songs on here are more distinctive than the ones on For You, actually seeming like individual entities as opposed to that album's minimalist homogeneity, but they're also a hell of a lot cheesier. Seriously, if the stuff on this album weren't inevitably held in the face of Prince's later peaks, it would be total Have A Nice Decade territory, with lots of ultra-corny synth riffs backed by lite-funk backing tracks. Prince was still riding his one-man band shtick at this point, but in trying to spread out and make his sound more dynamic, compartmentalized and expansive, he also succeeded in making it more thin, which doesn't really work to the material's benefit.
So yeah, stuff like "I Wanna Be Your Lover" is catchy, but in a way that sort of sounds like Prince took a MIDI of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back," slightly rearranged the music and gave it new lyrics, and voila! Instant do-it-yourself late '70s soul radio hit! I admit that it's really goddamn catchy, but it just strikes me as a bit insubstantial, especially for a song that goes on for almost six minutes for no reason at all. I don't really find anything particularly offensive or cringeworthy about any of the album, which means that it tops a lot of Prince's '90s work in at least one respect, and even the guitar-drenched anti-lesbian rant "Bambi" is at least pretty amusing. Still, the only really memorable material on here is "I Feel For You," mostly because of the later Chaka Khan hit cover version and its infamous stuttering "Ch-ch-chaka-chaka-khan-chaka-khan" intro, and "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?," which is about five times as awesome as about anything else on here and seems to be in open refusal of the prospect of getting the hell out of my head. Otherwise, it's just another perfectly decent but nevertheless dreadfully insignificant release by an artist who would later make a career out of releasing crappy albums he claimed were, in fact, amongst the most significant things ever bestowed upon mortal men.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
If you ignore the disturbing fact that Prince is dressed as a male stripper on the album cover (making a burned copy of this album nearly a must for even the most serious consumer), this is quite a remarkable advance forward from the soul clichés on those first two decent little things. The sound is still minimalist as all hell, but the difference is that for once the minimalism is actually used to the music's benefit this time around instead of serving as a reminder of how weak the songs are. On Prince's first two albums, the songs were minimalist simply because there wasn't much to them, so they really couldn't help but be simplistic. This isn't the case here at all -- the direct and punchy nature of the songs makes it clear that these are simply strong compositions that don't need any unnecessary embellishments to shine as great songs.
It still isn't quite as interesting and bizarrely entertaining as the weirdly creative heights (and lows) that Prince-i-pal Skimster would soon show himself capable of reaching, but it's definitely the best balance he ever struck between decent songs and a level of ego that can actually be held within the capabilities of human restraint. The album is, get this, half an hour long, or, in 1996 terms, 1/6 the size of Emancipation, and even though the album is called Dirty Mind, the sexuality is at a pretty low level compared to, say, "If I Was Your Girlfriend." It's there, but, aside from a synth-heavy slam-dance track with the wonderfully subtle title "Head," it doesn't shove itself in your face and scream "GET IT? I LIKE SEX, AND I LIKE IT IN STRANGE AND SICK WAYS THAT NO OTHER HUMAN BEING COULD FATHOM, BECAUSE I'M PRINCE AND THAT'S THE WAY THINGS WORK!!! I'M SOOOOO IDIOSYNCRATIC!!!"
Oh yeah, uh, the songs. Like I said, they're really simple and mostly really damn good, usually consisting of little more than bass, pulsing drums and waves of tasteful synth embellishments accompanied by some of the most addicting dance melodies Prince ever wrote. "When You Were Mine" is a total treat, not only hearkening back to a day when Prince actually put the word "you" in his song titles in its full and non-dumbassed actual word form, but also featuring one of the sweetest pure pop melodies I've ever heard, even if the song's about feeling lost and forlorn because the girl ended up with the other guy who was in the threesome. "I never was the kind to make a fuss, when he was there sleeping in between the two of us" -- HA! Is that pure genius or what?
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COMMENTS
Of the four Prince albums I own (Controversy, Purple Rain, Sign O the Times, and Dirty Mind), I would rank this as my second favorite, behind Purple Rain. Although the highlights are probably a bit higher on Controversy, this one is more consistent overall. The songs also benefit from not having any long, boring codas (Do Me Baby), and there's no crappy filler like "Ronnie Talk to Russia." The main reason I like Controversy less though is that it just seems more gimmicky, with all these weird monologues and silly new-wave noises. Dirty Mind is just pure fantastic synth pop, like the title track and the awesome "When You Were Mine." "Sister" is pretty entertaining too...is that like a Prince punk song or what?
Oh, and I'd like to give a hand to Mr. Bunnell for the excellent work on the Prince reviews. I think I laughed out loud in each review at least once.
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This one is often considered a weaker, black sheep brother of Dirty Mind, retaining many of that album's characteristics while replacing most of the stronger aspects with weaker songwriting. Maybe I'm just assuming that people think that because they both sit next to one another in Prince's catalogue, though, 'cause this don't sound nuthin' like the last album. It's still soul-inflected dancepop, but the arrangements are a lot fuller because for the first time Prince actually hired a significant number of session musicians, most of whom played synths, to augment his one-man funkfest. On top of that, this is the precise moment where the dam broke and the subdued, subtle sexuality burst forth in a stream of song titles like "Do Me Baby," "Sexuality," "Let's Work," "Private Joy" and "Jack U Off"...... jesus christ! This album ain't called Controversy for shits and giggles. And thus concludes this session of Interpreting Thing In The Most Simplistic Fashion Possible 101. Hey, it's Prince we're talking about, not The Sound And The Fury - leave me the hell alone.
As for the "weaker than Dirty Mind" tag bestowed upon the album by most people, allow me to come to the following conclusion: most people are friggin' nuts. The songs on Dirty Mind were cute and well-written, but the stuff on here is just so completely and thoroughly interesting compared to them that in the end it kicks that album's ass, if ever so gently. The opening title track sums up basically every facet of Prince's songwriting that would come to be an irritating problem later in his career - it's over seven minutes long, boasts a repetitive arrangement and contains two separate rhythmic, preachy chants about religion and race relations. In spite of all this, it stands as one of the dude's classics because it actually balances out all of his ambitions and processes them into a genuinely catchy song with an awesome, hummable groove. The same goes for "Annie Christian," with lyrics so blurredly socially-conscious that they're almost impenetrable, but an arrangement so uneasy and original that in the end it comes off as a total winner.
This album is real good. The only thing which keeps it from getting an even higher rating is "Do Me Baby," which has a great title but unfortunately kickstarted a hallowed Prince tradition of dull seven-minute piano ballads which hang around for a hell of a lot longer than they logically should. Otherwise, good times. It's essentially the birth of the Prince we all know and pretend to tolerate, but artistically still sound as a horny hummingbird and unwilling to assault his listeners' ears with eight-minute dance-rap monstrosities. He even bothered to wear clothes on the album cover this time around, and suave ones at that, making walking up to a record store clerk with it all the more easier as opposed to being a wuss and resorting to BMG and half.com like I did to get most of my Prince.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is it, folks - Ground Zero for the stray nuke that instantaneously transformed Prince from a promising, mildly-sexualized pop performer into a one-man ego-tripping production line. Every single irritating indulgence that Prince has so vainly bathed in for the last twenty years of his career can effectively be traced to the release of this album. Which isn't to say that he suddenly turned a total 180 on his fans like he would do at least five times during the '90s (to the fans that he still had left by that time, that is) - in truth, the stuff on here is not that big of a departure from the pointlessly-sprawling stuff like "Do Me Baby" on the last album. It's more that this is the first time that Prince took a look at the ideas that he was already working with and decided for some reason that every one of them would be a lot better at double-length and padded out with empty dancebeats and awkward, lusty monologues - and hey! It didn't matter how long the total running time ended up being, 'cause if it ran on too long all he had to do was release that thing that the public at large, especially critics, love oh so much -- a double album!! And so it was.
This album has to be one of the biggest dirty tricks that any major artist has ever pulled on his trusting fans. Based on the two albums that came before and the one that came after, there is no reason to believe that this album is anything but a pop masterwork filled with wonderful, concise mini-masterpieces. And the beginning of the album does a good job of reinforcing this, kicking off with the classic title track, seven minutes long but actually filling out that length with a combination of its mighty synth riff and tag-team vocals (Prince doesn't even sing a word until the third line of the song). Then come a couple of shorter and even more digestible numbers in the form of "Little Red Corvette" and "Delirious," placating the listener by filling his or her dire need for synth-washed balladry and updated '80s rockabilly, respectively. Even "Let's Pretend We're Married" starts off really well, with its cold, driving beat hammering in a sterile atmosphere that no artist would've imagined attempting during music's salad days in the '60s, and with good reason.... yet somehow it works on here. Good times so far - things are going very, very well.
....at which point, the rug is pulled from beneath the feet of the unsuspecting listener, who is then bound, gagged, drugged and tossed into a giant room reminiscent of the boss battle arenas in Mega Man and filled with eight-minute dance monsters and formless, musically-nondescript ballads. The rest of the album has its moments, and pretty much all of the songs at least have the general form of great pop songs, but they're all padded out to headache-inducing length with little more than what amounts to repetition of what happened during the first three minutes of the song, only stripped of its melody and left with nothing but the rhythm track. "Automatic" is alright for a few minutes, but at nine I feel like gouging out my eardrums with a butter knife. And the sexualized interludes that were merely there on Controversy are pumped up to the level of openly disturbing on here, with the otherwise pretty decent "Lady Cab Driver" (which sounds kind of like the contemporary hit single "Oh Sheila" by who cares) almost ruined by an S&M-style rhythmic spoken word section which borders on imitated rape.... I could be misinterpreting Prince's intentions, but whatever the case, that is not cool.
The problem with actually rating the album is that almost every single song is at least a good song on some foundational level, with the possible and in fact downright blatant exception of the totally unmemorable, wish-washy ballads "Free" and "International Lover." Even some of the stupid, manufactured filler like "Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)" managed to grind its way into my fragile memory banks thanks to the wonders of endless repetition - hey, for what it's worth, at least you remember these songs when they're over. Otherwise, this stuff is hard to evaluate... most of the songs don't even really make great fodder for dance parties since they're so awkwardly-written, which means that there's little more that you can do but sit down and listen to this as an album, which is kinda screwy since they were so obviously conceived as dance-oriented songs at some point. I guess that most of these songs have their own little niche audience, but it doesn't mean that I ever actually want to meet these people who actually take physical pleasure in reveling in this man's deepest indulgences.
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COMMENTS
Rich, you crazy wacko, it's great to have you back. But what the douche is this? You should KNOW this is a classic. It's too damn awesome NOT to be.
I actually enjoy this more than Purple Rain. To me, PR sounds too conventional; too, er, white, to put it bluntly. It merely takes you to a room where a lot of poofy-haired hairspray people are "rocking on," as it were. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but 1999 does more--it takes you away to another universe. Basically the ultimate party album. Eternal dance tracks and all. Better than short, tight, compact, normal pop-rock any day of the week. Sure, he might have a gigantic ego, but that's what makes it interesting. And the S&M? Tongue-in-cheek, dude. Completely. This blows Thriller out of the ballpark and then some.
Yes, this IS considered one of Prince's absolute great albums....... I'll only partially agree. The first 4 songs '1999' 'Little Red Corvette' 'Delirious' and 'Let's Pretend we're Married' form a suite of seamless synth-pop music. 'Let's Pretend We're Married' is one of his most underrated pieces of music, it's certainly on par with 'Little Red Corvette' and 'When Doves Cry'. It's absolutely grand, if the whole album kept going at this rate, well we'd have an album which would be undisputedly one of the greatest ever made. That's the problem, the rest only has a few high points and a much greater amount of low points. The LONG extended dance tracks do fine (fine, and not great) for dance tracks. 'Lady Cab Driver' and 'Something In The Water (Does Not Compute' form the best two songs on the 2nd side but neither do as well as any on the first 4. If a few minutes are taken off of a few of the dance tracks and if 'International Lover' and 'All The Critics Love You In New York' are removed, well, we'd have ourselves a much stronger album. But like it is, I give it an 7 1/2, with the alterations, an 8 1/2, POSSIBLY a 9.
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
If humanity were suddenly wiped off of the face of the earth, with the slate wiped clean and a new race of beings put in its place to forge the creation of a new society, chances are that upon their archaeological digs into the remains of human civilization, this is the Prince album that they'll be able to excavate a copy of. Stuff like the tons of unsold copies of Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic would be completely ignored, since malls and record stores would be amongst the first to go in the wars that would ultimately cause the wiping out of our materialist culture. In other words, assuming they somehow figure out how to listen to these disc-shaped metal thingies, Prince would be remembered by future civilizations as a musical visionary whose entire, unfortunately brief body of work was amongst the most brilliant and colorful music ever conceived by mankind. What a weird thought.
This isn't just "that hit album," the one that every crappy, inconsistent '80s artist has, the one that soccer moms the world round band together on Usenet and internet messageboards to praise, claiming that all of the songs defined their youth, at which point you actually hear the thing and all of the songs besides the two hit singles are generic filler. This is a collection of songs carefully and meticulously constructed to a point that in 1984 it basically ensured that Prince would instantaneously skyrocket to the level of "superstar" upon release. This must have been true, or else the Purple One (not Barney -- the other one) wouldn't have had the audacity to use the songs as the soundtrack to his first cinematic star vehicle. My roommate was apprehensive and kinda worried about the fact that I owned so many Prince albums until I played some of the songs from this for him and even he had to admit that they were "really fucking cool."
This stuff is brilliant. It's flagrantly commercial product at its most entertaining and interesting, with every song jam-packed full of so many weird musical passages and hooks that each one is bound to contain at least something that will entertain any given listener, or at very least not let him get bored. (That's right, only males listen to Prince.) Prince's newly-recruited lesbian backing band the Revolution does a fine job of actively toughening up the sound of the songs, converting grooves that potentially would've sounded annoying and repetitive on the last album into stiff, compact pop-rockers. "Let's Go Crazy" is probably the best example and easily one of the best songs in the dude's entire catalogue, opening with a hilarious, rambling monologue about the afterworld and "that shrink in Beverly Hills, you know the one" before seamlessly flowing into a tough, concert-ready boogie that effortlessly concludes into a hammer-on solo topped by a pumped-up blues riff.
I cannot sum up in a mere four paragraphs every reason why I love this album, but suffice it to say that the highlights are many. "When Doves Cry" is the one everybody knows, a hypnotic hit single infamous for containing no bassline, which is a really bizarre characteristic for such a danceable song. "Darling Nikki" pissed off Tipper Gore and is therefore good, the building string fills on "Take Me With U" are so well-orchestrated that the song winds up being one of Prince's unsung classics, and the phased synth backbone that the guy achieves on some parts of the strung-together seven minutes of "I Would Die For U" and "Baby I'm A Star" is simply awesome. I'm not even attempting to conform to the rules of proper grammar anymore. I think I've said enough about how great this stuff is. Even if you absolutely hate Prince and everything he stands for, which isn't a hard thing to do for about thirty different reasons, I can't see how anyone could hate this album. It's probably the most notorious monument that Prince ever constructed to his own ego, but at least he didn't put a picture of said monument on the cover of the album, fill it with shitty songs and sell it packaged with a pointless greatest hits collection. And then dangle his infant son from a fourth-story window.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Sometimes it's hard to convince myself that the followup to Purple Rain is indeed a followup, because it sure doesn't seem like one. This is a full-length album written by the same person and recorded by the same band as the last album, but for some reason it still manages to seem almost like a tossoff side project. It's as if, when reading Prince's discography, my brain wants to skip straight to Sign O' The Times, even though the albums released between Purple Rain and that one are legitimate, full-fledged albums. In this case, this is probably due to the simple problem that the album isn't very good, or at least a soul-vacuuming disappointment compared to the last one. As far as I can tell, Prince figured that the only way to top his crowning achievement, which sounded colorful and diverse, was to release an album that actually was colorful and diverse, utterly drowned in an open, expansive sound meant to invoke the spirit of psychedelia within the context of '80s pop music.
The problem is that the sound doesn't work. For busy, messily-arranged psychedelia to come across as anything close to authentic or impressive, the approach either needs to be so scuzzy that it at least comes close to sounding like the real Nuggets deal, or so polished and carefully-crafted that you can tell what's going on without feeling musically cheated. This album lies somewhere in the middle, eschewing both options in favor of wallowing Prince's ambitions in a sound that isn't so much expansive as it is empty. The album is supposed to sound open and carefree, but instead ends up sounding claustrophobic, like all of the instrumental parts were released and allowed to run free.... inside a zoo habitat, irritated because bratty, snot-nosed seven-year-olds keep tapping the glass. This, in turn, becomes a problem for the Revolution, who were given space to breathe on Purple Rain and were therefore given the chance to fill out every song, but on here they sound far less focused, with their trademark ping-pong (or Pong, if you consider the fact that it's electronic and it sucks) percussion sound starting to grow really annoying.
So how go the actual songs? "Raspberry Beret" escaped the clutches of the evil half of '80s psychedelia to rule the airwaves in 1985, bearing a pure pop melody classic in its simplicity yet complex in its approach, and "Pop Life" fares almost as well, skewering celebrity culture with the trusty spear of really, really echoey vocals. A lot of the rest of the album is good or at least interesting in theory (barring the terrible, eight-minute stomp "Temptation" -- "I'm talkin' bout..... sexual temptation!" GEE, YOU THINK, GUY?) but sorta marred by the fact that listening to them gives me a disembodied, unpleasant, headachey feeling that I really don't want to experience on a regular basis. If you can sit through an album with production like this without puking your lower digestive tract out, then go right ahead because there's not a whole lot wrong with the actual songs, and things like the title track and "Paisley Park" are actually straight from the deeper reaches of the more appealing and creative half of Prince's brain that ran dry in 1988. And yet I'm reviewing everything that came after that, because I'm a pathetic completist!
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COMMENTS
I don't think I can agree with this, I DO think Prince is one of the greatest artists ever. Possibly in the top 5 or 10. I ALSO think that this album is in his top 3. It's bloody brilliant, but few people think so. One of the great underrated records of all time like 'Arthur' by the Kinks. I put this over the grand Purple Rain, even. Sign 'O' The Times is his last laugh, though. Yeah, the 1st side of 1999 is one of the greatest pieces of pop that I have ever heard.... the rest lacks greatly. Around The World In A Day is incredibly colorful (Raspberry Beret, for god's sake!!) and always entertaining, the melodies are always good. In writing, well, he's just as capable of writing pop stunners on Around The World In A Day as on Purple Rain, but there is no songs that quite reach the level of 'Little Red Corvette' and 'Let's Pretend We're Married' both of which are near perfect pop songs and two of the best pieces of music to come out of the 80's.
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
There is no way in hell that I will ever be led into watching Prince's second feature film Under The Cherry Moon unless I'm completely and thoroughly lazy and bored and it pops up on VH1 and I can't find the remote (why I'd be watching VH1 would be another daunting mystery to be solved within half an hour by a group of teenage detectives and their dog, hopefully without a smaller dog accompanying them) -- the film teamed up with Howard The Duck and Shanghai Surprise to sweep the 1987 Razzies, which should say enough in itself. The soundtrack album isn't bad, though. Stylistically, it's more of that good ol' '80s psychedelia, but with thankfully less emphasis on the "'80s" this time around, meaning that almost none of the songs collapse into a puddle of their own filthy awkwardness as was so often the case on Around The World In Two Really Good Singles And A Bunch Of Other Shpiel. There are still some glaring problems - the shorter ballads wind up playing like glossy filler pieces, and the four-song suite that opens the album is a total mess, starting things on a bad note - but all in all the album winds up playing more like a coherent, complete set of songs than on the last goaround.
The album's legacy has been reduced in the public domain to "Kiss," an echoey, drum-machine-propelled lite funker which stands as probably Prince's most interesting and creative single, even if the video is atrocious (both girls in the Revolution look embarassed to be in it, and whether that was scripted or not it still says something). People will tell you that the significantly more conservative dance track "Anotherloverholeinyohead" is even better, which really isn't true at all (though who am I to stop people from their neverending quest to dethrone popular hits), but there's nothing at all really wrong with it and it incidentally has the coolest title ever. Everything else is a'ight, yo. Nobody ever mentions any other songs besides those two anyway, because honestly, they're not all that important, so why should I be an asshole and break the trend? Because it's fun. "Life Can Be So Nice" and "Sometimes It Snows In April" are both really, really good. HA!!!! You like how I break new ground! You like it like a fox!!!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I was kind of surprised when I was reading Jon Hein's Jump The Shark: When Good Things Go Bad and found that he marked the exact point when Prince started to blow rancid monkey balls to be the release of this double album. It wouldn't surprise me so much if the book were meant to reflect his opinions on when the formerly great turn into the obscenely bad, but in the rest of the book he seemed to be trying to present an accurate depiction of general opinion, and jesus christ, critics love this album. Purple Rain has gone down in history as "the Prince album that everyone knows the name of," but this is the oyster in the shell as far as the critical public is concerned, the point where Prince finally got off his psychedelica-obsessed purple ass and proved that he could release an album that was not only twice as long as his chart-topper but twice as good in the process.
NOTE: This is not really true. Critics just love the living piss out of double albums because they give them so, so much more to talk about. If you approach this album expecting it to be every bit as good as it's touted, jesus frigging christ will you be disappointed. This isn't ultra-colorful, full, sensually-dazzling pop music ala Purple Rain, nor does it pretend to be -- it is, on the other hand, Prince's self-consciously eclectic and super-mega-blatantly weird bargain-bin buffet line of whatever pop styles he felt like exploring this time around in the studio. Apparently the Revolution didn't play a part in this supreme vision, because he tossed their asses out and released this as a solo album, with his now-former backing band appearing only on one track, a nine-minute live rave-up distinctive in that it utilizes the "ohhh-eeee-oh, ohhhh-uh" guard chant from The Wizard Of Oz as part of the rhythm. Otherwise, this is Prince's one-man show, no matter how many anonymous studio musicians he enlisted to give his ambitions the swift kick in the but-tocks that they so sorely needed.
These songs are bizarre. Purple Rain started with such a bang that it was obvious that the rest of the album was going to be a high-energy pop masterpiece, but the cold, empty synthtones of this album's opening title track, a strangely direct exercise in social commentary, make it clear that the same rules aren't going to apply here. "The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker" seems like an innocuous enough song if you're not paying attention to it, but if you actually listen for a central melody, it doesn't have one, with Prince opting instead to chain together a series of bleak, brief half-melodies instead, including a brief quote from Joni Mitchell's "Help Me." This is all absolutely nothing compared to "If I Was Your Girlfriend," though, where Prince electronically speeds up his voice to a feminine pitch (which, granted, couldn't have been that hard) and sings a lustful, creepy ballad from the other side of the gender fence, complete with a 1999-style monologue during the fadeout which, instead of being disgusting, ends up being uniquely unsettling, which rocks.
There's still a lot of smiley-faced, immediately-appealing music on here, though, lest it be inferred that I'm insinuating that the entire album is filled with Prince's attempts to cross Captain Beefheart with Laurie Anderson and Michael Jackson or something. Granted, his overall tone has shifted -- "Play In The Sunshine," which sounds like an attempt to merge his old, happy mode of songwriting with his new, bleak production approach, falls almost completely flat (the "wooooo!" that opens the song runs out of gas before Prince even closes his mouth, sort of like when you answer a phone in a dream and you only get half a word out before you realize that you've woken up and are talking to nobody), but there's a lot of enjoyment to get out of the relatively unattempted sounds he achieves on songs like the arena-rocker "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man." "U Got The Look," a duet with Sheena "Morning Train" Easton, features the unfortunate line "Your face is jammin', your body's hecka slammin'!" thus extending kindergarten vocabulary into the untraversed realm of '80s pop music, but the song's still fun.
In short, as I stressed earlier, don't buy this album expecting it to be ripe with the kind of interesting, obvious and appealing hooks that were on Prince's earlier albums. If you do that, you'll probably only end up liking the songs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, which is a good 15 minutes of material, but on an 80 minute album that doesn't amount to much. If you go in willing to work with all of the weird, awkward beats and rhymes that the guy writes down and records the split second they enter his brain (which is how he has to write songs, or else stuff like Emancipation and songs on here like "Housequake" are inexplicable), this is a fun if slightly bumpy and vomit-inducing ride. So, to those bitching and whining that this album didn't measure up to their inflated expectations..... Shut up already! Damn!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I was going to ignore this album, since I forgot that someone had sent it to me as part of a massive trade that provided me with most of the Prince that I own (what, you think I went out and bought Come? It costs four whole dollars!!), but then I suddenly remembered that I owned it and tossed it into Ye Olde CD Player. MISTAKE. My opinion of Prince's career as a whole instantaneously decreased a few points, lost to the void and never to be recovered again. This is the album that was infamously withheld from release mere days before it was supposed to go on shelves and not actually officially put in stores until 1994, and some might tell you that this is because it was too lyrically and musically controversial for the times, but the real reason is that Prince looked into the future (because he has superhuman powers like that, since he's a godly being on a celestial plane above mere humans, as he loves to remind us), looked at the kind of musically empty, beat-heavy crap he was going to be releasing in the mid-'90s, and decided that he couldn't release an album like this during a time when he was still making music that at least somewhat resembled what most of those silly humans (who are concerned with concepts like "quality") like to call "creative."
Holy frijole, this album sucks. I tossed it in at least expecting to have a fun time, but much to my gaping dismay I discovered that almost every single song is a cold, unwelcoming, melody-minimal bore that goes on for like sixty billion years and doesn't contain one remotely interesting musical element. Maybe it was a way (as the title suggests) for Prince to get back to his "black" roots after mucking about in non-black styles like frilly pop and psychedelia, but the last time I checked, most black musicians like P-Funk and Stevie Wonder didn't make it their life's aim to subject their poor defenseless listeners to never-ending aural torture. The sole exception is "When 2 R In Love," actually pretty musically interesting as far as Prince's ballads go, but apparently he realized this and saved it from bootleg hell because it's included on the next (and much better) album. "Bob George" also deserves credit for adding to the pile of "potential Prince insults" that every serious music fan needs by coining the immortal line "that skinny motherfucker with the high voice?" but otherwise, stay far, far away from this crap. There's just too much good music out there in the world (some of which is even by Prince!) to be mucking around with stuff like this.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Since, if you're Prince, going a year without releasing an album is a sin comparable to listening to something besides your own music, in the wake of The Black Album's failed release, he quickly tossed together this followup to Sign O' The Times from that album's table scraps and apparently whatever else he had lying around. Luckily, the album he ended up cobbling together is significantly better than what he was going to release, even if the hit singles were slim to nil and nobody ended up buying the thing anyway. Which I guess falls right in line with Prince's own intents, because like a pretentious dork he sequenced the entire CD edition as one track, forcing every member of the bourgeoning digital age who bought the album either to listen to every single song in order or painstakingly take advantage of the "fast-forward" button so kindly provided by CD player manufacturers. I usually listen to albums in sequence anyway, so it doesn't really bother me, but still, that definitely wasn't the most consumer-friendly move made by a major artist.
The album isn't quite classic Prince, coming off as sort of a transition between the style he was doing before and the style that he was about to embark on - flowery, melodic pop crossed with endless, indulgent dance jams - and the songs end up benefiting from the strength of the former but suffering from the shortcomings of the latter. There isn't really a bad song on the album, and the entire thing is blanketed with a creamy atmosphere that makes it easy on the ears but not too light and frothy, but naming particular highlights even after the nth listen is a really difficult thing to do, because nothing on the album is really all that special. "Alphabet St." was released as the single, but aside from its stuttering rhythm guitar there isn't all that much that separates it from, say, the title track or the opener "Eye No." If anything on the album manages to distinguish itself in this cruel, cruel musical world in which we lived in 1988, not yet aware of the scars to be inflicted on popular music by the likes of Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli, it's "When 2 R In Love," held over from The Black Album because it was the only good song, and "Glam Slam" which has a reasonably catchy ascending chorus. Otherwise, I really honestly enjoy the album, and recommend it because it's really fun to listen to, but don't expect any of the songs to really kick you in the yarbles via the force of sheer quality.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Taken on its technical merits, the cover to Prince's 1988 release Lovesexy is really quite charming. The color scheme is quite beautiful, sticking primarily to colors at the lighter end of the spectrum such as white and lavender, but blending them together in such a way that at times it's difficult to notice where one color ends and another begins. The brightness makes the shot seem a bit overexposed, but it's ultimately to the benefit of the overall impact of the photo, further accentuating the light and sensual nature of the colors chosen. The actual content of the cover, comprised of an arrangement of blooming flowers, brings to mind the work of Georgia O'Keefe and quite nearly manages to capture the brilliance of said artist's work. In fact, I would say that this album cover was a total success if it didn't contain Prince's bare-ass naked body smack-dab in the middle of the frame. I'm not one of those raging homophobes who loves covers like Surfer Rosa but immediately pukes his guts out at the very thought of male nudity on an album cover, but Prince definitely isn't very high on my list of "guys I ever want to see naked over the course of my entire live or any future lives I may have." If Prince's label at the time weren't managed by him, I don't think that any record exec would've looked too kindly towards the idea of releasing an album with a cover that virtually guaranteed that no self-respecting consumer would be able to muster up the guts to approach a record store counter with it.
OVERALL RATING: -36,000,000,008
COMMENTS
THAT WAS THE FUNNIEST THING I HAVE EVER READ IN EXISTENCE.
Go Eagles!!!
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I have to confess that I haven't seen Batman since it was in theatres, which was when I was barely six years old, so all that I remember from it isn't Jacko's performance as the Joker, but instead that scene where that girl peels off her mask and reveals that she's really in desperate need of some facial scrub. Sadly enough, the Batman movie I probably remember the most from is Forever, leaving my soul tainted with the foul scar of the combined forces of Joel Schumaker and Val Kilmer for the rest of my life. Needless to blather on about, I don't remember a single one of these songs from the film, neither am I really sure why Tim Burton felt it necessary to counterpoint a score by Danny Elfman with contemporary dance-pop by a dancing elf man (with a high voice), but whatever the case this definitely isn't one of the more smiled-upon albums in Prince's pile of work.
This makes me kind of embarassed that I sort of enjoy it. It isn't a very accomplished or adventurous album, sticking mostly to dance grooves so tried and true that microorganisms in the primordial soup at the beginning of time would've shaken their asses to them had they enough cells to comprise even a small segment of one asscheek. The catch lies in the fact that it's really, really commercial. Normally, this would be a problem, but in Prince's case, the very nature of being obligated to craft the soundtrack to a Hollywood blockbuster made it so that to please the people in grey, he had to reign in his usual indulgences for a forty-five minute period, which, let's be honest, was the most irritating aspect of basically everything he released from Point Zero of his career.
It's formulaic as hell, and I still don't rate it very high because often Prince's usual indulgences surprise me and reveal themselves to be a virtue that is often sorely missed on here, but I'm just trying to ward off the relentless claims that this is Prince's all-time career low, when, honestly, it's just way too listenable for that to be true at all. Aside from not having very flexible dynamics, there isn't anything wrong with songs like "The Future" and "Electric Chair," and the closer "Batdance" is just way too weird and campy for me to admit that it's one of the most insanely ridiculous things Prince has ever released. I can't recommend this album, because compared to Prince at his best it's stylized and slick to the point of utter blandness, but it's not a bad enough album to be treated like a punchline like it so often is.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This one's yet another friggin' soundtrack, and one that I wasn't going to bother with until I found out that it was, once again, an actual Prince release that merely looks like a dicky side project, and not just that thing with the really stupid-looking cover that I kept seeing in record stores and not buying. Apparently the movie was a much weaker sequel to Purple Rain, not that I’ve seen it because I’m a seasoned movie connoisseur who can’t waste his time with Prince star vehicles when there are twelfth viewings of The Wizard and Baby’s Day Out that need to be seen to before I can waste my time with such plebeian bilge.
The point that I wasn’t trying to make at all but am going to make anyway is that this album sucks. It’s one of those discs that listeners and press release writers alike like to call “diverse,” but mark my words, it’s not. It’s only “diverse” in the sense that the album is glutted with guest artists (The Time, Mavis Staples, Tevin Campbell… I know, we’re talkin’ A-list stuff here) and hits upon at least seven distinct types of shitty dance-pop, with songs bleeding out the gills that make me shout into the winds “What the hell is the point?” Wow, “Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got!” That song is so not Pete Townshend’s “Rough Boys” in crappy lite-synth mode! “We Can Funk”? Yeah, I know from Funkentelechy that George Clinton has the ability to funk, but that doesn’t mean that grafting him onto one of your songs automatically means that you can funk as well, Prince guy.
The album isn’t bad, but…. oh wait, it is. There’re only a few songs out of the whopping seventeen cuts that really make the grade, amongst them “New Power Generation,” an in-your-face anthem awesome enough that Prince named his next backing band after it (though “Lay down your funky weapon” is a pretty obvious attempt at sloganeering that doesn’t come close to “Feet don’t fail me now” or “Take a look, it’s in a book, a reading rainbow”). Then there’s “Thieves In The Temple,” which doesn’t sit amongst “Let’s Go Crazy” in the pantheon of all-timeclassic Prince singles but is surprisingly laid-back in its approach considering that it was written by the most musically unsubtle man in show business. There’s other decent stuff, but who gives a crap? It’s not like I’m ever going to listen to this album again in my life or anything. Who needs to, now that we live in a musical world so blessed that Carlos Santana has teamed up with Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger? Oh, thank you, heavenly God!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Ladies and germs, welcome (and I use the word almost ironically) to the New Power Generation, also known as The Twisted World of Late-Period Prince. What's even scarier about this is that, as of this writing in early 2003, Prince is showing no signs of throwing in the towel, meaning that what was once "late-period Prince" will soon be "middle-period Prince" and eventually, god forbid, "early period Prince," during a far-off age where the Purple One will live up to his nickname in wardrobe and skin color, cooped up in his rest home and recording quadruple-albums containing singles like "(Eye Want 2) Jack Off Ur (Gerisexomorphic) Iron Lung." Until then, Diamonds and Pearls stands at the other end of the crossroads so lamely defined by Graffiti Bridge, marking the beginning of an era where enjoyment no longer comes out of Prince's music without being accompanied by a stiff dose of irony. Songs like "Take Me With U" no longer exist where it's possible to say "Hey, that's a great song!" Nope, we've now officially entered the world of "Well, I'll admit that it sucks.... but I still sorta like it."
The New Power Generation has come to symbolize a period of Prince's career where whatever genuine emotion that may have been hiding in the cracks of the ping-pong table that the Revolution used for percussion (and Prince used for various sexual acts, many not involving actual human beings as opposed to a number of different kitchen utensils and power tools) was completely hunted down and exterminated because it just doesn't deserve the right to exist when it can just as easily be glossed over for the sake of sharp, pinpoint instrumental precision, which the Generation certainly excels at. They have the instrumental virtuosity of a prog-rock band like ELP mixed with the spontenaity of Ace of Base, rendering them the perfect backing band for a guy like Prince who follows the strict ethos of "shut the fuck up and do as I say." The only real artistic purpose that they serve is that they have a really cool name, and Prince already came up with it by himself on the last album.
So what is there to say about Diamonds and Pearls? Not a hell of a lot, actually - it's about as carefully-crafted of a piece of product as Prince has released during the '90s, and definitely the most commercial album he's ever done outside of Batman. This doesn't stop it from being a heaping gob of wank, of course, with about half of the album dedicated to irritating crap like "Jughead," an extended rap by guest artist Tony M that does not once mention Pop Tate's hamburger joint, but sexualized grooves like "Cream" and "Gett Off" and cleverly-produced, super-fun party rock like "Daddy Pop" at least manage to keep the album just slightly above water for most of its dreadfully-long running time. And could there be a better NPG song than the opener "Thunder"? Stupid, dated orchestral hits, a mega-obvious "Come on save your soul tonight!" slamming vocal hook, tacked-on Arabian elements, a six-minute running time.... oh wait, I just made it sound like a piece of shit. It's really good - trust me for once!!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
That rather hackneyed sentence thang up there don't be the real title of the album - nope, this is that one that you see in the used bins all the time where the plastic cover is stamped with Prince's infamous enigmatic glyph that, just a short year later, he'd look at, say "Hey, you know what would be really cool?" and assume it as his name in a calculated attempt to rid himself of his contract with Warner Bros. Records (as much as he refused to admit it at the time). Even though Sigur Ros might think they're a really unique and awesome bunch of Icelandic weirdos for titling an album ( ), at least you can sorta tell what they're trying to say with that one - they're clearly Scheme experts (okay, sorry, I apologize for that one in advance). In Prince's case, you can't remotely interpret what the hell he's trying to say, unless he's proclaiming to the aether (and not really anybody else) that he's the great bridge between male and female in this troubled society, a title which I'd certainly at least hand to Prince based on appearance.
Collectively, the best songs on this album are a dazzling representation of Prince's self-indulgence at its most entertaining. There isn't one isolated moment on this album where you don't get the unsettling feeling that he's giving himself a massive blowjob (often in the middle of singing - one of his chief talents), but for once it's consistently channeled into music that's truly, honestly, 100% fun even when you're not Matthew Sweet or Kurt Cobain. If a more egotistical song than "My Name Is Prince" exists, the world would topple on its axis because an ego that large would be roughly half of the size of Siberia, but the song kicks total ass, with lines like "In the beginning, God made the sea, but on the seventh day, he made ME!!!" delivered with such insane passsion and fury that you get the scary feeling that he actually means it, but can't stop shaking your ass anyway. This attitude envelops pretty much the entire album, with the rug constantly pulled from under the listener's feet on soulful pop songs like "Love 2 The 9's," which shifts out of nowhere into a slamming hip-hop song with a call-and-response "DANCE, GIRL, LET ME SEE THAT BOOTY BOOM!" chant (which is truly eloquent stuff, believe me).
The thing is, the self-indulgence only translates into actual entertainment value for maybe a good forty-five minutes of the album's running time. Which is the length of, oh, say, a normal album, but Prince dun't release normal albums anymore -- he's perfectly content with torturing the listener for almost eighty minutes regardless of how many minutes' worth of ideas he happened to bring to the studio. This leaves some half an hour of totally nondescript, uninteresting music, and what makes this even worse is that all of these songs are concentrated into a very specific thirty-minute stretch of the album - this makes the task of physically removing the songs from the album without really damaging its flow fairly easy, but if you're musically obsessive-compulsive like me and have to hear everything, sitting through techno bilge like "I Wanna Melt With U" paired up with completely uninteresting ballads like "Damn U" and "Sweet Baby" is an absolute (and irritating) necessity. So, basically, there's a lot of great music on this album, and especially considering its price it's certainly worth hearing, but keep in mind that almost half of it is going to be crap. Plus the album is filled with all of these segues featuring (of all people) Kirstie "Lieutenant Saavik" Alley as a reporter trying to interview Prince. I didn't know that Prince hung around at the Cheers bar - maybe he always hung around in the back or something.
EVERYONE READING THIS REVIEW: You have to see the music video for the song "7." Prince prances around on this vaguely Arabian-esque soundstage, saving an embattled vixen by sequentially shooting bolts of electricity at Prince-shaped demons flailing around on caged pedestals. It's the message of the song on its most literal and hilarious level - classic, just classic. In fact, it's so classic that I'm going to dedicate this album's rating to the song title.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Sometimes writer's block doesn't arise due to laziness or a lack of inspiration, but often because sometimes there just isn't anything that can be said. I've been putting off this damn review for over two weeks now. This is largely and in fact almost entirely due to the fact that this album marks the exact point in Prince's (sexy) career where he metamorphosed from an actual musicmaking entity into a bad Jay Leno punchline-- he took a look at that weirdass glyph he'd just used as the title of his latest album and realized that it could be manipulated into not only a massive PR gimmick but also a nifty way to get out of his record contract. Presto changeo - thar not be a dumbass symbol, matey, thar be my name! "Oh, no, no, it's not a transparent way of freeing myself from my contract - honest, fellas! I did it because... because... it looks really really cool! Check out that shit - it's like a knife made for hermaphrodite serial killers!!" So of course immediately after publicly pretending that a (sexy) stunt like changing his name to an unpronouncable symbol even had some remote connection to his desire to expand as an artist, he goes and releases an album credited to the name "Prince" and filled to the brim with music that sounds like it was written, recorded and produced in less time than it takes to come up with a Home Improvement plotline (read: seven seconds).
This isn't really that bad of an album, but who wants to listen to music that wasn't really supposed to exist in the first place? Sure, I actually get more kicks out of the eleven-minute title track than I scientifically should from any eleven-minute piece of music released by someone of Prince's level of (sexy) self-indulgence, but it's all relative. Relative in the sense that the music is at very least listenable because Prince wasn't able to spend enough time in the studio to pad out his usual batch of NPG-fueled soul cliches with monologues about how he wants to dress up as an Eskimo and get his (freaky) groove on with a (sexy) walrus, or whatever randomly-generated bunch of sexualized epithets popped into his head this week. He does manage to find the time to end the album with a two-minute orgasm, though. See, every music listener on the planet has what is known as his or her own personal "happy music," music that attempts to emulate a transcendent state of pure musical bliss. Many people have vainly tried but miserably failed to achieve this state of aural nirvana, turning to albums like Abbey Road and Blood On The Tracks that, great as they are in a mortal sort of way, just can't help but desperately pale in comparison to two minutes of orgasm noises spurred on by Prince. JESUS CHRIST, SCREW THIS ALBUM. My mind now feels even more tainted and raped than when I was watching TV when I was seven and Mr. Bucket told me that balls popped out of his mouth.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is the point in the Prince biography where things go into overdrive straight into the realm of the totally and thoroughly haywire -- not only was he deeply embroiled in a battle with Warner that infamously resulted in his appearing in public with "SLAVE" written on his face (since being a multi-million-selling pop star with a corrupt contract is totally akin to being put into a state of forced labor and subjected to verbal abuse and frequent whippings - then again, knowing Prince, he'd probably enjoy that), he suddenly realized that it was sorta hard for people to pronounce your name when it's nothing but a symbol that he pulled out of his ass one day and served up the nickname "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince." Eventually this moniker was shortened to "The Artist," officially giving the Purple One just the extra nudge he needed to be plopped into the same pretentiousness bracket as Robert Fripp and Bono. Now all he needs to do is toss on a pair of ridiculous tinted sunglasses, go on a world diplomatic tour and kick any reporter who tries to take a photo of him squarely in the ass and he'll pass them up for sure.
"The Artist" (a name I promise never to use again on this page, since everyone still called him Prince anyway) himself held back the release of this album, apparently only really willing to release what he considered to be his best work when not under restrictions such as those imposed by Warner. The two sides eventually struck some sort of confusing compromise that makes no sense the way that it's usually explained, in which Prince agreed to deliver the album as long as he released another shitty tossed-off album soon afterwards to round out his contract. Lo and behold, the popular music world suddenly found itself the proud bearer of The Gold Experience. The album made such an amazing splash on the charts that, as of this writing in February 2003, the thing's out of print, sometimes found offered on eBay by people charging $20 for it even though it can be found in bargain bins around the country for a grand total of $4 a pop.
Enough with the boring, clinical history, though - did I mention that the album is really good? Yeah, sure, the second you toss it on, after noticing that the running length spans over an hour and being filled with the expected sense of accompanying dread, the first thing that greets you is six minutes of Prince practically at the mercy of his own synthesizers and awkwardly rapping in his usual pinched way about a girl named "Pussy Control." Then as the album progresses, you can't help but cringe at all of the really lame and dated faux-interactive spoken interludes that connect the songs, with a woman saying things like "Welcome to the Dawn. You have accessed the Now experience." But it eventually becomes clear that.... well.... the album is yet another towering example of Prince's usual sense of musical self-love, but it isn't really annoying this time around.... in fact, it's pretty damn fun. Instead of taking his ego for a wild ride across the Graffiti Bridge and through the glitzy, male-prostitute-soaked backroads of Paisley Park, Prince lets the actual music take center stage for once, and it turns out to be a mighty fine move, if one that should've been blatantly obvious from Day One.
Whatever the case, this is by far Prince's best album of the '90s, and actually one of the best he's ever released. The whole thing is almost impossibly interesting, colorful and diverse without including "really fucking annoying" in any of the musical styles that comprise said diversity. You've probably heard the beautiful falsetto-drenched ballad "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World," what with it being his last hit single to date and all, but the range of the album has a much wider span than that type of material. There's the aforementioned "P Control," which rivals "Batdance" in absurdity, sheer audacity and entertainment value, but then there's the sweeping hard rocker "Endorphinmachine" which rules about fifty distinct brands of ass while still leaving other types of ass for "I Hate U" to rule, and "Gold".... jesus CHRIST what a song. Truly an example of cheesy inspirational power-ballad rock at its absolute pinnacle, and easily one of the five best songs of Prince's career. If I ended one of my albums with that song, I'd just sort of rest on my laurels and revel in the fact that I'd hit the peak of my own songwriting abilities, instead of challenging that maxim by releasing a triple album and becoming a Jehovah's Witness.
I'd say more, but I currently have assloads of reading to do, and when you get right down to it, life's too short to spend more than four paragraphs talking about a late-period Prince album, no matter how surprisingly good it is. Since I'm about to give the album a lower-than-perfect score without having explained any flaws, here you go: "Now" and "Billy Jack Bitch" are really, really bad songs. Remember The Black Album? That kind of bad. Otherwise, clear skies for miles around, if you discount the fact that his next album sucks.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Hi, my name's Rich Bunnell!! I'm the very model of a modern major record reviewer, and I've information about The Artist Formerly Known As Prince vegetable, animal and mineral! That didn't rhyme at all, but it doesn't matter because it goes hand-in-hand with my wonderful, off-the-cuff method of reviewing, which amongst other things involves deciding whether or not an artist's albums suck in advance to actually listening to them, as is the case with this here contractual obligation released by one Prince Rogers Nelson. I just said about a paragraph ago that "the next album sucks," but my fair readers, thanks to my ultra-lazy demeanor, over three weeks have passed and upon actually tossing in the album and giving it a serious, intellectualized listen like a professional record reviewer would before collecting his paycheck for visciously sodomizing a work of art, I'm now willing to admit that.... this album's pretty damn fun. It's fun!!
There's a party in The Artist's bordello of blood and everyone's invited! He's even whooped out the old gee-tar for once for the sake of entertaining his waiting crowd because, what with the record company bigwigs standing in the back of the venue scowling with discontent at their soon-to-be-former slave and eager for product, there isn't time to rummage through the same old jumbled pile of beats and samples -- the only way out is to graft screeching guitar lines onto assembly-line party rock songs, because that's the kind of stuff that everyone likes, right? This was 1996 - the Macarena craze was in full swing but soon to disappear completely from the public consciousness, and what the hell was going to fill the void? "Tubthumping"???
This album is a delicately-woven tapestry of lightweight, tossed-off bullshit, and at several points throughout its running time verges on seam-splittingly friggin' brilliant. Whether carelessly mixing drum-heavy party rock with carnival noises on the title track, groovin' it Dallas-style on "Right The Wrong" or sleepwalking through one of the most tightly-constructed three-minute epics I've ever heard ("The Same December"), the music never once ceases to be the type of stuff that stays in your brain more than fifteen seconds after it's left your short-term memory, but it all amounts to a great pisstake anyway. Prince rocks, therefore he is! That's good, because I was beginning to doubt his existence there for a second. If I ever again judge an album in advance without ever having actually listened to it, you have my permission to torture me with repeated listens to Billy Joel's River Of Dreams, which I haven't heard but it probably sucks.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This is where I'd normally make a snide comment about how it must be some sort of cruel divine finger to humanity that the longest album of original material released by a major artist just happens to be a Prince album, but I'll come clean and admit that I've grown kind of fond of the guy as the months upon months of writing this page have gone on. The Rich of the intro paragraph you see above is dead - in his place is a kinder, gentler, and undoubtedly more flamingly homosexual Rich who enjoys fucking late-period Prince a lot more than he rightfully should. These albums simply aren't as terrible as the world of professional journalism (including myself about five reviews ago, except without the "professional" part) makes them out to be just because the guy who wrote and produced them just happens to be more self-absorbed than an economy-sized tub of Bounty. Personally, I think it's a definite relief that a guy with an ego the size of Prince's has at least devoted his entire career to making catchy dance music - even while he's vigorously rubbing himself with the force of a thousand suns, he still keeps the impoverished masses in mind.
I'm not the biggest expert on Prince's ongoing battle with Warner, but it's a pretty safe bet to say that this album consists of pretty much everything that the man had kept locked up in his cavernous purple vaults. A daunting musical behemoth at three discs and three hours (while still managing to sell for $6.99 on half.com), the album rather unsubtly and lavishly celebrates Prince's newfound artistic freedom - every single teensy-weensy crevice of it. What's surprising, though, is that while the whole notion of unleashing a three-hour, 36-song album onto the public is self-indulgent by its very nature (regardless of whether or not the public actually buys it), none of the actual music reeks of this self-indulgence at all. This is easily the most humble material Prince has ever written, not striving for any haughty pretentions or succumbing to tacked-on stabs at social relevance - they're just kinda, y'know, songs. They're not all particularly good songs, but at least they don't claim to be the second coming of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reincarnated as a skinny five-foot-tall black man) in the process.
Prince claims that all three of the discs have separate identities, which they don't really live up to, but since all three of them are an hour long anyway I'm going to give them all brief reviews as if they were releases of their own. The first one is allegedly Prince's "pop masterwork," and it's pretty fun to listen to, if rather blatantly not the most mindblowing music released by the dude. There's one flat-out fantastic song in the intense, ultra-tightly-constructed lovelorn plea "Right Back Here In My Arms," but the problem is that before you get to it you have to sit through six minutes of "Ooh, everybody's here, this is the jam of the year!"(which it definitely isn't). My ears perk up at the catchier tunes like "Damned If I Do" and "In This Bed I Scream," but otherwise it's pretty much just a glob of passable okayness ground up and pressed into music form. This one's worth a 5.
For a guy who gets filed in the "soul" section of the music store because he's black, Prince has never been the most convincing balladeer I've ever laid ears on. So of course then the asshole goes and proves this bias wrong by devoting an entire disc of his friggin' triple album to said balladeering and coming up with a winner for once in his life. What the hell? "Sex In The Summer" and "Dreamin' About You" in themselves right the wrongs formerly committed by piano-heavy bombast like "Condition Of The Heart," and the single "The Holy River" is another strong contender for the best song he's ever written ("Let's Go Crazy" excepted). There're definitely some awkward moments, which is undeniably what happens when a major pop artist decides to make the chorus of one of his songs "www.emale.com"(I am not joking) or tell off an aspiring soulmate by claiming that she doesn't even know what kind of cereal he eats (Cap'n Crunch, with soy milk), but the disc as a whole is at very least worth a big fat 8.
The third and last disc is supposedly an all-out funkfest, which would be awesome if more than, um, three songs on it were any good at all. "New World," "The Human Body" and "Sleep Around" make me shake my rump with about as much fervency as can be expected of a white college sophomore who walks around campus listening to Prince albums instead of picking up girls, but when Joan Osbourne's "One Of Us" already ranks amongst the bottom 0.1% of the canon of recorded music, why the fuck would I want to hear Prince make it worse? The prerequisite bitchfest about his record label pops up in the form of (what else) "Slave," and as delicate and pretty of a pop song as "My Computer" is, hearing Prince sing about how he "sits at his computer, looking for a site!" is more of a thing to quote to your friends while pretending that you're only listening to Prince albums for ironic reasons even though you very well know that you secretly enjoy everything he's ever done. Hi, I'm Disc 3! I'm worth a 4!
And thus concludes my disc-by-disc take on the longest (and therefore most significant) release ever bestowed upon mankind by a guy who seems to think it's genuinely witty that he uses pictures of eyes in the place of the letter "I" - because they sound the same, you see? Still, like I said earlier, the music in general, despite the inconsistency of the actual songwriting, for once doesn't live up to Prince's reputation as a prick with a lot of stupid ideas, and there's honestly at least a full hour of genuinely good music on this thing, which is certainly more great music than I've written when I wasn't busy doing an Irish jig about architecture.
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COMMENTS
Hi, I'm back. I just thought of something. Since I'm the doof that likes to reprogram song orders on albums to make them sound better as a whole (yeah, THAT guy), I thought I might as well do it for this one. You'll get a kick out of this, Rich.
Disc 1:
Jam of the Year
Right Back Here in My Arms
Somebody's Somebody
Get Yo Groove On
Courtin' Time
One Kiss at a Time
Sex in the Summer
Betcha By Golly Wow!
We Gets Up
Damned If I Do
I Can't Make U Love Me
In This Bed I Scream
Disc 2:
Mr. Happy
The Human Body
Soul Sanctuary
Emale
Style
La La (Means I Love You)
Joint 2 Joint
Curious Child
Dreamin' About U
The Holy River
Let's Have a Baby
Saviour
The Plan
Disc 3:
Slave
New World
Da Da Da
White Mansion
My Computer
Sleep Around
Face Down
One of Us
Emancipation
The Love We Make
Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife
If you have three hours to spare during the holidays (hA! hA!!), give that a spin. I think you'll find it most ooby-dooby.
Sincerely,
Mr. Lotsa Time On His Freakin' Hands
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