Classic or Dud: Prince's Batman "Soundtrack" Album

Most of the audience thought so and so did I. But it got me thinking about what is, and isn't gay.

Discussing sex with a guy is gay. Discussing sex with a woman is straight, even telling a woman, "Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to suck a cock," is straight.

Sports are gay, especially contact sports, unless you're the only guy on both teams, in which it's straight. Gymsare always gay, because afterwards, in the locker room, you're showering with other guys, and that is gay.

Watching pornography alone is neutral, like eating a sandwich. It's neither straight, nor gay. Watching pornos, with one or more other guys in the room, no matter how many other women are also in the room, is gay. Watching porn - even gay porn - with one or more women only, is straight.

Here's an interesting one - kissing a gay guy on the cheek, or letting him kiss you on the cheek, is neutral, as long as the guy is out of the closet. Hugging or kissing a straight guy is gay.

See, look, I know I'm homophobic, but not about gay guys. They don't bother me at all. It'sstraight guys who don't know they're gay. They fuck my shit right up. Like a guy calls me up and says, "uh, a bunch of us guys are gonna sit around in our underwear and watch the football game and drink beer and eat chips, and you know, maybe wrestle with each other a little, and you know, just us guys. You wanna come over?" And I'm like, "no." Okay. You've got a guy sucking your dick, even is he's dressed like a beautiful woman, even if he's got the best breast implants you've ever seen, even if you're saying, "Suck it, bitch, I knowyou like it, you slut, you whore," that's gay.

And conversely, if a woman straps on a dildo, and you'redressed like a woman and you're sucking her cock and she's saying, "you like it, don't you, you like sucking my dick you fucking faggot," and then she rolls you over and fucks you in the ass and says, "you love it, you little pussy-boy, you love getting fucked in the ass, I bet you wish I was a man, I bet you wish this was a real cock, you fucking faggot!" And you're getting off on this like you've never gotten off before, that's still straight.

But then, if you go off to the bar and discuss this, or any other sexual activities with another guy, that's gay.

And here's the most interesting one. Sucking a guy's cock, can, under certain rare circumstances, be straight. Let's say you've gotten into a betting game with a woman and the bet is whoever loses has to be the other one's sex slave for the night, the kind of thing that happens in Penthouse forum all the time, and you lose. And the woman makes you have sex with another guy, that's not gay.

I don't know exactly why, but it's not.

And I think you think to much about the straight/gay divide. You need to just relax, roll over, and let me slide this big cock in that manhole of yours. Yeah, baby...

can't think of anyone else doing that.

it was all hype anyway. muchlike the film.

atention show-offs ! now's the point where you say
"i thought 200 balloons was better than anything off the album anyway"

also agreed about "Partyman". take it (okay, and maybe "Vikki Waiting" too) out and this album is nigh on perfect.

it's still fucking absurd.

fucking absurdly great, you mean.

it wasn't as bad as i remembered it to be, but as i mentioned above, it sure as fuck sounds way too much like "daddy pop".

"Hey Ducky, let me stick the 7-inch
In the computer
HA, HA, HA
Hey, we got the power
Oh, we got the soul
Hey, we got to sho'nuff get off
2 make the devil go, go

"This town needs an enema!"

"I'm gonna kill U"
POWER
"I'm not gonna kill U"
SOUL
"I'm gonna kill U"
POWER
"I'm not gonna kill U"
SOUL
Let's do it
"I'm BATMAN"
BATMAN
Don't stop dancin'
"I'm BATMAN"
BATMAN
Don't stop dancin'
Do it, do it, do it, do it
BATMAN, BATMAN, BATMAN
Don't stop, don't stop
Let's do it
Don't stop dancin'
Let's do it, BATMAN
Let's do it, BATMAN
Don't stop dancin'
Don't stop dancin'
No, damn it! Turn the music back up!
You son of a bitch!

"Have you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?"

Who's gonna stop 200 balloons?
Nobody!
Batman
Stop!"

same difference

Anyway, classic, if only for "Lemon Crush" -- a sublime example of the tossed-off insta-funk that your boy could seemingly do in his sleep back then. Lotsa other good ones, too.

it was the best movie

Ridiculousness.

&

"This town needs an enema"

When was the last top 5 hit with the word enema in it?
Such a rush

The amount of self-steals on Batman are large (the ending of 'Forever In My Life'='Vicki Waiting', the best song, mind), but that's almost an advantage. Recently, I could finally listen to the entire thing and I still believe it's classic. Awesomely, ridiculously classic.

You wanna get nuts?!?!?! COME ON!!! LET'S GET NUTS!!!!

The sticker-book series for the movie actually gave this line its own card.

Defend: "Love Song," the duet with Madonna.

-- manthony m1cc1o (anthonyisrigh...), October 16th, 2004.

i think at one point i had all those topps batman trading cards. after a while they had a card for EVERYTHING in that movie.

The one on Like a Prayer? That's easy. The gratuitous French from Maddy (and esp. Prince's "What?" in reply towards the end). The fact that the chorus line is in fact "This is not a love song" (if only PiL had thought of that), etc.

Ok now I have to hear this (been meaning to buy Like A Prayer anyway).

It bears repeating: save for "Partyman", this album is great.

"Arms of Orion" is beautiful.

Um excuse me? "Partyman" is my favorite Prince song. Period.

got this on tape iirc

classic

Yeah, "Partyman" fucking rules. Shrill funk collage.

This was the first music I ever bought. I think on cassette, when I was 7 or 8. My best friend was a girl that would come over and we'd play the tape and act out the movie with me as Batman and her as Vicky. "Partyman" was the one we'd play over and over again. "Trust" is pretty good too!

listening to this album for first time in decades. reminds me how much of a marketing juggernaut this film was. perfect for 11-year-old me. this album is pretty good, against all odds. its worth getting the homemade deluxe edition available on the internets. got all the b-sides, some of which are fantastic.

yeah i was 6 when this movie came out and it utterly DOMINATED my summer. used to clean my room to this album!

argh i just realized that i said the exact same thing upthread.

in any case miccio is hilarious in this thread!

no doubt. I actually saw this again sometime between 04 and now and enjoyed it a lot. I dig how many moments feel like total non-sequiturs.

The other day my wife asked me whether someone on TV was hot and I said "well she's not, 'stop the press, who's that?' or anything..." and then had to explain both the original line and "batdance". or rather felt compelled to.

Part of the problem with inception was that it didn't have a soundbite-filled medley by prince called "do the inception" at the end.

if I could vote for Prince's "what?" from "Love Song" in the Prince poll, I would. Maybe I will.

Prince would've totally made a project out of Marion Cotillard.

Time passes by for those who slowly wait.

Then Play Long reaches Prince and his music for Batman, which is more than you might think: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/prince-batman-motion-picture-soundtrack.html

"Scandalous" is fantastic.

I love this record. Just played it on Friday.

"Partyman" is a good time

Carlin's essay nails it, on both the album and the film. Some related ephemera:

* "I have seen the future, and it works" is a quote by the famed American muckracker Lincoln Steffens regarding his 1919 visit to the Soviet Union. Two summers after Batman, Soviet communism collapsed.

* Prince really was extremely enthusiastic about Batman, and constructed his own elaborate mythology around the character inspired by not just the Black Album, but Camille and Spooky Electric. Prince's long-suppresed Batdance video is much more interesting to watch than Burton's film.

Because the biggest flaw of the character, in almost any iteration, is that nobody really seems to know how to handle his sexuality. Some writers attempt to make him a hyper-sexual billionaire playboy who beds tons of women. The problem with this is that the "billionaire playboy" thing is a transparent pretense, and therefore anything he does in that persona is implausible. Batman has, since 1940, been an implicit pederast, and this reading continues to complicate the character.

Prince's solution is utterly fascinating. His reading of the character, because he's Prince, is intrinsically sexual, but he is just as disinterested as everyone else in the alleged Wayne-Vale "relationship". His most passionate expressions of sexuality, such as "Scandalous", are expressed in the character of the Joker, who in Prince's reading becomes an androgynous and pansexual Baphomet-like figure of misrule. The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

* "Batdance" was edited down from a nearly nine-minute first cut. The sub-four minute single edit removes the reprise of the "A" section of the "song", thereby making the song even stranger.

* A dark record? Yes, definitely. However, Prince actually cut one track from the record, "Dance with the Devil", for being too dark. The song has never been released, but circulates as part of the five-billion-CD Prince studio outtake bootleg collection. It's pretty dark.

If you want to delve deeper into Prince's sexual take of Batman, I'd recommend acquiring the Scandalous Sex Suite EP, which includes an extended three part version of "Scandalous", complete with some orgastic moaning by Kim Basinger (she briefly dated Prince at the time, so he invited her to do this in the studio), and a track titled "Sex (The 80's Are Over and the Time Has Come 4 Monogamy and Trust)", which has got to be the most Princean title of all time.

Most of the Batman OST singles are well worth acquiring too, they have some dope B-sides like "Feel U Up" (Camille again!) and "200 Balloons", plus nice alternate mixes - the house remixes of "Batdance" and "The Future" by William Orbit and Mark Moore are even better than the originals, IMO.

I'm in this liminal state where I haven't googled anything in Tuomas's post yet to see if it's real. feels good.

Is it heretical to prefer "The Future" to "Sign o' the Times"? Fine.

Carlin's essay nails it, on both the album and the film.

yup

defenders of the film are baffling imo

I like the movie, but Marcello's idea of asking Keaton to play both characters intrigued me too

The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

wait waht are you serious, this has totally been explored in the comics

xp

and in pretty canonical stuff too - Dark Knight, Arkham Asylum etc

I don't really follow Batman comics but I've read enough to know that take is basically Batman 101

Marcello's piece seems to be happily unaware that Batman comics have ever existed, while we're talking

idk if the comics are really relevant tbh - he's by and large correct about what he does discuss

"* Prince really was extremely enthusiastic about Batman, and constructed his own elaborate mythology around the character inspired by not just the Black Album, but Camille and Spooky Electric. "

Please PLEASE direct me to further reading on this?

it might be truer to say that reading hasn't really shown up *outside* of the comics? nicholson's joker is lascivious, but in an omnisexual kinda way

maybe not explicitly, but Joker's always been an essentially camp figure, and I think that includes the usual pansexual connotations

Cesar Romero was gay after all

jon not jon the liner notes/lyric sheet for batman kinda demonstrated it, songs were in character, the whole album kinda played like a rock opera. that the batman soundtrack is basically a sequel to the black album is something i wouldn't have picked up on at the time but seems super apparent. it was interesting to learn why 'partyman' and 'batdance' haven't been on any of his comps. all his comps have left off something so it didn't seem too odd, that one of his number one hits wouldn't be on a greatest hits comps was more of a marker of how many hits prince had than anything else (though obv that #1 hit would definitely be 'batdance', it's been at least 25 years since i heard it on the radio).

batman '89 is still my favourite superhero movie, it has this jagged tangle of sensibilities that marvel and DC would never really permit again

joker sparing the francis bacon painting, jack palance acting like a reptile that put on your dad's skin, the long metropolis tribute near the end...

I didn't know the reasons for their omissions until I read the Wiki last night

xpost

Xpost yeah I have imbibed the internal evidence (though I haven't read the liner notes since purchasing the cassette in 89) I just thought for a sec there might be some prince interview where he talked about it.

OTM that batman plays like a black album sequel. They even have similar arcs (killer a-side, b-side peters out a little)

idk if the comics are really relevant tbh - he's by and large correct about what he does discuss

Not that it's super-relevant to the album, but saying things like there was no precedent for the darkness of the movie and Burton had to build his own antithesis of the '66 TV show, whimsically speculating what the characters might have been if they'd existed in the '40s - rhetorical asides that clunked specifically due to by-and-large non-correctness

Agree that the album is good and the Scandalous Sex Suite is ridiculous obv

lemon crush is the best thing on here, though i like the whole album, even if it could be a bit less rushed sounding in places. i want to hear the 9 minute version of batdance.

sex is one of his great b sides.

lemon crush and vicki waiting.

electric chair is fantastic but a bit throwaway sounding.

Is the Batdance video really "long suppressed"? Easily accessible via Google. Though maybe not commercially available. Anyway, I showed it to my kids not long ago, they didn't know what to make of it.

Also, I reviewed the album when it came out for my college paper: "as bizarre and carefree as anything he's ever done, though not as stunning as his best work." More otm than most of my 19-year-old opinions.

i dont remember the mark moore or orbit mixes of the singles, but always felt after the future, and maybe loveleft loveright from graffiti bridge, that i wished prince let more house/techno producers remix his songs. or that he went down that route rather than hip-hop. though who knows if it would have turned out as badly.

He's had housey/ravey moments on several of his post-Batman albums, most notably "Loose" on Come and "The Human Body" on Emancipation (I'm pretending Joy Un2 the Rave Fantastic doesn't exist)

The "Batdance" video was an extra on a "Batman" DVD I rented a long time ago. Maybe they got rid of it since then but I think at least first run DVDs have it.

i try to pretend loose and human body dont really exist. sleep around was house-ish too.

I started a thread on this subject a while ago:

Prince and house

Whoops, sorry, here's the correct link:

Prince and house

best bit of Batdance; "Hey Ducky"!

Otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTkglWrB5xE

Love Prince's hand moves at 1:00 in here.

Classic dig at Bubbles the chimp ~4:40 yo MJ

http://en.musicplayon.com/play?v=478997

Best version of Batdance I could find.

just listened to that song for the first time in about 15 years. wish the drums on parts 1 and 3 were a bit less rigid. but the 2nd part has to be one of the funkiest things hes ever put on record. need to find that vicki vale mix on the 12" i used to have.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5667047/prince_the_future_remix/

this remix is obv a tad dated but good.

'hollywood conjures images of the past'

prince could see the 00s.

I always thought this album was too claustrophobic due to his reliance on samplers. Samples all over the place: voices, guitar chords, film dialogue. It's almost too much at times. This sound carried over somewhat into "Graffiti Bridge" but with much more space.
I love some of the weirdness but it's nowhere as weird as "The Black Album".

black albums weirdness has also been overstated somewhat over the years. it was better when it was a 5th generation bootleg to hearing it as it was meant to be released.

Side b of black album is boring as fuck, that's the other problem with black album

boring? Really? I think it's far from his best but it's still odd, funky and pisses from a great height on most of his subsequent 90s releases. And I'm familiar ( and own) it as a "5th generation" boot as well as the sonically spiffy Warners release.

Ok I was exaggerating a little

The boot I got in Ibiza was pretty decent, sound quality wise. 1991 or thereabouts

prince was right to kill "black album" and replace it with "lovesexy", imo. now, banding the whole cd as one track was maybe not a super-smart idea, but the album itself is super fantastic.

after ATWIAD Lovesexy is his worst record between 1979-1989, but I'd read a robust defense.

I am shocked to see myself typing this but after atwiad, controversy is his weakest record 1979-89 imo. By dint of those being the two records in that span which I never feel like listening to all the way through. But I love both of them anyway; there's no other hot streak as hot and long as this one (unless u count nightfly as a SD album) (well maybe the fall 79-89 or miles second quintet through electric epics)

my big issue with the black album is that with the exception of "when 2 r in love" and "rockhard in a funky place", none of the songs are as good as the songs cut from "crystal ball" the previous year. oh yeah, sure, "bob george" and "le grind" are _weird_ songs, maybe even weird songs by the standards of prince, but that's not enough to make them good songs, and with something like "scandalous", the weirdness is enough to make them good. "the future/electric chair" is a more potent one-two punch than "le grind/cindy c", "arms of orion" and "dead on it" are about equally bad, "partyman" trumps "superfunkycalifragisexy", "batdance" crushes "2 nigs united 4 west compton" from a great height, the dirty joke on "vicki waiting" is just enough to make it marginally better than "rockhard in a funky place", "when 2 r in love", great as that song is, just can't hold its own against "scandalous". i'm not going to bother comparing "bob george" and "trust".

If you've never listened to them all the way thru, then they're worse than Controversy.

xpost

batman is like the black album in that most of it sounds like it was done really quickly. a lot of prince albums fall under that category, lovesexy too.

probably worth pointing out that many of the Prince tracks on Graffiti Bridge (Can't Stop, We Can Funk, Joy In Repetition etc) had mostly been sat around on very-available bootlegs for the previous couple of years and that some of the cuts sounded almost identical once on the album. much of it was written way before The Black Album.

my bootleg copy of The Dream Factory has "We Can Funk."

tossed-off Prince in that era > most things

probably worth pointing out that many of the Prince tracks on Graffiti Bridge (Can't Stop, We Can Funk, Joy In Repetition etc) had mostly been sat around on very-available bootlegs for the previous couple of years and that some of the cuts sounded almost identical once on the album. much of it was written way before The Black Album.

"Initial tracking for Prince's original solo version took place on 31 December, 1983 at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, CA, USA, as We Can Fuck (the day after Erotic City and She's Always In My Hair), with additional work the following day, 1 January, 1984. Prince later toned down the title and lyrics of the song, and re-recorded the track on 17 June, 1986 at the Washington Avenue Warehouse, Eden Prairie, MN, USA (in sequence after Data Bank and Can't Stop This Feeling I Got, the day before recording Girl O' My Dreams)."

Holy shit @ "Electric Chair!"

For me, probably his first less than very good album. It has its moments, though.

Better than Lovesexy and D&P.

It's been cute seeing people defend "Batdance" over the last couple days, but I never really liked it. I'll rep for the rest of the Batman album, though. "Electric Chair" prob in my Top 5 Prince songs.

contentious opinion there !

(i genuinely love all three so, i aint siding with any of them here)

xpost.

I like batman and love sexy about even (aka a lot)

the prince batman soundtrack makes me smile a lot.

i never did catch his cameo in the film.

I genuinely fail to understand what possible reason there could be to dislike "Batdance".

Anyway, a fine record. Uneven for sure but it's got those first two songs as well, and "Scandalous" which is an AMAZING song. Also, I would like to point out that Prince's elaborate conception of the Batman character is far more interesting than Tim Burton's.

The score was originally supposed to be a collaboration between prince and elfman and I've always wondered how that was going to work

I think its nonexistence answers your question.

at the time (1989) this felt like a gimmick and after a lot of soundtrack albums where artists kind of tossed in their also-rans from recent albums, i think people kind of projected that onto this one. however prince was producing so much good music in this period, more music than he could possibly include on an album a year, so there's plenty of great stuff on here-- minimalist rave-ups, ballads -- that would probably be more appreciated if it /weren't/ on the batman sdtk.

Totally

I need to listen to it again. I spent the summer of 89 listening solely to a C90 containing this and Lovesexy, and Lovesexy remains one of my favourite albums of all time and I fell out of love with this very very quickly.

Carlin's essay nails it, on both the album and the film. Some related ephemera:

* "I have seen the future, and it works" is a quote by the famed American muckracker Lincoln Steffens regarding his 1919 visit to the Soviet Union. Two summers after Batman, Soviet communism collapsed.

* Prince really was extremely enthusiastic about Batman, and constructed his own elaborate mythology around the character inspired by not just the Black Album, but Camille and Spooky Electric. Prince's long-suppresed Batdance video is much more interesting to watch than Burton's film.

Because the biggest flaw of the character, in almost any iteration, is that nobody really seems to know how to handle his sexuality. Some writers attempt to make him a hyper-sexual billionaire playboy who beds tons of women. The problem with this is that the "billionaire playboy" thing is a transparent pretense, and therefore anything he does in that persona is implausible. Batman has, since 1940, been an implicit pederast, and this reading continues to complicate the character.

Prince's solution is utterly fascinating. His reading of the character, because he's Prince, is intrinsically sexual, but he is just as disinterested as everyone else in the alleged Wayne-Vale "relationship". His most passionate expressions of sexuality, such as "Scandalous", are expressed in the character of the Joker, who in Prince's reading becomes an androgynous and pansexual Baphomet-like figure of misrule. The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

* "Batdance" was edited down from a nearly nine-minute first cut. The sub-four minute single edit removes the reprise of the "A" section of the "song", thereby making the song even stranger.

* A dark record? Yes, definitely. However, Prince actually cut one track from the record, "Dance with the Devil", for being too dark. The song has never been released, but circulates as part of the five-billion-CD Prince studio outtake bootleg collection. It's pretty dark.

Also, "Dance with the Devil" is the tits.

This is a great post. We owe it 2 the Man 2 discuss Prince's reading of Batman.

Ok, I guess we kinda did already. Others anyway. Still, revisiting this of all of his eras is a nice discovery in the wake of his passing.

The central conflict of Prince's reading of the Batman mythos is the sexual tension between Batman and the Joker, which is not something that exists in any other version of the character I have encountered.

The Dark Knight Returns has it, albeit one sides.

https://bigotherbigother.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/batman-darling1.jpg

i put together an alternate version of the batman soundtrack to listen to because even though it's my favorite prince record it is, i've come to accept, really uneven (peeps on the "worst prince song" thread OTM about "the arms of orion", for instance, but even, say, "lemon crush", while not bad, is kind of a generic tune):

The Future
200 Balloons
Electric Chair
Scandalous

Partyman
Dance with the Devil
Batdance (long version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB-fSOds9AU

Which disc of work it is dance w the devil on

15

Been watching this a lot more than I would have imagined in the last few days. Is this "Vicki" Dr. Fink?

https://youtu.be/YRP7rwvy6k4?t=4m20s

xp I think "Trust" would have to be included since it's featured prominently in the movie.

Also it's interesting that three B-sides from Batman made it onto the "Hits / B-Sides" but none of the A-Sides.

Actually now that I'm looking closer, nine of the B-Sides on that set were from singles whose A-Sides were not included.

Was reading up on this ... Prince had a deal with WB that gave them the rights to all the music. Thus, no Batdance on Hits/B-Sides.

That kind of thing is very common for anything having to do with movie music

first time hearing this - this is really good! "ARms of Orion" is awesome, as is "Electric Chair".

oh man, you just named one of the most universally derided prince songs of all time! (the former)

i figured it probably was, I like cheezmo duets tho

also I like "Partyman"

omg LEMON CRUSH

"Arms of Orion" is tres pretty. Fuck the haters!

"Lemon Crush" has always been my favorite

This album is in no way an enormous climb down from previous fare (and Lovesexy certainly wasn't either)

kind of surprised how many of these songs he's done live, even in recent years. only ones he didn't do live were "lemon crush" and "trust".

the osmosis jones soundtrack apparently is ridiculously good !?

1. Summer In The City - St. Lunatics
2. Big Ball - Drama
3. Solo Star - Solange
4. Open - Brandy
5. Fill Me In (Part 2) - Craig David
6. I Believe - R. Kelly
7. Cool, Daddy Cool - Kid Rock
8. Turn It Out - De La Soul
9. Take It To Da House - Trick Daddy
10. Just In Case - Nivea
11. Why Did You Have To Be - Debelah Morgan
12. Don't Be Mad - Sunshine Anderson
13. Here We Go Again - Nappy Roots
14. Love Me Or Leave Me - Ms. Toi
15. Rider Like Me - Ezekiel Lewis
16. Break U Off - Uncle Kracker

the osmosis jones soundtrack apparently is ridiculously good !?

. . .

7. Cool, Daddy Cool - Kid Rock
. . .

16. Break U Off - Uncle Kracker

Does not follow.

Sure, but also

1. Summer In The City - St. Lunatics
2. Big Ball - Drama (love this!)
3. Solo Star - Solange
4. Open - Brandy
5. Fill Me In (Part 2) - Craig David
6. I Believe - R. Kelly
8. Turn It Out - De La Soul
9. Take It To Da House - Trick Daddy
10. Just In Case - Nivea
13. Here We Go Again - Nappy Roots
14. Love Me Or Leave Me - Ms. Toi

(whoops this really belonged on the crow soundtrack thread i guess?)

Bumped because I found myself re-watching the '89 Batman movie today, which I hadn't seen for years.

Anyway, 'Scandalous' fucking rules... as good a song as anything Prince did in the '80s... 'Partyman' isn't a favourite, but it works far better for me outside of the movie... that whole scene made me cringe a fair bit.

gentlemen, let's broaden our minds

This is a great album with only a few duds imo

Howard Stern last April: "I believe Prince made the best motion picture soundtrack of all time, and I know that might be a controversial statement, because not a lot of people like the Batman soundtrack." He wasn't kidding. It's his favorite Prince album.

It's not a soundtrack album,tho.

The majority of the songs were "inspired by the motion picture Batman" iirc, the idea of which seemed funny at the time, Prince finding the idea of a Batman Movie so cool he writes a whole album. Doesn't seem so unlikely now tho it wasn't really the case.

It's not a soundtrack album,tho.

It was marketed as a soundtrack album to the movie (as opposed to Elfman's contribution, which was released as "the original motion picture score"), and the songs (tho not all of them) were used in the movie, so I don't see why it wouldn't qualify as a soundtrack?

Anyway, 'Scandalous' fucking rules... as good a song as anything Prince did in the '80s...

I don't agree with this, in fact I think "Scandalous" is the only dud on the album, but if you like it so much, you should check out the Scandalous Sex Suite EP, which extends the song to a 20 minute suite, complete with orgastic moans by Kim Basinger (whom Prince was dating a the time). It also has a B-side called "Sex (The '80s Are Over and the Time Has Come 4 Monogamy and Trust)", which has gotta be the most stereotypical Prince song title ever!

Lol, looks like I posted pretty much the exact same thing about the EP in this thread in 2015.

"The Arms of Orion" is blah.

What, you're not searching for a lover in the Sea of Tranquility?

"The Arms of Orion" is tres pretty.

I put it in the same boring ballad category as the R&B hit "Insatiable" two years later. In 1996 he released a cousin of "Orion" called "Soul Sanctuary" that's far prettier.

Back to the album! I love "The Future."

"The Future" and "Electric Chair" are the fucking bomb; overall I rate the album pretty highly and prefer to tag it as the end of the hot streak rather than beginning of the hit-or-miss imperium

Okay, so I previously had Lovesexy down as being the last LP in Prince's fabulous run, but after spending more time with Batman over the last month, I'm willing to admit I was wrong about this record for years - it fucking rules.

In other words, Jon not Jon OTM - this was the end of the hot streak rather than the beginning of the hit and miss records.

'The Arms of Orion' is a lovely song.

I wouldn't say it's at the beginning or end of any streak. It's about on par with Lovesexy and the three albums after it (Graffiti Bridge, Diamonds and Pearls, Love Symbol), in terms of hits and misses.

I think both Lovesexy and Batman are def. superior to the three LP's that came after!

All are uneven, all have moments of all-time greatness.

Graffiti Bridge alone has "Joy in Repetition" and "The Question of U" and "Round and Round" and "We Can Funk."

Turrican otm it was downhill from here and there was a p distinct change in sound - less cluttered, New Jack Swing drums, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sordWByWM-M

Graffiti Bridge is half of a worthy successor to batman and lovesexy and half... not

yeah that's really the first time you can tell he just sort of gave up/didn't know what to do and was just like "well, here's a bunch of random stuff"

also his first terrible haircut

guhhhh otm

so ugly

movie is legit fascinating in a shitshow way, but having to look at that hairdo for 90 minutes oy

haha yeah we watched it shortly after his death and it's just one design monstrosity after another, we found ourselves marveling at, like, the shitty lighting and his weird facial hair and the totally fake "outdoor" sets etc

Graffiti Bridge is technically half of a worthy successor to Purple Rain and half not even remotely in the same ballpark.

i actually love the aggressively false outdoor environments in GP a lot

just hanging out in this crappy abandoned department store display case https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftrashfilmguru.files.wordpress.com%2F2016%2F04%2Fgraffiti-bridge.jpg&f=1

love that thing

also she later married david sylvian, right? this was not known to me until recently.

the other day at CVS I heard a familiar-not-familiar Prince track, a gospel-inflected ballad.

It had been years since I last heard "Still Would Stand All Time."

It's probably been said about a million times before, but one thing I like about this record is that Prince couldn't help himself and ended up taking the Batman characters and made a Prince-style concept album that can easily exist as its own thing apart from the movie.

otm

i wish someone would make a batman movie that attempts to incarnate what the burton movie would have been had it used the prince records as its bible

Jack Nicholson as Vicki Vale.

It's funny, because all of these songs are sung "in character", and 'Scandalous' is meant to be "sung" by "Batman", and you watch the movie and you just can't reconcile the song with the character as played on-screen by Michael Keaton. It's like Prince has decided to cast himself as Batman on the record and then just ran with it.

also she later married david sylvian, right? this was not known to me until recently.

still married !

She also had two daughters, Ameera and Isobel, with English singer and musician David Sylvian, whom she married in 1992 and divorced twelve years later.

oh my bad heh

http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/21303846/sn/1538020043/name/n_a

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY_xsUpABiQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udVFCpg5OnU

I really don't understand why Prince fans hate 'The Arms of Orion' so much, I think it's a really beautiful song - really well-written, gorgeous melody and highly memorable. They can't all be funk jams! I still disagree with Tuomas and think 'Scandalous' is one of the highlights of the record, as good as anything he did in the '80s and one of my favourite Prince slow jams.

graffiti bridge? oh yes please prince take a bunch of killer outtakes from '86-'88 and rerecord most of them to sound way shittier and then release those versions, thanks

(of course he didn't rerecord "joy in repetition", oh hey "joy in repetition" is the best song on the album, what a shocker)

yeah, I don't really get the hate for "Orion". It's a nice Prince slowjam - on the cheezy side of Prince, sure, but it's part of his work from the start ! - and certainly not the worst song on the album.
"Scandalous" is clearly upthere with his best stuff. It could have been on any album since 1999 and not be out of place.

Have you hear the new "single" available on spotify for the remastered "Purple Rain" ?
It's called "Father's song".

I'm looking back through the Prince artist poll we had on here, and it's crazy that none of the highlights of this album placed.

I was on hiatus or something when that poll happened. I think I'd need "Electric Chair" on my ballot

Maybe it would be worth giving it its own poll...

Listened to both Lovesexy and this back-to-back tonight and man, Prince was still on fire in 1988-1989. I know the common line is that he started to go downhill after Sign o' the Times, but I genuinely put both Lovesexy and Batman up there with his finest work.

When I listen to Graffiti Bridge or Diamonds and Pearls I wonder what the fuck happened. While there's no denying the talents in the NPG, and Prince never truly lost his ability to write great songs, it feels like he seemingly lost his good judgement and ability to make consistently great decisions. His sense of quality control just seemed to go all to hell and the productions just aren't as interesting.

I relistened to this last week too. Tho I still think "Batdance" is no "The Line," the rest of the album has tons of greatness.

The bit where Prince is all like "ooh yeah ooh yeah I wanna bust that body" on 'Batdance' still tickles me. I quite like the fact that Prince took full advantage of the situation he was in and created this bizarre Batman concept album that had dick-all to do with the plot of the movie.

I mean, an artist can't just go ahead and create a bizarre concept album about Batman without, I'd guess, running into all sorts of legal problems - so it's quite something that Prince was in a position where he was allowed to make a record like Batman by presenting it as the soundtrack to the movie. Which it was, but in far more ways it wasn't.

The "Batdance" breakdown is an eternal jam that I will treasure until the day I die.

I agree that Lovesexy and Batman Sdtk are all peak-Prince afaic. There's no real drop-off in quality til he hits Graffiti Bridge, a strange mishmash of leftovers and guest spots and yeah his production ear and quality control instincts seem to go completely out the window. He subsequently occasionally still hit on decent singles and ideas here and there but everything just got so much sloppier. It's hard to say what really happened and why. Part of it is probably changing technology + R&B landscape and trying to figure out how to adapt to those and still be "Prince", and part of it is obviously the fight with Warner Brothers... maybe that all just drained him, idk.

I see I said all this a few months ago

I was about to type a rebuttal. See what I too said a few months ago.

Say what you will about the rest of the album. Anyone who hears anything other than top-tier Prince in either "Joy in Repetition" or "The Question of U" is a person whose ears I don't trust in Princely matters.

His production ear was still intact. "Joy in Repetition" and "We Can Funk" popped up on The Dream Factory and Crystal Ball in rather different forms.

"Joy in Repetition" is the one he didn't re-record (as noted upthread, I think?) and yeah it's great. "We Can Funk" is good too.

"Graffiti Bridge" is the point where he transitions to a hit-or-miss artist from unstoppable-genius artist

'Joy in Repetition' is a great one, yeah!

I reckon I could easily put together a couple of compilations of '90s Prince stuff that would be wall-to-wall excellent songwriting and well played by the musicians that feature, but the productions wouldn't be as interesting, and he put out a fair amount of filler in the '90s.

Even considering that he put out a couple of double albums in the '80s, his albums started to become overlong post-Batman (with the exception of the uncharacteristically short Chaos and Disorder) ... I can't help but think Love Symbol and even The Gold Experience could have done with tightening up a bit - this is before we get to Emancipation ...

xp It's an album earlier for me, but hey, we're within a calendar year on where the line falls.

Yeah, I'm with Shakey on this one, I'm afraid. Almost everything up until and including Batman is essential Prince, IMO. After that, I start cherry picking from the albums up until and including Emancipation, but then I fall off/lose interest etc.

There's good stuff on Musicology and 2131

Black Sweat song/video is incredible

there's even a couple decent songs on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic iirc but it's been awhile

That album (Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic) was a bit of a depressing listen for me, because it felt like the work of an immense talent that just didn't know what the fuck to do with himself anymore.

thing is - he has a ton of bangers on his last few albums. they work in a really loud club setting rather than an intimate listening situation.. you haven't lived until you've heard clouds or gold standard from "art official age" super loud in a club with a bunch of people dancing . they dont work so well in a car though.

Art official age is just soooo thin sounding though, I can't imagine feeling it bodily at any volume

yah i duno you're wrong heh

there's always at least one worthwhile song hiding out on any arbitrary non-instrumental prince release, e.g. "chelsea rodgers" on planet earth

and "Lion in Judah"!

Someone should do a POX of post-Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic Prince if there isn't one already. I'd be interested to see how different everyone's selections are.

As for Batman, I'm convinced at this stage that 'Scandalous' and 'The Arms of Orion' are two of the best things he's ever done, and 'The Future', 'Electric Chair', 'Vicki Waiting' and 'Lemon Crush' are all fucking awesome.

Yeah, every time I listen to this album, I like it a little more (I didn't like it at all when it was released but I guess I was too young).
Actually the Lovesexy/Black Album/Batman period might be my favourite now since I know these albums a little less than the previous ones.
And then he almost totally lost me in the 90s for many reasons... the change in his music is so huge between Batman and Diamonds & Pearls... and it's only 2 years !

Everyone go back to Come, that is the lost jewel of the 90s and has monster jams on it.

Really ? I've tried to give it a try a few days ago following this thread. I think I made it to the 3rd song or something...
What would be the best tracks on it for you ?

There were also some posts on a thread about Gold Experience being the gem of his 90s output but I haven't heard it yet.

The best songs on Come are "Letitgo", "Papa", the title track, and "Pheromone". Everything except "Orgasm" is IMO great.

The Gold Experience is also a fantastic album.

Yeah, if we're talking about the real last truly fantastic Prince album, you can't go any earlier than 1994.

xpost
thanks, I'll listen to these !

(I meant 1995, of course.)

eheh, AllMusicGuide's reviewer strongly disagrees about Come !
https://www.allmusic.com/album/come-mw0000118400

I should challenge him on Facebook over that review

I'm not as effusive about those two as Dan is but they are def the cream of the 90s crop

Yup

Yeah, I'd rank The Gold Experience and Come as the peak of his '90s material, although about 40 minutes of Love Symbol isn't too far behind. He could still write great songs, but the productions aren't as good. He became more focused on releasing more music instead of his best music.

Like, how much music did he put out in 1996!? And how much of that could have been left on the cutting room floor!?

a lot of it's just his changing tastes in synth and guitar patches IMO. He went hard for those 'epic' digital timbres starting then

and drums! drum sounds totally changed, massively.

I love a third of Emancipation. I'd rank the albums:

The Gold Experience
Graffiti Bridge
Emancipation
Love Symbol
Come
D&P
Chaos and Disorder

I don't disagree with that ranking except to swap Emancipation and Come.

It's not that technology and sounds changed. Classic Prince didn't much sound like contemporary pop and R&B -- those genres adapted to him.

What changed was Prince's waning curiosity in finding new sounds.

it would be interesting to hear an engineer's take on how his gear changed - samplers, drum patches, synths, etc. I think his interest in new sounds continued but the range of stuff available to him (as far as what was "new"/cutting edge) changed, and his eagerness to defy convention sonically also deteriorated. It was perfectly natural for him to not want to just use a LinnDrum forever, but what he replaced the LinnDrum with sounded like garbage.

Michael B was a solid drummer if no Sheila E. I didn't blame Prince for wanting a live drum sound again.

he wasn't a bad drummer, but Sheila's drums *sounded* better, they were tuned, mic'd, compressed, etc. differently. Prince still occasionally got decent drum sounds ("Get Off" is pretty banging) but in general that big booming 90s arena-rock drumkit sound was shit imo.

I'd rank the '90s stuff:

The Gold Experience
Come
Love Symbol
Emancipation
Chaos and Disorder
Graffiti Bridge
Diamonds and Pearls
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic

Makes a lot more sense to rank his '90s singles than his albums tbh.

The drums started to get very New Jack Swing-y after Batman... I sometimes wonder if Prince was ever worried that Jam & Lewis might eclipse him in some way.

with Janet? of course he did

during an Emancipation promo interview he specifically mentioned that he hoped the album would compete with J&L.

Apparently 'Space' was so close to being on The Gold Experience that it even had an NPG Ooperator segue recorded for it ("you have accessed the Space experience" etc.)

there's a lot of crossover between "come" and "the gold experience" - i think "endorphinmachine" was on an early lineup of "come"

both records suffer i think by being recorded at the height of his self-sabotage (also why "lovesexy" often gets consigned to "post-peak", which it obviously isn't). they're fine records of amazing songs put across in a self-consciously off-putting way.

I don't hear the self-sabotage in Lovesexy... a lot has been made of the Black Album but I really think that whole situation was as simple as Prince cancelling a project because it wasn't up to standard and replacing it with something superior. It's not like Prince hadn't done that before, just that Black Album got as far as being pressed and the other projects didn't.

yeah the drums sound is important in my dislike of his 90s output. also the lack of killer synth !
Listening to Batman I tried to imagine what it would sound like with his 90s sound and I think some of the tracks are not that far from the following albums.
As others have said : I wonder what made him change his sound so drastically circa 90-92.
Cos' Batman still sounds like a lot of his 80s output.

Listening to Lovesexy now and it's incredible to think that merely three years later he'd have gone from this dizzying slice of batshit genius to playing it straight on 'Cream' ... a song I like but it's like day and night.

I'm sure I've said this before but Batman is not just a better album than The Black Album, it's also darker.

"Bob George" aside, The Black Album ain't all that dark.

I'm sure I've said this before but Batman is not just a better album than The Black Album, it's also darker.

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican)

Just about every '90s album is.

"Bob George" aside, The Black Album ain't all that dark.

― iCloudius (cryptosicko), Wednesday, October 25, 2017 7:54 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree. It has this reputation (put about by Prince himself) of being a dark record when it's not. Same as Batman has this reputation of being throwaway or "commercial" when it's really neither.

received wisdom about Lovesexy - that it represented a big shift, was inferior, etc. - also inaccurate imo

Yup. If anything, Lovesexy is one of his most focused!

The Black Album might be my favourite of the 3... hmmm nah, I think I like Lovesexy and Black Album equally but in a different way.
The former being more "poppy" and the latter more "funky".
A kinda of fight between Anna Stesia and Cindy C. !

The presence of 'Dead On It' on The Black Album pretty much ensures it's his worst album of the '80s for me.

I don't hear the self-sabotage in Lovesexy... a lot has been made of the Black Album but I really think that whole situation was as simple as Prince cancelling a project because it wasn't up to standard and replacing it with something superior. It's not like Prince hadn't done that before, just that Black Album got as far as being pressed and the other projects didn't.

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican)

i was thinking of his insistence on indexing the entire cd as one track.

I'm sure I've said this before but Batman is not just a better album than The Black Album, it's also darker.

― Gholdfish Killah (Turrican)

...and that's _after_ he cut "dance with the devil" for being "too dark"!

But then you have "Le Grind" and "Cindy C." which are fantastic and pure fun !

Yeah, but then you have that 7 minute instrumental with that god-awful title which does very little and doesn't go anywhere during its entire runtime!

Keep bustin'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulOLYnOthIw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjY8HvpNu6o

This came up in the Graffiti Bridge thread the other day. I just put this on after listening to For You, and it really is a far more enjoyable album, so much that I have to say it's underrated. For You has so little of what made Prince PRINCE that if you remove the title track and "Soft and Wet," what's left is a competent R&B record that's so conventional it's kind of dull. Switched over to Batman and even as a cranked-out job-for-hire, it's loaded with Prince's personality. It may lack ambition, but it feels effortless in the best way.

(I should add that "The Arms of Orion" is a gaping hole of crap. Skip that shit or slot in "200 Balloons" instead.)

"The Future" slaps.

Not only ambition, it lacks craft. It sounds like he bashes it out in a few days. But yeah its enjoyable. Batdance is fun :) I'd prob have preferred it if Tim burton used 1999 and baby I'm a star like he planned before prince jumped on board. Dont imagine burton or Nicholson thought they got prince on his best day when they heard the soundtrack.

But yeah, it's a quickie throwaway like the black album. Which is cool, but dont pretend like it isn't :p I mean, half of love sexy sounds throwaway too!

I've seen posted elsewhere, but it's been said that The Black Album (and its replacement, Lovesexy) marked a shift where Prince became less interested in crafting tight, polished songs. So you definitely hear that continue with Batman. Anyway, it's never going to be a major work but it's on par with the Magical Mystery Tour double EP - a highly enjoyable trifle that's more fun than the movie it was made for.

Batman >> Lovesexy >>> Black Album

All of which >>> Diamonds and Pearls

Lemon crush is underrated.

xxpost Batman >> Lovesexy? Yikes!

id buy a super deluxe edition of the batman soundtrack.

I simply like more songs on Batman: "The Future," "Electric Chair," "Scandalous," for starters. And "Batdance" remains a glorius wtf moment, at once part of and adjacent to his catalog.

hey Jackie
let me put my 7 inch in the computer

id buy a longer version of the batdance vicki vale remix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5l4MW-yg_c

supposedly a remix with big daddy kane was comissioned too, but never released

Alfred - fair enough. I just think his songwriting and arranging struck some sort of weird, baroque vein on Lovesexy and it was dullsville, for the most part, from there.

Dullsville “afterwards”, I meant to write.

All his albums after SOTT until D&P were tossed off quickies. I'll take alphabet st, glam slam, Anna stesia and I wish u heaven over the best of batman though.

I love "Vicky Waiting" and "Electric Chair" is a great heavy funky track.

id buy a longer version of the batdance vicki vale remix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlBQxQkE-wE

200 balloons is a total, deliriously hammered out throwaway but fun.

Back in the day, I hated "Partyman" a lot. Today it sounds completely awesome. I think I just needed to get past the drums.

Ain't nothing but a muffin