It all seems a bit too cultish.....the anonymous mods...the pre selected avatars.....the overwhelming Prince as god mentality....plus some of the images in the "rooms" (a concept that would've worked better on an enhaced cd in the mid 90's, rather than the basis of the entire official fansite) are kind of creepy (WTF is up w/ the bird looking like its gonna scratch somebody's eyes out?) Anyone else w/ me on this?

AprilMichelle said:

a
Cult
is
a
Cult

PANDURITO said:

lol far from it....that site is rather odd.....but i think you took it a lot more seriously than i meant it....i don't think there is an actual cult of people drinking the overpriced purple kool aid i just meant that the whole site is rather strange...and a bit disappointing....a nearly complete waste of $25 (other than the possibility of future concert tickets and some of the downloads) I was expecting something focused on music.....
[This message was edited Tue Aug 3 1:37:03 2004 by AprilMichelle]

April, you're FAAAAAR from the only one feeling this.

The site is antiseptic, sterile and creepy, IMO. It actually starts to take away from the enjoyment of the music after a little while.

Real people don't go there its crap. WE only join fot the concert tickets and to get Music, there are no decent pictures or video clips and if there are they are SLOW to update.

And the discussions are to be AVOIDED.

People only go there cause they think they can get close to Prince, like his current wife if you no what I mean!

too funny! i just came from that site and i was about to start a thread about how scary the npgmc is! i swear that place is designed to keep the fammy fams in check, lol! if you don't claim prince as your personal lord and savior, you gon' get a whole lotta shit from peeps, lol! i try to get into the site every now and then and i just can't. all of the threads turn into "prince is the greatest human that ever walked the face of the earth...next to larry graham (cuz prince would like that)."

yeah, the 25 ducats is well spent thanks to concert tickets. outside of that there just isn't much being offered. its a far cry from something like bowienet where there are contests, tour diary entries, trivia about the tour...fun stuff that isn't all devotional and shit.

I think there's a very thick layer of cheese and BS and sycophantic crapola, but if you have the patience to spelunk under that, you can find a salvageable morsel or two at the Club. I've met a few cool folks over there who don't seem to hang out over here, and oddly enough they seem quite normal.

I'd love it if they would revamp the look of the club and get rid of the Myst motif and move on from those sub-Funkadelic NPG People doodles - the Musicology store looks great with the faders and the almost-kinda-pseudo-80s-retro look, and I can even deal with the look of the Glam Slam entrance and the vault rooms...how cool would it be, though, if the overall feel of the site were that of a different album theme for each "room"? A peach & black SOTT room, a black and white (with red accents) Parade room, a multicolored ATWIAD room, a magenta and baby blue Lovesexy room, etc. etc. etc....and how fabulous would it be if all the avatars were album and single covers? Talk about a THEME for a MUSIC CLUB.

Anxiety said:

I like it.....I LIKE IT!

The thing I dislike about the club is that it is so static. They very rarely change anything. The Reflection room is pretty much a total waste. Just about everyone has all of those songs. The Glam Slam room is a shade better than Reflection but it's still pretty crappy. Cyberclips? Will it ever reopen? Then you have the extremely overpriced merchandise. Coupled with what I think is expensive shipping. I think the biggest problem is the lack of music. I'm hardly the first person to make this observation but I think they could easily offer more music (it is the NPG MUSIC club.) As long as we have the org I don't mind how fanatical the forum over there is but would it kill Prince to pump a few more dollars into his official site?

Anxiety said:

Yeah, but they would actually have to do a little work for that, and in their eyes most of the members have already paid the $25, so what incentive do they have? In my experience, the only time there has been any kind of significant update on the site is right before they're selling something - otherwise, it's quite clear they could care less.

I mean, the "writings" in the Knowledge Hall are over 5 years old, some of them. Is there really nothing else in the last FIVE FUCKING YEARS that Prince and/or the NPGMC thinks that it's members might want to read about? I mean, I bet they could even find something that has to do with music if they tried hard enough!!!

The look of the club is totally lifted from old-school "quest" games like Myst. The message boards are derived from codes that are free on the internet...almost nothing that's in there is original or interesting, even in terms of how it looks. And absolutely nothing in there has any relation whatsoever to Prince music. It's such a dreary wasteland.

If they followed Anxiety's suggestions, just even making that LITTLE effort would go a looong way towards giving that place some much-needed levity.

But it'll never happen, because the people who run the club believe that Prince is a god just as much as the people who suck up to him on their boards do....just as much as Prince himself believes it, despite his claims of not worshipping false idols.

The NPGMC has shown consistently over the last several years that it is most definitely not willing to do the work.

The club is whatever you make it. There are folks over there who are positive all the time just like there are folks here who are negative all the time. Truith be told, most folks are somewhere in between. You see what you wanna see. The one thing about the club is more of a lack of hypocrisy that's experienced over here at the Org. Folks say "Prince ain't shit", "He treats his fans like crap", yadda, yadda and I'll be damn if folks ain't whipping out the credit cards, booking flights, staying up super late and turning into the biggest Prince whores to get a chance to dance with him onstage. So Prince asskissing is widespread, not exclusive to the NPGMC. Some folks are just more truthful about where they stand on the matter.

i don't know if i'd go THAT far...i think the club has been hit or miss in a lot of ways, but i've gotten more than a few great things from it - the kick-ass tix, the (very) occasional find in retail (okay, just the Rave In2 CD, but you betta believe i play the dickens outta that sucker), the musicology downloads...and to be really honest, there was a time that i held NPGMC up to the standards of bowie's official web site, but ya know what? ol' uncle dayvid has really fallen off the ledge over the past couple of years. where there used to be downloads and chat sessions with the man and other celeb chats, and regular bowie diary entries and "ask david" Q and A installments, all that stuff has become more and more neglected and the site is a shadow of what it once was, and dare i say it...NPGMC, for all its flaws, has run circles around bowienet in the past year.

yeah, i have criticisms of the site and i think it's far from perfect and i'm not a fan of the whole "fantasy realism" design asthetic of the site, but it's been well worth my twennyfive bucks and the weird devotional vibe only scares me when i delve too deep into the lilac jungles of the forums, which nobody's twistin' my arm to do, ya know?

TheOrgerFormerlyKnownAs said:

i'm the first to admit i've flown all over this bitch to see a p show! i've also been quick to buy downloads. at the same time, i'll call p out on his shit in a heartbeat (hey, he'd be just as quick to do it to me, lol). i think there's a difference between liking the performer and work vs thinking he is some nd all and be all to my existence. a lot of peeps can't seem to separate the two thoughts.

you're definitely right though, tofka, there are plenty of cool folks over there too! not everyone is a purple bootlicker, lol!

COMON said:

Anxiety said:

wow! you really think so? i'll respectfully disagree. now, i'm no fan of mash ups or anything but considering how frequently they posted them (which is a cool idea for fan interaction), i thought they were cool. all of the contests at bowienet were pretty cool as were the tour photos and shit. now, granted, very recently its been slow around there but the man did have heart surgery, lol! i don't know, i've always felt that bowie and his people went out of their way to offer something new or different at their site. i don't get that from npgmc. which is no big deal because i've never been terribly excited about npgmc...except when some new tunes get loaded!!!

.
[This message was edited Tue Aug 3 11:13:08 2004 by SassyBritches]

SassyBritches said:

true, true, bowienet has thrown some bones over the past couple of years, and i know the man has been horribly sick in recent months, but if you were a member of bowienet when "hours" came out, you'd know just how amazingly overwhelmingly AWESOME it was to be a fan and a site member at the time, and lately, i dunno, i can't help but feel bowie isn't as excited about his site as he was when it was a new idea...and i get the feeling that, even though they certainly have had their fair amount of shortcomings, NPGMC has made a consistent effort to stay engaged and offer stuff to fans, sporadic though it may be. the mashups on bowie's site was cool, but come on. it was a tie-in with some car company and i didn't get the idea that it was some inspired thing that bowie was behind wholeheartedly - and, i mean, that's fine, but it didn't really rock my world. but that's just me. i'm glad to be a member of bowienet, but it just hasn't reached the excitement that it offered during its first couple of years, and i've had more than a few heart palpitations thanks to NPGMC over the past year alone, and i dunno, i just can't dismiss that.

theblueangel said:

I gotta agree with just about all of that. They kind of painted themselves into a corner with lifetime $25.00 memberships. If they do radically change the site they are probably going to want to be paid for doing so. This will upset people. If they don't radically change the site more and more fans are going to grow weary of it. I think they should ask for another $25.00 bucks and make the site much better. If the content was worth it I wouldn't mind paying to make it happen, but they would have to do something special.

I have to agree...the NPGMC can be a very scary place. This was particularly noticable in year 1 (for me) when I got screwed over by being charged twice and not receiving Rave SE. I emailed over and over and never got a reply - until one day they replied really angry and basically said that I was lying and how dare I criticize them.

Year 2 wasnt too scary but thats because they didnt have much conatct with teh members - tehy got a bit miffed when people started to question where the CDs were and how they could justify the box set being $100

Year 3 hasnt been too scary for me directly because theyve done sod all as a club and dont reply to anything.

Where it is very scary this year is the deleting and vanishing of less than ideal questions from their boards...even if they are valid.

I just wish that the NPGMC would give you some INFO regarding his musical history...um a discography perhaps...bring back the old news from the park (yes we were spoonfed...but at lease it was something), um open the video room...there's more. For someone 20 plus years and buckets of music he certainly has a site that's um lacking in content. It's his site though...he can do what he wants.

I do have to say it's better than some of the previous incarnations of that site.

I am looking forward to the next single...which should be in about 2 weeks or less.

superspaceboy said:

i do have to say, in all my browbeating of bowienet, their frontpage news section puts just about EVERY other official fan site to shame by comparison. and the moderation at bowienet is fabulous - i've never felt like big brother is watching, but it also doesn't feel like a free-for-all in the forums over there.

just sayin'.

TheOrgerFormerlyKnownAs said:

I nominate this for org "quotables"
[This message was edited Tue Aug 3 19:44:58 2004 by psykosoul]

I never kiss toosh the club has good and bad points like every other place.
But i do dislike fighting and i hate that stinking ugly, creepy bird and just wanna use this on it
[This message was edited Tue Aug 3 17:33:53 2004 by katt]

squirrelgrease said:

i thought that was 4 kingbad what happened 2 him.
.
[This message was edited Tue Aug 3 17:52:20 2004 by katt]

squirrelgrease said:

rofl...that about sums it

TheOrgerFormerlyKnownAs said:

It's been a year since I posted on the message boards over there and I'm in no hurry to go back.

I have to agree with an earlier comment on this thread, they only spruce things up a bit when they are about to sell something, otherwise the place is lifeless.

Tom said:

I can see they do alot of sprucin up in here as well.

ok, i think we've all trundled out the same familiar points on both sides of the issue, so i'm just gonna go ahead and put this broken record back in the dustjacket and lock this sucker up.