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

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.

I think with Larry the music collab came first, then the conversion...?

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

this also very OTM from everything I've read

Maceo and Larry are givens but those collaborations happened several years after Diamonds and Pearls

if we're talking pre-D&P yeah he wasn't interested in collaborating with anybody he didn't have control over

he did kick MJ's ass at ping pong tho

lovesexy is awesome; wtf @ you guys

welcome to ILX, Brad!

i think i said in the voting thread that i started listening to come because of all the prince action on ilx, and that record rules too, glad everyone can agree

shakey's whole revive post outlined how little the world at large thinks of Lovesexy, don't act like it's just people here

the world at large aren't music fanatics who pour over the minutiae of an artist's catalog, so yeah it's true that the most people don't think very much about Lovesexy

everyone who does should love it, tho, because it owns

i love it because i found a jukebox at a shitty college bar that would do the whole album for one play. i've always meant to pop back in and just ruin everyone's selections for an hour.

you may recall that this thread is the result of music fanatics pouring over the minutiae of Prince's catalog and deciding that the single was the only thing from Lovesexy worth holding up as one of his 50 best songs.

lol 'pore over' i repeated your typo, now i really don't want to get any mental images of pouring anything over Prince's anything

re: collaborations, I totally forgot about this:

In 1989, Prince appeared on Madonna's studio album Like a Prayer, co-writing and singing the duet "Love Song" and playing electric guitar (uncredited) on the songs "Like a Prayer", "Keep It Together", and "Act of Contrition".

WAHT prince plays guitar on "like a prayer"!?!?

I didn't even notice that typo

I'd be more embarrassed had I not read that Zelda review, I don't think anything I am capable of writing could be as embarrassing as that

also I didn't know that re: Like A Prayer, wau

well it is wikipedia so I dunno, grain of salt

No, it sounds right. That guitar tone sounds an awful lot like his.

there are references to Madonna confirming this in an interview floating around the internet, but I can't find the original source

read a lot of the prince books and none of them mention that...?

i found a convo on prince.org that makes it sound like Prince played on a remix of "Like A Prayer" but not the album version and also has an unreleased cover of it

If you want to hear Prince on the song Like A Prayer... you need to get ahold of the "Remixed Prayers" CD. The 12" Club Version has him on Keyboards & Guitar, and the 12" Extended Mix has him on Guitar, including the solo that they edited out of the LP Version. Act of Contrition is mainly made up of backwards parts of the Club Version. There is also a promo mix out there called "Dub Beats" which has instrumentation from Prince, and a sample from Bob George.