I'd always heard that this was the worst Prince album but, apart from a few clunkers, I found it surprisingly OK. We've certainly covered much worse recently! Also, there wasn't as much guest artist involvement as I had expected. 3/5
Rave Un2 / In2 The Joy Fantastic - this is the sound of Prince desperate for chart success again. Time was when others would kill for Prince to appear as a guest musician on their own albums - here Prince liberally sprinkles collaborations across the piece in a vain attempt to widen his audience again. I think the reason this is often cited as a low point is that over the first 45 minutes (which I still consider to the optimal length of an album) there is only really 1:33 of Prince being effortless (Tangerine.) It picks up from I Love U onwatds, but by this point I've completely switched off. Luckily the whole thing bombed, and Prince appeared to have a rethink. What followed was a period of Prince becoming comfortable in his own skin and once again putting out music that didn't even attempt to play to an audience... we are heading out of the depths! 2/5
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic Like most late albums after the mid 90s it has weak, mediocre, ok, good and also some great stuff. Therefore these are really hard to rate as albums per se. The pop-collabos don't work, the rap ones do for me here. 3.5/5
Our votes for “Prettyman” (19 votes): 1 - 0x 2 - 1x 3 - 7x 4 - 10x 5 - 1x Average: 3,4763 For what it's worth, 3 of us also voted for the extended version of the song. Those 3 gave the same rating for both versions. So, the extended version also gets a 3,4763
"Rave..." I would give a 2/5. This and Emancipation I would consider personally to be my least favorite Prince outings, albeit with some gems on both of them
The individual songs are better than the album. I'm not sure why that is but when you combine them as a single listening experience they don't work as well as they do on their own. Prince has made "messy" albums before that have been fantastic but this is not one of them. This album, combined with Prince releasing most of his material through the NPGMC, caused me to mostly check out on him over the next few years. I was a fairly hardcore fan but this era really pushed me away from him and his music. It took too much work to be a Prince fan and the payoff wasn't worth it. With Musicology I reconnected with his music in a big way and stayed with him until the end but, for me, as a fan, 1999-2003 were sort of lost years for Prince. The fallout from Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic was the beginning of those lost years. This is an album/era that I will never have fond feelings for. 2/5
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic (the album) With Rave, Prince wanted to make a commercial hit album. He saw what Santana could do (with Supernatural) and he quickly joined Arista and Clive Davis to reach the same goal (aka to do better... knowing Prince). They asked a couple people to collaborate (some friends, some other friends), dug up an oldie from the 80s, some great break-up songs and made 'Prince' producer of the album.... That should be a massive hit, right?! Sadly, it didn't and the album failed for a number of reasons. Starting with the first single, the album concept/configuration and the decline to release So Far So Pleased as a single. Also the frustration following the lack of immediate success and the awful interviews Prince did at the time (with Prince in defense all the time, talking too much about religion etc.). The frustration between Prince and Clive/Arista (who promised Prince a hit album and a hit single) didn't help either. Anyway, it's not all bad news. A good part of the songs on the album are pretty great. Some are even brilliant. Sadly, there are also some pretty bad ones and that brings the album down. Strangly, those were selected to be singles (Greatest Romance, Hot Wit U, Man O' War). Without those songs the album is much better (a 4 out of 5), especially if you omit the, great but not fitting, vault track (Rave Un2), the final segue and add Beautiful Strange. As-is, the album is less than the sum of its parts. This is a solid 3 out of 5.
Yup, to all of that. Exactly. Better than some of the stuff that just came before but man, it's still rough. Yeah, it gets off to a really weak start and the second half isn't strong enough to really redeem it. More on that in a minute. This is what I was going to come to - it doesn't hold together at all as a coherent album. There's no real mood here. It somewhat feels like a flashback to Controversy / 1999-era Prince in a few places, but not really. And not consistently enough for that to accomplish a unifying theme. Still too much of the lame '70s funk retreads he'd been doing since circa 1990s. Retro was over, Prince. One thing I didn't really see people hit on: the production. It is uniformly pretty awful, and the hyper-overloaded, over-compressed sound is a real ear-ache. It sounds amateur, like a bad demo. I think the sound of this record knocks a full star off of it for me. 2/5, but if you removed the worst tracks and improved the awful sound quality with maybe a few production tweaks, could easily be a solid 3/5.
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic - the album I found it a little disappointing at the time but in retrospect, there are some good songs in there. 3.5/5 In2 3/5
I became a Prince fan when I heard "Sign" playing at a record store when I was 15. From Lovesexy to Rave, I bought every CD on release day. After Rave, I would not buy a Prince album again until after he died. I was just too worn out with the public WB fighting, multiple segues and skits across multiple albums, and, frankly, just too many bad albums in a row starting with Emancipation. After his death, I picked up and/or streamed a couple of albums, and I liked those. So, apparently, there's good music in this thread coming up. I look forward to hearing what I missed.
There is. I liked if not loved Musicology and would easily give it a 3 and probably a 4 when it comes up for review. 3121 has a couple of great tunes but I didn't like it nearly as much overall, unfortunately - it sadly reminds me of a bunch of albums from the '90s, although the production is better. Maybe I'll like it more when we get to it...
Prince did a lot of interviews as promo for this album. Most of the appearances had Baby Knows and TGRES, but he also did a very strong emotional performance on Spanish tv of a traditional song (Sometimes I Feel Like A) Motherless Child. I've watched this performance so often, it is always proof that even in his lesser periods he could still surprise me and come up with something so powerful. I've never before or since heard him do something on his guitar like at 5.50
I guess that with Prince's productivity and my current life I never catch up with the songs discussed here. Be away from the forum for a few days and you're again half an album behind. For the first song I can be quick, it seems. Silly Game sounds like an Emancipation outtake. In other words, bland and boring, though not really bad. Just without imagination and with quite some musical (and lyrical) clichés. 2/5 The person who compared Strange But True with All The Critics Love You In New York was quite on the mark. This one has quite a similar vibe to that 1999 track (with Strange But True coincidentally being released in the year 1999). In the end the groove isn't as great as on All The Critics... But though Strange But True might remind us more of that great track, it's also quite decent by itself. 3.5/5 There's another throwback in Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do to slightly more recent times as the drums (and general vibe) remind me a bit of Forever In My Life. But this is a more sweetened version of that song, without the originality of it. End credits music is indeed a good description of it. Pleasant but without much substance. The happy ending vibe here is that the album is finally (almost) over. 3/5 Over the years Prince has done quite some James Brown-inspired funk songs, but Prettyman also features JB Horns saxophone player Maceo Parker. So yeah, the JB-vibe is big in this one. It's a final injection of energy into the album, trying to wipe away what we listened to before. I can't stand the Prince intro though as I think his delivery of the line "Don't hate me cause I'm beautiful" is delivery. The JB-funk is then thankfully bringing a better sound and vibe. In the end I can (just) forgive Prince for that horrible start. 4/5 The extended version is just the regular version with an extra minute at the end of Maceo blowing his horn. Which is certainly a good thing, so that one will be included on my Ultimate Rave compilation of the two albums.
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic... This was towards the end of my Prince love. In fact, I didn't even buy Rave, upon its release. A cool woman in my TV class heard I liked Prince, and she just happened to work at a cd store and had received a free copy...she gifted me Rave, which was a very cool thing to do. I wasn't too impressed upon 1st listen and filed it away in the forgotten cd piles of yesteryear. Upon further listen, it's not as bad as I proclaimed at the time, yet obviously not the breakthrough Prince and Clive were looking for. So far- Half pleased? Better than nothing I guess. I wish I could remember the woman's name that had gifted me Rave, she was a cutie. 3/5
Rave un2 the Joy Fantastic was, at the time, the final nail in the coffin of my Prince fandom. In retrospect, it's not as bad as I remembered, at least in terms of song quality. One problem is that there's no flow. Another is that the first half is very weak. And the third problem, as @sunspot42 emphasizes, is the terrible mastering. It just mostly sounds wrong. However, taken song by song, I can deal with the poor SQ (if not always the mix), which may be one reason I've enjoyed it more this past week: I don't have to listen to the whole thing. (Which should have helped Emancipation too, but it actually didn't.) Apart from the songs themselves, I was pretty turned off by what appeared to be calculated, inauthentic, and somewhat desperate career move. I'm feeling more forgiving these days. But consequently I'm much less familiar with the material we'll be covering going forward, as I took my sweet time acquiring the rest of his catalogue and have given most of it only one or two listens. Anyway, long story short, I expected to be rating this album around 1.5, but with a little boost for surprising me after all these years, I'm going to award it a 3/5. Rave in2, on the other hand, is a failed cash grab based on previous failed cash grab, and I have no mercy for it. 1.5/5. These posts also speak for me!
Rave Un2 I hadn't heard all the songs from this. It's not as bad as I thought it would be, but there's nothing that really wowed me. 2/5
Rave Un2 a mixed bag.. a sense of trying too hard on some tracks, wanting a commercial hit, trying to prove something.. some good songs that are memorable and fun 3.75/5 I generally prefer Rave In2 because of Beautiful Strange
Today's song is "Beautiful Strange", written by and produced by Prince. Prince – Beautiful Strange Lyrics | Genius Lyrics "Beautiful Strange" was originally released as a video of a studio performance on the Beautiful STrange home video release; it was recorded in 1998 at Paisley Park. It was later reworked and remixed and released in 2001 on Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic. : all vocals and instruments except: Mike Scott: additional guitar Kirk A. Johnson: additional drums Marva King: vocals "Beautiful Strange" was included on Anthology: 1995-2010.
I should be all over this, but it does nothing for me. Something about the production - especially the mix and all the compression - just ruins it. Doesn't have the space it needs, like his '80s run of albums from Dirty Mind thru Sign. 2/5
