Prince..... the exact point where it all started to go horribly wrong.

this of course makes that scenario unlikely http://www.denisematthews.com/homepage2.htm

the original Crystal Ball is better than the released verion, Emancipationis boring etc etc.

I'm with maria b. upthread, after Graffiti Bridge nothing really worthwhile. Prince live will still be incredible and he could still produce albums that are stunning, but I would need serious convincing that his 90s albums are of that much worth. Even Diamonds & Pearls which is a more solid album can't stand up to the older stuff. Gold was errible as was C&D.

arrr, must stop before start ranting

then the album went number one
the same day 'on both sides of the atlantic'.
the public eh ?

course the career turnaround is scheduled 2 kick in at
10.30 p.m. on sunday the 27th of june
at the glastonbury main stage.

i'm already excited !

_Emancipation_ songs that people seem to sleep on that I really, really love:

"Somebody's Somebody"
"I Can't Make You Love Me"
"Mr. Happy"
"Holy River"
"Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife"
"Slave"
"Human Body"
"Sleep Around"
"Da Da Da"

Is it really? Wow! What did that freak say? I never heard Rainbow Children.

no? then he ain't no witness.

Prince's decline began when hip hoppers began to sample in the late 1980s. Before then Prince had a monopoly on hard pop-funk with avant-garde textures, but hip hop made his big advantage available to all sorts of young kids with ears. This has enriched our collective culture but made Prince's job harder.

That is *so* OTM, Mr Miccio.

No recollection of anti-semitism, but Rainbow Children is deeply weird -- thus, pretty interesting.

-- Haikunym

No recollection of anti-semitism, but Rainbow Children is deeply weird -- thus, pretty interesting.

-- Naive Teen Idol

Hmm.. I wonder if Haikunym considers Christian beliefs antisemitic.

"Like a thief in the night
My Lord come and strike
Leave nothing but ashes 2 the left, dust 2 the right
Holocaust aside, many lived and died
But when all truth is told
Would u rather b dead or b sold?
Sold 2 the one who can now mate the displaced bloodline
with the white jailbait"

It's funny you should say that Tracer, because Around The World In A Day was actually billed as Prince's Sergeant Pepper in some quarters. I can't remember if Prince was one of those quarters.

not just chaki's post
but the concept of the thing:
rainbow children = good,

and the "banished ones"
who don't dig "the New Translation"
are the enemy

when he mentions them
background voices say "love, like
a rose in bloom" (wait...)

then: "family name"
runs down lists of surnames some
people got to keep:

"Rosenbloom" (get it?)
"Pearlman" and "Goldstruck" also;
now you catch my drift?

since that's all he says
implication clearly is:
"Holocaust? Big whoop!"

"Digital Garden"
made by the "Banished Ones" is
(sigh) the media

again with that shit?
Jew-run Media Satan =
Prince's view these days

sorry these haikus
are getting tedious but
know what I mean now?

i think he just ran out of gas, in the way that just about every pop/rock artist in history has eventually run out of gas. he had his freakishly fantastic seven-year run from dirty mind to sign o the times, with nearly an album every year, including two doubles. then he woke up one day and there were no songs left.

i've liked bits of almost every album since, from "diamonds and pearls" to the underrated "chaos and disorder" and beyond, but the difference between them and what came before is the difference between a master with a direct line to god and an above-average craftsman struggling to come up with a tune, with ever-diminishing returns.

i don't think he's got an abbey road left in him, but i'd love to hear him come up with a tattoo you before he goes.

Have to disagree with this. Up until recently, he's always had the same '80s Minnesota synth-funk sound and it really got old. It's not just hip-hop that overtook Prince; funk moved on too but he never really changed. HIm not working with anyone else other than subservient band members and old funk legends who are probably just grateful he's giving them a gig doesn't help. He should just hook up with the Neptunes, since they updated his sound for him. But his ego would never allow it.

Now at least he's moved on, albeit to a jazz fusion tip, which could be good and is sometimes great (like the awesome live version of Dorothy Parker on One Nite Alone) but more often perilously close to Lite FM territory (like the two recent download-only albums and tracks like Muse 2 the Pharoah). He just doesn't seem to have good taste in jazz.

Still there is more good stuff in the 90s than people realize. There are a lot of great tracks on Symbol, almost all of it really... Gold Experience is Purple Rain pt. 2... Bits of Rainbow Bridge (Family Name, Everlasting Now, etc) are seriously funky... and for me the Truth is up there with his very best; I'd probably put it in his top 5 albums (I love about 2/3 of Crystal Ball... some of his hardest funk is on there). I would like to buy the Emancipation revisionism but can't quite; it's one of those albums that only Prince can churn out where all the tracks sound as if they should be good but are actually mediocre, and there are so many of them that you can't figure out which ones actually are good, if any. (I can come up with about 6). See also Graffiti Bridge.

The only irredeemable dreck, really, is Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.

But I still wouldn't write him off. Even tossed-off stuff like One Nite Alone (the studio album) throws up a killer track like Avalanche.

this thread is convincing me that i should really check out his more recent stuff.

I remember shelling out $35 several years ago for a rare one-track CD form his site called "The War." 35 minutes of spoken word on the coming apocolypse and Prince's fears of the government putting a computer chip in his neck. That was the last somewhat interesting trip from O+> for me.

that was just prince being weird. the idea was to force people to listen to the album all the way through, instead of just listening to "anna stesia" or "alphabet st." the effect, intended or not, was to make it just a little bit harder for radio stations to play tracks from it.

Check out Sacrifice Of Victor, not the song, but the video, if you can. It's from the same period. An aftershow.

Maybe the Diamonds and Pearls/O+>/Gold era wasn't THAT bad... in terms of live shows anyway.

Okay, I'm remembering "Endorphinmachine" live on some cheesy VH1 fashion awards show several years ago... brightened my day.

and... yeah. 1+1+1=yawn.

it was so dominant at that time, but the pneumatic drums of new jack swing were a bad influence on Price and Michael

I know as a big fan the couplet "My name is Prince and I am funky/When it comes to funk I am a junkie" definitely gave me pause. I did like "Gett Off" a lot, and "Sexy MF," both the right kind of ridiculous.

Tony M is the laughable kind of ridiculous.

Prince was futuristic and innovative in many ways but he was also old fashioned, he was a product of the pre hip hop era, R&B club bands, to me at least it never felt like he was comfortable with hop hop despite his efforts, or as a listener it felt clunky and forced

I think Prince was a rockist maybe?

I didn't like anyone is this band but Prince and Michael Bland.

Diamonds and Pearls is a terrible song wtf

there's some gems on the album but apparently no one agrees on what they are lol

I think Prince was a rockist maybe?

He was a Funkist !

I would think Prince's confusion about how to integrate rap is p well covered territory. Prince's aesthetic - one of ambiguity, mystery, elasticity, sophistication - ran very much counter to hip hop's emphasis on authenticity, crude machismo, etc. They don't mesh well, the only common factor is the braggadocio.

Musically they share a lot of funk influences though.

You're being unfair to a lot of hip-hop released in 1990-1991 that was ambiguous,elastic, and sophisticated -- unless you mean that Prince misread or got hip-hop wrong

xpost

Yeah crude machismo is not really how I'd describe a lot of early 90s hiphop.

I don't know what Prince thought of De La or UMCs or Divine Styler or whoever, and yeah I bet he was inclined to misread it - it was a v different kind of "musicianship" than what he was schooled in.

it's also worth pointing out that I wasn't referring to hip-hop in 1990-1991, rap was over a decade old at that point and Prince's dabbling in it felt more like grudging respect not willingly given to something he had pretty much ignored wholesale for his entire career

I mean, I would think Prince's preconceptions about rap were formed pretty early on

Who's the crude macho ?

https://i.skyrock.net/7670/16037670/pics/460951091.jpg

ugh can we keep the MJ shit to the other thread

It's quite likely Prince wasn't that familiar with rap much at all, and to the extent he listened to any music other than his own it was probably just a few of his favorite acts and records. Sly, Joni or whomever. He didn't, at least back then, seem like the most attuned ear-to-the-ground guy. That could explain why, when he finally dipped into hip-hop, it was (pretty much literally) very much of the "My name is Prince and I'm hear to say ... " variety.

Like, the story of him hitting a Seger show while doing R&D for "Purple Rain," surely he knew about arena rock already, right? Who knows. Sometimes I wonder if he learned about Sheena Easton through her duet cover of Seger's "We Got Tonight."

there's some gems on the album but apparently no one agrees on what they are lol

Such is the conundrum with basically every Prince album after Sign o' the Times.

xpost to me, "here to say," gah.

I stopped caring pretty much around Prince's Tony M / GameBoyz era. Too slick, too calculated to try and please and he fell on his face more times than I wanted to hear. But COME is a great "minor" masterpiece IMHO -- the horn arrangement on the title track alone ups the horniness to another level ( I will also stan for the brilliance of Lovesexy (album) and its horn arrangements til the day I die). And when he would do lowkey little raps - like on the COME title track - I didn't mind it so much. "My Name Is Prince", though? Oy Vey.

I think he was probably pretty familiar with a lot of contempo rap. He signed Monie Love to Paisley Park and I doubt some label suit was behind getting J-Swift on remix duties here, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUHaLLQc1ew

“Here to stay” would work better if he said it in one of his cartoon voices, acknowledging the origin of the phrase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX_dgcSsu1Q

Which is of course what you were already getting at.

_Prince finally showed up at nearly 4 a.m., teasing the crowd with a fiery guitar solo and then decamping to the back of the room. _
Hahaha