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

Lovesexy doesn't go anywhere at all. Apart from "Alphabet St," the jams are undistinguished.

The tracks sound like the most boring parts of "Play in the Sunshine" and "Housequake" pasted together with indifferent singing atop.

well I'm sure having the entire album as a single track didn't help distinguish the songs from one another. but I hear hooks even where there's minimal structure. could've used Bob George on it tho lol

but ugh three tracks in to the symbol album and already all this terrible rapping + sampling is just SO MUCH WORSE

Cat is a better rapper than whoever in god's name he gets in the band on the symbol record.

Lovesexy is inferior to the Black Album (I saw the tour when he did the two together and it was awesome), and the Black Album does have its weak moments. But Alphabet Street is great--if it's an inferior version of "Kiss," it's a superior version of "Cream." And it does have some other nice moments. I've always loved the break in the title track when the whole band sings "This feeling's so good in every single way!" Also "I Wish U Heaven" is a great one. For me I would not say that the shark gets jumped here, but it's in neighboring waters.

You could also point out that this is the point where the 12" mixes start to nose dive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzHrQFl5JZ8&feature=related

always dug this video

and the 12" mix too!

Ooh. I never saw the video OR heard the 12" mix. I will have to czech it out. Thanks!

I love Lovesexy and think the first four songs especially are all amazing. I also love "When 2 R In Love" and "I Wish U Heaven"

yeah that's about how I rate it too. altho I mostly lol at the lyrics to When 2 R in Love... Prince is REALLY into taking baths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuOn1jC9ALc
^12" mix

I was listening to Lovesexy earlier this week and kind of marveling that the ILM 'biggest quality drop off from album to album' thread doesn't mention this from Sign O The Times once. "I Wish U Heaven" is the only song I really like (and even that I tend to imagine being done better as covered by someone else), "Dance On" is just barely almost cool but not quite, and "Alphabet St." is easily my least favorite of his 80s singles. this is really the point where his choice in drum machine sounds started to get ghastly, too.

Thanks for the 12" link -- not bad! Drums are nicer there than on the Lovesexy track.

it's the kind of "early sign of falling off" album that doesn't even seem much better when you compare later albums to it either, i prefer a lot of the 90s/00s flailing to Lovesexy. (xpost)

That's just insanity to me, I had a long car drive over Labor Day during which we played both Diamonds and Pearls and Love Symbol and both of those albums sound way, way, WAY more dated and incoherent to me than Lovesexy.

Then again, I also love Around The World In A Day and see Lovesxy as a spiritual successor to it.

i prefer a lot of the 90s/00s flailing to Lovesexy.

this seems insane to me. especially if yr complaining about his drum sounds! I can't think of a single album that's at all consistent after Lovesexy. maybe musicology or 3121.

xp

Diamonds and Pearls and Love Symbol and both of those albums sound way, way, WAY more dated and incoherent to me than Lovesexy.

yeah listening to these right now and man this is so OTM

those are not among my favs of the 90s/00s stuff but their highs are higher than Lovesexy's imo

there is NOTHING on Lovesexy as full-on embarrassing as "Jughead" or "Blue Light"

i didn't say the lows were higher

(then again I'm in the small minority that thinks "Cream" is super overrated)

there was a quote at the end of the Per Nilson book from Bobby Z about how he felt Prince basically lost interest in songwriting, which seems very apparent to me on this 90s stuff (and to a lesser extent Lovesexy and Batman). it's like he cranked out so much material and got used to such endless jamming he became unable or unwilling to focus on the nuts and bolts of how good songs are structured, how to edit things down. he just didn't care. even Get Off, for example, is really aimless. there's the drumloop and the one guitar/flute riff, but that's it - the rest is just various odds and ends thrown on top (some shitty rapping, oh here's a James Brown sample, the "let a woman be a woman and a man be a man" diva warble, etc) with no rhyme or reason. and that's one of his BETTER songs from the era.

in the past he was able to make that approach work because of the quality and inventiveness of the sounds he would draw on - songs that were super minimal and basic still worked because of the sonic details. but by the 90s he was following other people's shitty sonic choices, and it just sounds bad...

some dude otm.

I suppose on some conceptual level Lovesexy isnt as distasteful as Love Symbol, but damn if the latter doesn't boast more songs I care about (besides boasting more songs, period, which is why it gets a bum rap).

As far as Prince's excellent to great nineties albums, The Gold Experience and Emancipation have stronger ideas and sounds than Lovesexy or even ATWIAD.

I speak for myself when I aver that I'd rather be offended than bored.

I love "Blue Light," by the way.

i wonder how much of that might have been the influence of dance music and hip-hop, and prince going "oh, well i can do that shit"

xp to shakey

yeah one of Lovesexy's virtues is that it's one of the last times he had to fit an album onto one vinyl LP, but once his consistency rate went way down and arguably none of his albums were front-to-back classics anymore, the longer albums at least offer more buffet options for playlists and mixes

i wonder how much of that might have been the influence of dance music and hip-hop, and prince going "oh, well i can do that shit"

oh it's this – he was quite offended by the interest in rap.

yeah, and it shows in the material he churned out. it was beneath him. there are instances where people make great material despite their contempt for it, but Prince is not one of them.

I like The Gold Experience and Emancipation as much as I like Lovesexy.

(Come is better than all three tho.)

otoh what excuse is there for Diamonds and Pearls, which is just execrable as a ballad. recently watched a clip of him performing this on the Grammys and he looks so fucking bored, the band looks awful, the playing is so limp.

xp

it's funny - you could say he burned out, and yet this burnout was not accompanied by a decrease in material, he still kept cranking it out.

According to Possessed, Prince wanted to woo his R&B audience back.

yes Come is the joint. if anything THAT is the only time he really sounded in step with '90s R&B.

I'll agree with that.

Ditto Come. A strange album because it was almost as if he wanted to remind you that he still had it in him, but it was also obvious that he would never be so disciplined again. I guess the epitaphs on the cover are tip off.

it just bums me out how even the songs that would otherwise be fine (Willing and Able, for ex.) or at least moderately enjoyable on Diamonds and Pearls songs are literally ruined by the rapping. it's the audio equivalent of a chef preparing a dessert for you and then, upon hearing that you are fond of chocolate pudding, serves you a lump of shit. and then complains when you say you don't like it.

it's the audio equivalent of a chef preparing a dessert for you and then, upon hearing that you are fond of chocolate pudding, serves you a lump of shit.

That is exactly what we were all thinking.

thing is even if Prince had grabbed like the greatest rappers of the era it still probably would've turned out awkward at best, it was just a lose/lose proposition for him to engage with hip hop imo

yeah, he shouldn't have bothered

When was the last time Prince directly collaborated with an already pedigreed artist whose pedigree wasn't directly tied to Prince himself? I think his egomaniacal need to find new talent and sleep with them if they're female would keep him from working with known non-facepalm rappers.

yeah i mean he's worked with a few heroes and predecessors, but aside from Mavis Staples it was usually just little one-off things, and very little stuff with anyone you'd consider a contemporary or peer (or near-misses like walking out on the MJ collaboration). i think that's as much about him being a control freak as an egomaniac, though, he doesn't want to show up and be part of a duet or ensemble for a song he didn't even write.

how do Larry Graham and Doug E. Fresh fit in here

or Maceo Parker

larry graham and maceo parker are definitely heroes that he came up listening to

yeah - that was more in response to dan than some dude

some dude's OTM tho about Prince restricting himself to situations where he's firmly in control. and limiting himself to one-offs. he's not a collaborative guy, really.

yeah Wendy & Lisa might be the only really really extensive truly collaborative relationship he's had

lol I didn't even know about Doug E. Fresh, some Prince fan I am

Maceo and Larry are givens but those collaborations happened several years after Diamonds and Pearls (and actually, same with Doug E Fresh now that I look it up), plus with Larry at least I don't know how much of that was tied to the conversion to being a Jehovah's Witness.