If Tracks Are Good, Let's Get 2 Pollin - PRINCE TRACKS POLL RESULTS

Do it. This poll has already made me a bigger fan.

UK hits which didn't make the 50:

2 Batdance
7 Thieves In The Temple
7 My Name Is Prince
10 Gold
11 Girls And Boys
11 Betcha By Golly Wow
14 Partyman
14 Peach
18 Paisley Park (although the B-side made it)
19 The Holy River
20 Eye Hate U
24 I Wish U Heaven
25 Diamonds & Pearls
26 New Power Generation
27 The Arms Of Orion
28 Thunder
29 Glam Slam
30 Letitgo
36 Anotherloverholenyohead
36 Dinner With Delores

Many thanks for that Spotify link DL! About 3 hours in and so far I realise I haven't listen to 'conroversy' anything like enough in my life, also had never heard 'sometime in snows in april' which is excellent

Yeah, Controversy gets better every time I hear it.

i'll say it again...cos he hasn't released a truly decent album in nearly 25 years he really is in danger of being forgotten as possibly the greatest musician of the last fifty years...that 78-88 period is unbelevable...as well as all the singles,albums and b sides there's all the stuff that was unrealeased and given away to other artists...I still cant get my head round how he did it and toured excessively at the same time and made films and slept ate and...well maybe he didnt do a poo for 15 years...thats maybe why he got a little kranky...

^^^^
this

except of course for the truly decent or better albums he's released in the past 25 years, which would include:

Sign O' The Times
Lovesexy
Diamonds and Pearls
Love Symbol
Come
Chaos and Disorder
Emancipation
Crystal Ball
The Rainbow Children
Musicology
3121
Planet Earth

"truly decent" is not a particularly high bar to get over!

he really is in danger of being forgotten as possibly the greatest musician of the last fifty years.

no offense but no one has forgotten.

4 of his last 5 albums were top 5 debuts, one of which (3121, which also went gold) was #1 (Musicology peaked at #3 but went double-platinum in the US)

or, what Alfred said

Prince is one of the few musicians of the last thirty years whose catalogue is vast enough that my students can name at least four songs they love.

I do believe that a lot of the kinderlach seem to know Diamonds And Pearls period on wards and forget about the pre purple rain stuff...Ok let's say almost 25 years then but no matter your protestations and I know there are great things post 88 but you can't tell me 'Chaos And Disorder' is very good...I'll listen to it tonight just to make sure...

I don't expect classic Prince albums anymore, I guess...? It's not a big deal. No one could continue his rate of excellence. "Very good" is enough.

no one is forgetting prince anytime soon, you can rest easy

he murdered the super bowl halftime show to universal acclaim like three years ago or something

I think I always knew, but wasn't conscious of until just now, when someone called "When You Were Mine" an "indie" choice, that the chords and guitar riff were lifted for the Replacements' "Kiss Me on the Bus."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDH6W-bU8wo

I don't like Chaos and Disorder all that much either, but I wouldn't say it was worse than "actually decent"

wow i sure would

and yay i am an idiot and totally missed voting in this

tbf i would have just been stupidly voting for gold album and first NPG album shit that had no chance of placing so

I like "Dinner With Dolores" and "Dig U Better Dead" too much to write off the album entirely.

actually shit i always forget that dig u better dead is on there! that song is ok!

i think i was just so awash w/ prince new stuff at the time and knew the whole supposed ok you want another album here is all the crap i dont give a shit about rumors that it might have tainted my opinions

my #1 would have probably been "count the days"/"return of the bump squad"/"horny toad". or "billie jack bitch" maybe.

when u were mine is fucking indestructible. the cyndi lauper cover is (of course) quite beautiful as well, maybe even more beautiful.

IIRC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbzxA-5OfWc

i thought chaos and disorder actually WAS a "leftovers" album while come was actually a "real" album that prince advertised as a "leftovers" album to spite warner bros.

or maybe i'm thinking of old friends 4 sale (=worst prince album?)

i thought chaos and disorder actually WAS a "leftovers" album while come was actually a "real" album that prince advertised as a "leftovers" album to spite warner bros.

correct! chaos is the record that completed his contract with warner bros. and is basically stuff from the vault

prince made come and gold experience at the same time (they contain basically every song in glam slam ulysses between the two of them) and wanted them released simultaneously but warner bros. wasn't having that

damn i fuck with that lauper cover heavy

cannot parse that sentence

see what the song is doing to him?

you can hardly blame warners, really -- i think there sense that a glut of prince albums would bring his stock down was basically correct.

prince in not having best commercial instincts shocker.

there = their

I don't blame Warners much at all!

well, I do for this: did the record company really expect to recoup their advance even knowing that no album released after PR sold more than a couple million copies?

Diamonds and Pearls is the only big hit.

how much was the advance? when was the deal made?

late 80s/early 90s rife with ridiculous deals ... didn't motley crue have some crazy multi-album deal worth millions? even though their stock was clearly plunging?

music industry flush w/ cash around that time. couldn't spend it fast enough.

/nostalgia

Can't remember if I said this earlier, but thanks for the work on this one, Jamie!

When You Were Mine is a great song. Probably in my top 30 or so. Not my favourite on that album though.

I still can't really work out the commercial drop off from PR onwards up to about Batman, esp. in the US. 14 million (now 20 and counting) for PR, to what, 2 or 3 million for ATWIAD and Parade (as of 2011) and what, a couple mil for SOTT and about 1 million for Lovesexy in the US? He was having top 10 hits, a massive iconic 'name', part of the 'big three' etc etc. Just too much material in too short a time? Moving on when the last album was gaining momentum? If there were no records between PR and SOTT, would the latter have sold at least 10 million? People say that the hugeness of PR was in fact the anomaly, but why? It's Prince for goodness sake. Everyone knew him.

Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Springsteen never surpassed the success of their single disc diamond-certified albums either!

I was one of I'm sure millions of teenage Purple Rain fans who listened to a friend's copy of ATWIAD and was disappointed: That kind of break in momentum is hard to come back from. And you can't underestimate the shifts in taste toward hip hop that left Prince looking out of touch even as he was making brilliant music: Steve Perry broke down the racial and sexual politics of it well at the time, but it was more than that--Prince was just not at the center of musical innovation by '88, though I remember buying The Black Album and Nation of Millions at the same time.

Batman and Around the World in a Day both went double platinum, by the way. What's strange to me is that Sign 'O' the Times "only" went platinum, despite spawning three top 10 hits and having massive critical approval. Probably just a case of too much product in a relatively short period of time, or maybe a higher price tag as it was a double album. From ATWIAD through what I'll call Love Symbol in 1992, though, his only real flops were Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge, though each spawned a top 10 single. I don't think the real dropoff occurred until the mid-90s - Prince sold a lot of records after Purple Rain, but those sales were spread out over a bunch of minor hit albums rather than a small handful of blockbusters.

+ it's a double album, so it's sort of like it didn't even go platinum at all

Pretty sure it was certified before the RIAA started counting double albums twice. So it sold (or shipped) at least a million copies. Just checked the RIAA website, actually - yup, it actually went platinum a few months after it was released in 1987.

Sales often measure buyers' reactions to the previous album: I can't imagine Lovesexy being released as a single track on CD endeared him to anyone.

Actually, Lovesexy came after SOTT, in 1988. The follow-up to Lovesexy was Batman, his biggest seller in years.

Not sure how many actually bought Lovesexy on CD, as opposed to vinyl c. '88.

I know SOTT didn't follow Lovesexy, and I'm theorizing off the cuff more generally about sales--I guess Batman might prove that idea wrong, but it's a cumulative thing, inevitably not very provable. Either way, Batman never struck me as a Prince revival.

And you're right about the CD thing, to me it just registered as one more pointless barrier to Prince love.

Batman and Around the World in a Day both went double platinum, by the way. What's strange to me is that Sign 'O' the Times "only" went platinum, despite spawning three top 10 hits and having massive critical approval

I read in a Billboard published late '87 or early '88 which praised SOTT for being a "sleeper hit" because it remained on the charts longer than ATWIAD and Parade and boasted three top ten singles. I thought, "Wow! How things have changed since 1984."