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

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."

I get the sense that, in comparison to Madonna or Michael or Bruce, Prince was just too eccentric for a lot of people, and that might be a big part of the reason he's sold fewer records than his superstar peers (of course Michael was eccentric, but in a distinctly pop, pan-humanist sort of way). Since I was born in late '82 and barely aware of his importance until about 1994, I can't really verify this firsthand - but I know that as a kid Madonna and MJ were on my cultural radar long before Prince, and I would be surprised if my experience was entirely atypical.

What's more, Prince cultivates the rarefied air of a vanguard artist, whereas Michael and Madonna (almost) always shot for the pop universal, even when they courted controversy/scorn/ridicule. Prince has certainly continued to make something out of his own mystique, but after Purple Rain he never made such a conscious effort to build or maintain his celebrity, excepting the Musicology comeback in 2004.

after Purple Rain he never made such a conscious effort to build or maintain his celebrity

what about D&P?

That was an obvious pop move, but was it accompanied by a media blitz approaching those for, say, Like a Prayer or Dangerous? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way - my only exposure to Prince at the time was Batman, whereas Madonna and Michael were already pretty familiar by 1991.

i dont think we are likely to ever see a media blitz that approaches purple rain, but thats because it was a self-contained one. i mean dangerous and like a prayer didnt have $80 million grossing films promoting them so

LAP did boast a Pepsi commercial tie-in which was one of the canniest moves of her career.

and yeah obv other film soundtracks have done exceedingly well but they arent as completely tied to the product as purple rain (eh i mean maybe the bodyguard but not in the same way) xpost

i don't think we can think about batman as just another album in the arc of prince's career -- it was an integral part of a massive marketing juggernaut. i bought it because it was a "batman" album, not because it was a prince album -- and i imagine many others did the same. so the sales of that album are sort of anomalous in terms of prince's post-PR career.

to change the subject somewhat, one thing i find really weird and kind of sad is that because of the unusual distribution prince arranges for his new records these days (he makes/packages an album, then contracts with a major to distribute it, making no long-term deals) and because of paisley park's general flakiness, some of prince's most popular recent albums are already out of print. that doesn't mean you can't buy them for $0.50 on amazon or whatever, but they aren't going to be in the targets and best buys of this world. more than ever i guess prince--even more than most artists--seems to view albums as teasers for his renumerative tours.

LAP did boast a Pepsi commercial tie-in which was one of the canniest moves of her career.

Groan.

Aside from (very) current major releases and proven catalogue sellers (which for Prince includes only Purple Rain, maybe 1999, and a couple best-ofs), the Targets and Best Buys of this world don't stock a lot of CDs by anybody, so the fact that Prince's new releases are disappearing from their shelves is really no great loss. Anybody who cares already knows what to do.