Prince Album by Album Thread

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by theanalogkidsignals, Jul 19, 2015.

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  1. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Comparing both our lists, we have the slamming number of 18 songs in common (out of 60-something) :yikes:.
    Looks like we are not going to agree on a single 4cd set ;).
     
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  2. It's different approaches. :) I went with the approach that if this were an actual release you would want to include most of the singles, a few deep cuts, and maybe a couple of B-sides, but mostly you want people buy this set, hoping to entice them to purchase the actual albums after hearing how great the songs are. And I had to rep every album that the general consumer would buy, which is why I left off instrumentals. People want to hear Prince sing at this moment in time. I'm looking for SALES!!!

    Out 65 songs, across 4 CDs that's 35 singles - 2 B-sides to singles (Rock N Roll is Alive & Underneath the Cream)

    P Control
    Gold
    Love Sign
    The Most Beautiful Girl In the World
    Space
    I Hate U
    Letitgo
    Get Wild
    Somebody's Somebody
    The Holy River
    Betcha By Golly Wow
    Come On
    The One
    The Greatest Romance That's Ever Been Sold
    Extraordinary
    The Work Pt1
    She Loves Me 4 Me
    Last December
    Supercute
    U Make My Sun Shine
    Musicology
    Call My Name
    Cinnamon Girl
    S.S.T.
    Black Sweat
    Te Amo Corazon
    Song of the Heart (Gold Globe winner, Best Song)
    Chelsea Rodgers
    Breakdown
    Clouds
    Breakfast Can Wait
    Baltimore
    RocknRoll Love Affair
    Fallinlove2nite
    Free Urself (his last released single)

    Of course some of those are promo only singles, but we have to bank that people would have heard them on the radio, as I did songs like "P Control," "Extraordinary," "Call My Name," "The Work pt1."

    Plus, I wanted to end thematically. "Way Back Home" and the lyrics to the song (as well as the affirmations) really bring some sort of closure. I tried to start each CD with an up tempo opener and a slower closer. :)

    I mean, we're working for WB now! I don't want to get fired for putting a kick ass jam like "The Exodus Has Begun," on the comp just because I like it! :D :biglaugh:
     
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  3. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Haha, I hadn't thought about that one :doh::righton:

    Yeah, my approach was to collect his best and most interesting songs. That includes a couple of long instrumentals as I think people are interested in Prince the musical genius and not the hit machine (how many singles were actual hits in this time frame?) I don't mind skipping single choices that I didn't like or try to include at least one song from every album. Just his best work (at least what I think) :angel:

    Actually, I have made these two sets into a play list on my iphone and really enjoy listening to them. It includes some music that I hadn't played in a long time... and with this thread and sets I am really rediscovering them :cool:.
     
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  4. Summer of Malcontent

    Summer of Malcontent Forum Resident

    Prince in the 90s

    This is the period where I fell out of love with Prince the first time around, so I was a little wary about revisiting it and tackled the 00s first, which had the benefit of drastically lowered expectations and a bunch of albums (the NPG Club releases) I’d never heard before.

    In the early 90s, I cloaked my disappointment in the assertion that the bloat of extended CD-era albums was responsible for a lot of padding, and that there probably was a much better album hidden inside Diamonds and Pearls, or Love Symbol, or Exodus, or The Gold Experience, if you could be bothered to extract it. But it was telling that I never cared enough about any of those albums to actually do the work of whittling them down to a leaner, meaner LP length. And this is conveniently ignoring the fact that including the ‘padding’ of the attendant b-sides to Prince’s 80s albums wouldn’t have diluted the quality of those albums at all, and in a couple of cases (Around the World in a Day and Batman) would have sharply improved it.

    So approaching this era with new ears, I was surprised to enjoy everything a lot more this time. There’s still a dearth of classic albums (in their released form), but there’s way more great music to be found than most other artists released in that decade (or any other).

    Diamonds and Pearls – I’m starting with this as for me Graffiti Bridge is more of a ‘closing off the 80s’ album, or transitional at best, whereas this was Prince’s statement of intent for a new band in a new decade. And it’s. . . unfortunate. It’s the blandest album he’d released to that point, and it’s the first time he sounds like he’s chasing trends rather than leading them. The title track is just horrendously trite, and it doesn’t even sound particularly like Prince. If I wanted a Boyz II Men album, I’d buy a Boyz II Men album. The album sequencing is really bad, too – something that would become a common trait in this era – particularly in the back half, where upbeat stompers are repeatedly kneecapped by drippy ballads (or bits of nothing like ‘Walk Don’t Walk’) before any kind of flow or momentum can be built up. ‘Jughead’ gets a lot of flack here, but I don’t think it’s that bad (at least it has a pulse), and it would be a lot less exposed if it were allowed to be part of a properly built album side (e.g. Gett Off / Jughead / Push / Live 4 Love). Nevertheless, there are two genuinely great tracks here: ‘Cream’ (even though it’s really just a sideways remake of ‘Get It On’) and ‘Willing and Able’, which is sunny, supple and smart, and a very cool indication of just what the NPG could do that Prince arguably couldn’t have done before. ‘Gett Off’ is a solid B+ single, but after hearing the original promo version, the more polite commercially released mixes don’t scratch the right itch.

    Love Symbol – I remember hearing this as an improvement on release, but the album loses its way resoundingly as soon as the Kirstie Alley skits begin and then we’re immediately deposited at the horror that is ‘Blue Light’. What a ghastly embarrassment to find in the middle of a Prince album. Things pick up after that (how could they not?), though there are more stumbles on the way to the conclusion. I don’t particularly like ‘3 Chains o’ Gold’, but I applaud its sheer insanity – it certainly would have perked up the previous album. I tried the ‘trimming down to 45 minutes’ game with Diamonds and Pearls, but I still came up with a decidedly weak album; doing it here, the results are sensational. It helps that Love Symbol had four superb singles to lean on (‘Sexy MF’, ‘My Name Is Prince’, ‘7’, ‘Damn U’ – by far his strongest single run of the 90s. Does ‘Damn U’ have the best vocal Prince ever recorded?) – just try not to think of ‘My Name Is Prince’ as a remake of the Monkees’ ‘Ditty Diego (War Chant)’ and you’ll be fine. This is what I came up with:

    Side A: My Name Is Prince / Sexy MF / Love 2 the 9s / The Max
    Side B: I Wanna Melt with U / Damn U / 7 / Arrogance / The Sacrifice of Victor

    You’ll need to do a little trimming and cross-fading to remove all trace of the album’s dubious ‘concept’, and ‘Arrogance’ is mainly there to serve as an elaborate intro / transition to ‘Victor’ (with the line “What is sacrifice?” emerging from the faded babble at the end of the previous track), but for my money this makes for an incredibly strong Prince album.

    Come – This isn’t long enough to trim, but fortunately, it’s a genuinely great album as originally released. I thought this at the time, and it still sounds just as good, so I have no idea where the album’s negative reputation comes from. The singles (‘Letitgo’ and ‘Space’) aren’t particularly strong, but this is an album with no bad tracks on it – which came as quite a relief in 1994, believe you me – and ‘Loose’, ‘Papa’, ‘Race’ and ‘Dark’ are among the best things he did during the decade. Better yet, they’re all eccentrically Prince to the core. This is his darkest and filthiest album. It establishes that mood with the extraordinary title track and plays it to the end. Atmospheric, diverse, coherently sequenced: this is what we want from a Prince album.

    The Gold Experience – While this is well on its way to becoming Prince’s most overrated album, it’s pretty darn good. Its faults are the common ‘Prince in the 90s’ ones: overstuffed with samey filler, lame conceptual segues. Thin out some extraordinarily boring ballads (‘I Hate U’, ‘Shh’, the mega-bland ‘Most Beautiful Girl in the World’) and throw the NPG Operator to the wolves and you get another extremely good album. My take on it:

    Side A: P Control / Endorphinmachine / 319 / We March / Dolphin
    Side B: Now / Billy Jack Bitch / Shy / Gold

    I still don’t think this is as good as any of his 80s classics (or even the stripped down Love Symbol), but it flows very nicely, and ‘We March’ is one of the all-time-great all-but-unknown Prince tracks.

    Chaos and Disorder – When it came out, despite at least one review acclaiming it as a return to form (I’m pretty sure you can find the same claim made for every one of his 90s albums by some critic or other), this sounded to me like blatant contract filler. Today, I’m surprised to discover another album without a weak track on it, one that works very nicely as a complete listening experience (with no tampering!) For most of its length it’s merely enjoyable, with no new classics on display, but the last two tracks, the ultra-funky ‘Dig U Better Dead’ and the haunting ‘Had U’, are as good as anything Prince ever did, and end the album on such a high note that they retrospectively make everything else stronger.

    Emancipation – My anticipation for this album was very great in 1996. Prince’s frustration with Warner Bros. was legendary, and it casually copped the blame for the relative weakness of his 90s output, so the prospect of – at long last – the kind of album Prince wanted to release all along was extremely powerful. And my disappointment in any release has never been greater. I listened in vain for evidence of ambition unleashed, but instead heard hour upon hour of tameness and anonymity. Emancipation was even more boring than Diamonds and Pearls. There were songs on here as trite and embarrassing as ‘Blue Light’. I tried to distill a single album from the bloated corpse of Prince’s woeful vanity project, but I was struggling to find half a dozen tracks I liked. This time around I tried to recharge my optimism and lower my expectations, but it was still a slog. I managed to cobble together an 80-minute, double LP configuration that I like well enough, but it’s no Sign o’ the Times.

    What’s good? Surprisingly to me, a whole lot of ballads (which I provocatively programmed together on the last side of my imaginary 2LP version): Friend, Love, Sister, Mother/ Wife / Soul Sanctuary / One Kiss at a Time / The Love We Make. Only a couple of the upbeat tracks (‘Face Down’, ‘New World’) are as good as those, but there are a lot of other ‘good enough’ ones to make for an enjoyable listen. What’s bad? Unsurprising to me, most of the other ballads, about which ‘generic’ is probably the kindest thing I could say. The covers: this is the first time Prince released a cover version of any song, and they’re not good. The blandly pretty versions of ‘Betcha By Golly Wow’ and ‘La, La, La Means I Love You’ fall completely into the ‘why bother?’ category (and when the former was chosen as the lead single for this alleged magnum opus I did suspect something was amiss), but Prince’s atrocious Bon Jovi reading of ‘One of Us’ remains a career low. The sequencing: this is when Prince’s albums seemed to be sequenced with more regard for numerology than for the audience’s listening experience, and the bizarre need to have the same number of tracks, totalling exactly an hour, on each disc might be to blame for the semi-random tracklists, or weird decisions like editing down the two minute ‘The Plan’ from Kamasutra to 1.46 just to make the disc add up right. Also, not to speak ill of the dead, but if you have to add a bunch of silence to the end of the last track on a disc, you’re cheating, Mr Nelson.

    For what it’s worth, here’s my 16-track double LP tracklist:

    Side A: Slave / Face Down / Joint 2 Joint / We Gets Up
    Side B: Courtin’ Time / The Human Body / Damned If I Do / Get Yo Groove On
    Side C: Emancipation / New World / Emale / In This Bed I Scream
    Side D: Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife / Soul Sanctuary / One Kiss at a Time / The Love We Make

    Crystal Ball – And, shockingly, the same criticisms largely apply to this. What promised to be the Holy Grail ended up as just another awkward 90s Prince album. Again, we’ve got numerology calling the shots, leading to awkward and obvious edits and mediocre sequencing. And the programming is bizarre in other ways. Plenty of tracks are rudely truncated, and yet the throwaway ‘Cloreen Bacon Skin’ is allowed to run longer than either side of Dirty Mind. And when fans were hoping for treasures from the vault I don’t think a single one of them had in mind the G Shock remix of ‘Love Sign’. The whole is such a wasted opportunity I even find it difficult to appreciate individual parts, some of which are, of course, very good.

    The Truth – And this bonus album is better than all of those ‘treasures’ combined. Quite possibly it’s the best Prince album of the 90s. It’s certainly up there with Come. Great songs, refreshingly simple arrangements, plenty of humour. This album really needs to be better known.

    The Vault. . . Old Friends for Sale – And hot on the heels of the disappointing Crystal Ball, here comes another random collection of dodgy outtakes. What had happened to the career of a once-great artist? But, wait a minute. . . Coming back to this after all these years, it’s actually a terrific little album. It’s got the flow and coherence that Crystal Ball conspicuously lacked, and it doesn’t really sound like any other Prince album. It’s basically variations of the theme of jazz pop, and there are some great tunes (‘The Rest of My Life’ is one of the most adorable lead tracks on any Prince album, and ‘5 Women’ and ‘Sarah’ are the other big highlights, but there are no duds) and great playing here. Rediscover it with open ears now!

    Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic / Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic – in 1999, this sounded like another nail in the coffin , a more commercially craven version of Emancipation. But it’s nowhere near as bad as I remembered. I dismissed ‘The Greatest Romance Ever Sold’ at the time as another in the long line of bland commercial ballads that he insisted on releasing as singles in the 90s, but now it sounds gorgeous and harmonically surprising. On the other hand, there’s the godawful ‘Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do’: I heard enough of that notorious aural laxative ‘Every Breath You Take’ in the 1980s to last me a lifetime, and I certainly don’t need it stinking up a Prince album all these years later. ‘Undisputed’ finally pairs Prince with a great rapper, and considering how much Tony M used to borrow from Chuck D, this is quite satisfying. ‘Baby Knows’ is ‘Cream’ Part 7, but still enjoyable. I originally wrote off the cover of ‘Every Day Is a Winding Road’ as ‘One of Us II’ and tried to politely look the other way, but it’s actually a really nice reinvention of the song. Plenty of filler here, but also some stuff I shouldn’t have overlooked.

    The revamped Rave In2 doesn’t really bring much else to the table. ‘Beautiful Strange’ is a great addition, but most of the track extensions are basically irrelevant (mere codas) and none of the remixes improve on the original, even when the original could stand some improvement. The two tracks we lose were better than average on the original album and all the real stinkers remain. Shrug.

    I managed to salvage a (re)listenable album from the two of them. It’s far from great, but it’s pleasant enough:

    Side A: Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic / Undisputed / The Greatest Romance Ever Sold / Every Day Is a Winding Road
    Side B: Baby Knows (extended) / Strange But True / Tangerine (extended) / Beautiful Strange / Prettyman (extended)

    (I tried to find somewhere to insert that little orchestral segue that comes before ‘Man O’War’, but it didn’t seem to fit anywhere.)

    The NPG

    Gold N*gga – This is really more of a protégé album, without any Prince lead vocals. It’s a nice 70s throwback, with a couple of great tracks (‘Gold N*gga Pt 1’, ‘Black MF in the House’), but it’s hampered by unnecessary, unfunny segues that grind everything to a halt constantly.

    Exodus – That’s nothing compared to this album, where the segues are bloated to nearly 15 minutes and make the album almost impossible to listen to end-to-end. It’s effectively the best NPG album buried alive inside the worst one. I extracted the actual songs (leaving the mediocre ‘Cherry, Cherry’ on the cutting room floor) and came up with this LP-length track list:

    Side A: Get Wild / New Power Soul / Count the Days / The Good Life / Big Fun
    Side B: Return of the Bump Squad / Hallucination Rain / The Exodus Has Begun

    You need to do a fair bit of editing and (cross-)fading to make this work without including partial skits, but it’s worth it. I also need to note that the original version of ‘Get Wild’ released on the Pret a Porter soundtrack is far, far better than the album / single version, but I refrained from rewriting history to the extent of substituting it.

    New Power Soul – Much better to listen to, though this is a weaker album, song-for-song, than the others. And by this point the NPG’s latest has really just become ‘just another Prince album’.

    The War – But this isn’t ‘just another’ anything. This track seems to have a lot of fans running in horror, but I really like it, and it’s certainly a radical departure for Prince from everything else he’d ever released. It’s basically just a looooong slab of ambient funk. If it had been released in a private pressing in 1974 and rediscovered by the Numero Group forty years later, people would be falling over themselves with superlatives.


    So here we are (here we are, at my paisley crib) at the end of the 90s. For me, the theme of the decade is control, loss of.

    So many of Prince’s public stances were about attaining / maintaining / regaining control over his music and his career, but, ironically, the muddled discography that emerges is all about loss of control. CD bloat sets in, quality control dips, albums Prince wants to release are withheld or delayed, albums Prince wanted to withhold are released, record companies collapse around him. Grand projects evaporate (The Dawn), disappoint (the bland, filler-heavy Emancipation), limp out in compromised form (Crystal Ball, which should have been a triumph, is more of an own goal), or turn out to be terrible ideas in the first place (1999: The New Master, anybody?) There’s still plenty of innovative and original music, but there’s also plenty of trend-chasing that we’d never seen before. At the start of the decade, Prince was a pop / rock institution; in the middle, he was a punchline; at the end, an irrelevance. There’s no particular difference in the quality of his output - Diamonds and Pearls and Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic are both mixed bags, with similar problems – but Prince had lost control of his own public narrative through a confluence of unfortunate happenstance and his own career missteps. If Emancipation had been whittled down to a single, Purple Rain-length album of only the strongest material (which is the million-dollar question: could Prince still recognize his strongest material? His single choices suggest maybe not), and had been supported by a healthy record company, perhaps this would have been a genuine comeback with genuine forward momentum. Stepping further back, if his relationship with Warner Bros. had been less antagonistic, maybe that partnership would have proved much more supportive in the long term than the makeshift label relationships that came after. Who knows? In the end, all we have is the music, and the music is the true reward.
     
  5. Before posting the tracklists to Amazon, there have been changes to lists for CD1 & CD4

    CD1
    1. P-Control
    2. Gold
    3. Love Sign
    4. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
    5. Space
    6. Rock N Roll is Alive! (and it lives in Minneapolis)
    7. I Hate U
    8. Letitgo (Single edit)
    9. Get Wild
    10. Chaos & Disorder
    11. Dinner with Delores
    12. Get Yo Groove On
    13. Somebody's Somebody
    14. 20/20 (unreleased song)
    15. In This Bed I Scream
    16. The Holy River

    CD4
    1. Feel Better, Feel Good, Feel Wonderful
    2. Chocolate Box
    3. Sticky Like Glue
    4. Lavaux
    5. Breakdown
    6. Rocknroll Love Affair
    7. Breakfast Can Wait
    8. Anotherlove
    9. Clouds
    10. Baltimore
    11. Fallinlove2nite
    12. Revelation
    13. Black Muse
    14. Free Urself
    15. Time
    16. affirmation i & ii
    17. Way Back Home
    18 affirmation iii

    ...like anybody cares. :hide:
     
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  6. BlueGangsta

    BlueGangsta Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    And then the label's website mysteriously dissapears and no further information is heard of.
     
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  7. JohnnyQuest

    JohnnyQuest Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paradise
    Forget what I said about SOTT, "The Rainbow Children" is the ultimate hot coco and fireplace album. :thumbsup:
     
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  8. Nathan Aaron

    Nathan Aaron Forum Resident

    - Chaos and Disorder doesn't have a weak track on it?! (I think there might be three good tracks on that thing, IMHO. ;) ) And 'I Hate U' should be removed from The Gold Experience?! A completely excellent track! We can not be Prince friends, I'm sorry. :D
     
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  9. Summer of Malcontent

    Summer of Malcontent Forum Resident

    I may have exaggerated the worth of Chaos and Disorder, but at least it hasn't got anything on it that makes me want to rip my ears off (see: Emancipation). On an open-minded relisten, it was surprisingly enjoyable.

    But 'I Hate You' is that same humdrum falsetto ballad that Prince had been trotting out for a decade and a half at this point. It just seemed totally stale and unremarkable to me, and I found it depressing that he kept putting the same dreary mainstream R'n'B stuff out as singles while he was still recording interesting music. As the lead single for a new album, that's a white flag of surrender. Nothing new here! Move along!

    I was listening to Mayte's Child of the Sun recently, and 'Children of the Sun' is a fantastic electronic dance track that could have happily rubbed shoulders with the Chemical Brothers, who had just released their first album at the time. But instead of something cutting edge, the singles released from the album are the syrupy ballads, 'If I Love U 2Nite' and a dull, redundant retread of 'The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.' After the Love Symbol album, did Prince release any upbeat or funky commercial singles in the '90s? An innocent bystander listening to the radio would have no idea he was still recording stuff like 'Loose', or 'New World', or 'Dig U Better Dead'.
     
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  10. Nathan Aaron

    Nathan Aaron Forum Resident

    - I honestly love I Hate U. Plus the fact that Billy Jack Bitch comes before it, and I think they both work great together. But I was just playin' with you a bit. That's what makes fans, fans, and music great! We all love songs someone else doesn't, and vice versa.

    I know he officially released Black Sweat. That's a pretty rockin' upbeat song. And wasn't Rock N' Roll Affair an official release? That's one of his best later songs, period! I can't really believe that didn't go anywhere (I don't think it did, anyway.) Not sure how many others there might have been...
     
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  11. BlueGangsta

    BlueGangsta Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    RnR Love Affair and Screwdriver received a surprising amount of hate when they were released. Never understood why.
     
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  12. 99thfloor

    99thfloor Senior Member

    Location:
    Sweden
    I love "[​IMG] Hate U, I think it's an outstanding "falsetto ballad", nothing "humdrum" about it, and also love "If [​IMG] Love U 2night". But I do agree he was very unvaried in the choice of singles from "Most Beautiful Girl" and throughout the rest of the 90's, with if not ballads then at least slow or "soft" songs. The first funky single in a long time was "The Work, pt. 1", and if you don't count that as upbeat and commercial, then "Musicology".
     
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  13. Prince was never, ever very good at choosing his singles. Period. Back in the day he had WB to help him with that.

    Then again, WB only had the tracks available that Prince turned into them. So, even Prince's choice of what should be on an album is suspect, as evidenced by all of the quality tracks left in the vault.
     
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  14. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Hmmm, I don't agree on that one. I love that album! I like all songs, EXCEPT "I Rock, Therefore I Suck". One of Prince's worst songs ever...
    Besides that, pretty great album. Add a era-rocker and you have a 90s classic :).
     
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  15. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Why do you think that...? He was not always right, but he demanded When Doves Cry as the first Purple Rain single and that was a pretty game changer. WB seemed to hate the song before release.
     
  16. JohnnyQuest

    JohnnyQuest Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paradise
    It's already a classic in my book. :)
     
  17. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    Yep, I love the raw first songs, the poppy Delores and the amazing finale.
    The in-between songs go with the flow (and can't spoil the party).
     
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  18. That's an exception, not the rule.
     
  19. 99thfloor

    99thfloor Senior Member

    Location:
    Sweden
    Agree completely, the songs may not be masterpices, but it is a very enjoyable album, except for that one track... For example "Empty Room" and "18 & Over" had videos shot around that time that form a "story" together with the one for "Zanalee", so he could have included those instead, then it would have been great all the way.

    So "When Doves Cry" was one of the few good single choices made...?
     
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  20. JohnnyQuest

    JohnnyQuest Forum Resident

    Location:
    Paradise
    "Alphabet St." and "Glam Slam" are great examples of smart single choices. :thumbsup: The latter wasn't as successful but I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with the quality or Pop appeal of the song.
     
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  21. Fact: Prince's/WB's choice of singles during the WB years were a lot better than post-WB. As an eccentric and multifaceted artist, it has always been stated that quality control had been an issue with Prince and WB. Simply stated, WB felt that Prince needed to be monitored, while Prince didn't, and often, begrudgingly, compromises were made by both parties. Not so after Prince split from WB. Then it became the all-Prince-all-of-the-time show.

    Certainly, in many respects, Prince splitting from WB was a pioneering act, yet Prince suffered suffered the many ills of not have the machine to back him. With singles he missed that push and pull that WB provided. It's like a writer without an editor; all creatives need a sounding board.

    "When Doves Cry" wasn't "one of a few good single choices." It was just a case of Prince being in the right out of many single choices that could have gone either way given the division between the art and the editor.
     
  22. thekid87

    thekid87 Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Netherlands
    I do agree with you for most of your comment. I don't agree with the poor single choices (WB years). To me, all the first singles were spot on. After that they were a mixed bag.
     
  23. Maybe I didn't make myself as clear as I should have, but I'm not knocking most of the single choices in the WB years, mostly only those after.

    I think there came a time, though, around 1992, when the majority of the mainstream pop buying public began to fall out of love with Prince.

    Pop is cyclical. Prince didn't do himself very many favors post-WB without the machine behind him. His cycle wouldn't come back around again until Musicology, which great, but by the time 3121 came around "Black Sweat" should have been the first single to ride the crest of that wave.
     
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  24. Nathan Aaron

    Nathan Aaron Forum Resident

    - And that's ACTUALLY one of the few songs I love off that album! Ha! Too funny! That song is FUNKY!
     
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  25. RRB

    RRB Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    How can I get a copy? This is a fav album of mine...
     
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