errant said:

This contention that ATWIAD was PR light or some sort of sequel is patently rediculous.just because he utilized the Lin drum and songs like the ladder and temptation were similar to purple rain and darling niki does not make it some sort of continuation.The title track opens the album entirely on a different tone songs like Condition of the heart give it a melecholy sense while songs like Tamborine and Paisley park were very avante garde for a huge pop act like Prince circa 1985.There is no doubt that Prince was very wary of becoming the next Peter Framton and wanted to cultivate die hard fans but he went tangential before he should have.and of course the Parade and UTCM debacle magnified his blunder.

I am glad all of this happened when I was really too young to notice or care. Looking back at it now, it seems the albums are a bit different. ATWIAD was probably rushed out too soon and the sound may have been too challenging for casual 80s Prince fans.

The main faults with the album being

1. Only 9 months from Purple Rain, people were still suffering from a Prince overload, the movie, album and tour and 5 singles, a 1 year break would have helped.

2. The quality of the album is good, but its not as good as the 2 albums before and the 2 albums after, a hole in the middle, this is because it is rushed.

3. Its nowhere near as memorable as Purple Rain or Parade which followed it.

4. The music (As great as it is) was very challenging, the casual 80s fan would just switch off, hence the 80% drop in sales. All those instruments and strange guitar solos, great to us, strange to Tiffany Casuelle the standard 14 year 80s music fan.

5. Prince himself tried to kill it, by originally not wanting to release any singles or have any promotion of it, I mean really why did he do this quirky shit.

6. 1985 in general was a shit of a year for Prince, the National Enquirer story (Marilyn Monroe shrine, bodyguards, dogs with voiceboxes cut out) and the famous We are the World project and the photographer getting in his car, plus his poncy appearance at the Brit awards, may have had a few people think "Oh this guy is just a plonker".

7. 1985 was the year of fluffy pop, Madonna and Phil Collins type rock.

I don't think the album was too psychodelic (Psychedelic?) as you put it, it was just a great album that appealed more to hardcore Prince fans, rather Joe and Josephine public as well, like Purple Rain did.

But I agree the drop from Purple Rain to ATWAID was very sudden and severe and kind of like what happened to Alanis Morrisette after Thank You failed to be the blockbuster after Jagged Little Pill.

dawnboy999 said:

errant said:

don't believe the hype. ATWIAD is Purple Rain Mark II, just with fewer tight, satisfying tunes.

This contention that ATWIAD was PR light or some sort of sequel is patently rediculous.just because he utilized the Lin drum and songs like the ladder and temptation were similar to purple rain and darling niki does not make it some sort of continuation.The title track opens the album entirely on a different tone songs like Condition of the heart give it a melecholy sense while songs like Tamborine and Paisley park were very avante garde for a huge pop act like Prince circa 1985.There is no doubt that Prince was very wary of becoming the next Peter Framton and wanted to cultivate die hard fans but he went tangential before he should have.and of course the Parade and UTCM debacle magnified his blunder.

it's the same core. it's just dressed up in frillier clothing to disguise the fact that he picked the wrong songs that he was working on at the time to put on the album.

[Edited 6/19/12 21:26pm]

Adorecream said:

The difference is that Prince had awesome songs that he could have compiled into a classic gem of an album.Alanis Morrisette who I was a huge fan of did not this notion that it's good he didn't release another poppy fluff album I strongly disagree with.Songs like Electric Intercourse and She's always in my hair have a depth few pop songs can match and he could have mixed up the vibe of the album with great song like G spot and Dance electric.It seems that Prince fell into the foolish trap of taking his golden period for granted by releasing songs like Erotic city and Another Lonely christmas as B sides when these were better than any album track he subsequently released.

errant said:

No way.Entirely different dynamic and sequential rhythm.Your way off.

SoulAlive said:

PurpleMusiq8 said:

Me personally, I hate it. With the exception of America and Tamborine, I never listen to it, and I think the last time I even listened to those songs was like a year or 2 ago. I don't know how people can say that ATWIAD and PR are the same, or even similar, when they're clearly not. Sure, they both have linn drums, but the overall feel, tone was completey different. ATWIAD is a weird, quirky, totally pschadelic experimental album that sounds like you're taking a trip through India and back in the 60's, and PR is a fucking straight-forward commercial rock album that's full of great guitar solos and classic sing-a-long songs. They're completely different. PR is for everyone, mainstream, larger than life, ATWIAD was for the fans, and easily forgettable, or at least that's my take on it. ATWIAD reminds me a lot of the Beatles, and I absolutely hate the Beatles, so I think that's the big reason I never cared for it at all.

But, to keep to the general point of the thread, as much as I think it was a big mistake to release it right after the huge success of PR, like the poster above me said, I think it was necessary in the overall picture of Prince's career because I don't think he would have been able to make albums like Parade and SOTT without it. I think maybe it made that transition a little easier.

I think Prince should have eased into different styles...slowly.ATWIAD was such a departure from his earlier work and he alienated alot of people with that record.Parade was an even bigger departure.Experimenting is a good thing but if you do it too soon,you run the risk of losing alof of listeners in the process.I think he abandoned his "classic sound" too soon.That's why copycat bands like Ready For The World were so popular during this era.These guys were giving folks their version of the Minneapolis Sound that Prince had walked away from.I'm saying he should have done maybe two more albums with that sound,and then gradually moved on to the horns,psychedelica and orchestra sounds that we heard on ATWIAD and Parade.If he had done this,he may have held on to the mainstream Purple Rain audience,a little longer.Of course,we all know that Prince didn't care about all that,lol.

I've always said that he should have milked his signature sound up until around 1990 when a style change in music by everyone as a whole occurred. At that time, albums like "Around The World In A Day", "Parade", "Sign O The Times", and "Lovesexy" would have been perfect during the 1990s. They certainly would have sounded better than everyone else's albums in the 1990s and they also would have sounded much better than Prince's own 1990s albums that he released. Plus we would have got five more years of that hard ass kicking signature sound of his during the 1980s. Albums with his signature sound would have been huge sellers in the late 1980s.

novabrkr said:

I'm really glad that he did ATWIAD and Parade at the time. They allowed him to skip the really awful production trends of the mid-80s. After Purple Rain he started using many of the same keyboards that dominated the sound at the time (DX7, Fairlight samplers etc.), but he figured out an alternative and a lot cooler way to use them.

Compare ATWIAD and Parade to the bullshit that dominated the charts at the time - or to what his "rivals" like Rick James were doing - and you'll really start to appreciate those two albums.

Rick was doing much weaker stuff during that era. He stopped being himself and tried to copy Prince.

SoulAlive said:

imago said:

I don't think ATWIAD was nearly as strange as PARADE or TRC.

HELL, I don't even think it's nearly as strange as COME.

But what really made it different to all the kids in school who heard it (I'm talking 6th and 7th graders here), is that it was very SLOW compared to Purple Rain. I mean, he slowed EVERYTHING down a notch. Paisley park has an appropriate walk-in-the-park feel, Condition of the Heart is absolutely down tempo, The Ladder is far more gospelly than Purple Rain, etc. The kids in my school weren't tripping on how strange it was--they were bored by how slow the album felt.

This is so true! I was in high school when ATWIAD came out.People were shocked when they first heard this album! People were saying "Where is the funk?? I can't dance to this!".ATWIAD is a very laidback album but in 1985,people wanted to MOVE! They wanted beats.

The thing is, the majority of his audience back then was people in their teens and 20s. Prince has his own sound but he also didn't stray too far from the overall current sound of the era so he still fit in. The thing that made him stand out so much and be a trendsetter in the R&B world is because he had a futuristic new wave sound in his funk that a lot of people didn't start doing until he did. Even though it wasn't the typical funk, it was still relatable because everyone that listened to R&B was still familiar with new wave from the music video shows like "Friday Night Videos", "Night Tracks", etc. Remember, BET was very rare in those days and hardly anyone had it so it was either the rock video shows or nothing.

But "Around In The World In A Day" didn't sound like anything in America. It sounded like something from India or somewhere and every black person I knew was like "What in the fuck is this". And then with the next album where it sounded like France, people were really like "What in THE hell". And it wasn't done in a way like Twilight 22 or Egyptian Lover was making foreign sounds. When Egyptian Lover did it, it kinda made you feel like you were in Egypt but in the future which seemed very hip. When Prince did it, it felt kinda like the traditional sounds of those countries (which people considered "stuffy"....remember, these are teens and folks in their 20s at the time) so it felt totally unrelatable to them. Every black person I knew at the time dropped Prince except for one. And the white kids, well that was very simple with them. It wasn't another "Purple Rain" or "Little Red Corvette" so they just moved on instantly. Most of them were new fans anyway so they were like...."Oh well".

But I've been listening to those late 1980s albums a lot in the last few months. They are some absolutely wonderful albums and definately show the genius of Prince probably moreso than his earlier albums which I love the most. And I'm absolutely loving that India and Paris, France vibe now and also that retro vibe. But I'm listening as a 44 year old man now whose tastes have grown and are much more diverse than they used to be. Also, I'm living in an era now where there are no other good artists to distract me when back then there were plenty of others. But no matter how much I love those albums, I still say it was a mistake that he changed his style that early and I don't think he ever fully recovered from it because if I mention Prince to people now, they remember damn near everything from those earlier albums but only remember certain songs after "Purple Rain" such as "Kiss", "Adore", "Raspberry Beret", etc. but not albums in their entirety like they used to remember, mainly because they stopped buying them during that era.

Adorecream said:

I am glad all of this happened when I was really too young to notice or care. Looking back at it now, it seems the albums are a bit different. ATWIAD was probably rushed out too soon and the sound may have been too challenging for casual 80s Prince fans.

The main faults with the album being

1. Only 9 months from Purple Rain, people were still suffering from a Prince overload, the movie, album and tour and 5 singles, a 1 year break would have helped.

That's the way things are done now. That's not the way things were done back then. Back then, everyone released an album a year with the exception of Michael Jackson, and even Michael recorded albums with his brothers inbetween his albums during that time until "Thriller" blew up in late 1982 and spilled over into 1983. When Prince didn't have an album out in 1983, a lot of folks thought he had just disappeared and was wondering if he had quit or something. Everyone else was continuing business as usual with an album a year. Sometimes folks even had two albums in one year back then.

2. The quality of the album is good, but its not as good as the 2 albums before and the 2 albums after, a hole in the middle, this is because it is rushed.

3. Its nowhere near as memorable as Purple Rain or Parade which followed it.

4. The music (As great as it is) was very challenging, the casual 80s fan would just switch off, hence the 80% drop in sales. All those instruments and strange guitar solos, great to us, strange to Tiffany Casuelle the standard 14 year 80s music fan.

5. Prince himself tried to kill it, by originally not wanting to release any singles or have any promotion of it, I mean really why did he do this quirky shit.

I don't think Prince was trying to kill it at all. I think he was being very smart and was trying to trick people into buying the album without hearing it first. Even back then, Prince had fans that bought his albums either the day of it's release or the following weekend. With "Purple Rain" being so huge at the time, he may have been predicting even more to instantly buy it since he was so hot at the time. A lead single like he had always done would have been a warning to them that this album was going to be nothing at all like they were used to hearing from him. Once some people bought it, they warned their friends and once radio started playing some tracks, that was another warning so sales dropped. He probably hoped they would buy it and accept the style change but was being careful and still wanted their money by tricking them without a warning lead single. Folks were hip to that with the next album but Prince had a different trick up his sleeve. He released a lead single "Kiss" which made them think the "Old Prince" was back and then when they got the album, the rest of it was nothing whatseover like the single. He even had a third trick up his sleeve before "Sign O The Times" was released. He announced that he had fired The Revolution and was going back to doing everything himself like he used to do. A lot of folks had blamed The Revolution for influencing his style change, especially Lisa and Wendy, and were glad to hear they were gone. But folks were more cautious this time because they had already been burned twice.

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[Edited 6/19/12 23:54pm]

What is too soon or too late in relation too? Success is more than album sales and anything that sells in the millions can hardly be judged a failure. Imagine that many people handing over thier cash because they want your art. Wow! If it's income, I still don't see Prince wanting for anything. Brother has cash.

I think after PR, Prince had his bank accounts in order such that he could basically do whatever he liked and he choose to do ATWIAD.

As for other songs from that era he could have put on a folow up to PR, they are surely great songs but great songs don't always mean a great album. They can just become a compilation of great songs. I think ATWIAD was his first real album, where every song was delivered in the context of every other song.

And it contains my 2 favourite vocal performances

Soul...I agree with you.."The Dance Electric" would have been a cool idea. All those outtakes plus the songs like "17 Days", "Erotic City"(songs that SHOULD have been on the "P.R." soundtrack) and "She's Always In My Hair" would have worked.

He could have kept the masses happy in 1985 and then released the "Parade" funk in 1986.