And most African American artists of the 1980s did not have a pop audience backing them up either to raise their sales so I would say that an album by a crossover artist that only sold 1.8 million is not very good.

vainandy said:

1.8 million was still considered very good sales in the 80s. Those figures just got out of hand in the latter half of the 90s. But sure, of course it was a disappointment after Purple Rain - keeping in mind that when Jackson followed the success of Thriller with Bad he was still able to achieve skyscraping sales figures even though his public persona by that time had already started getting seriously marred.

I just don't see a candid possibility that a record like Parade could sell gazillions - even those sales were for the most part due to the fanbase sticking around from the Purple Rain days. And in all honesty Parade didn't even have the commercial potential musically speaking to reach even the sales it did. However that is no indication of the quality of the music itself. Almost on the contrary - if you'd make to compile a list on my favourite albums most of my choices wouldn't have sold more than 10,000-25,000 copies.

Novabreaker said:

Indeed. Prince had one of the most unique "core fanbases" in pop music. He had 1) white fans who were into his rock/punk/avant-garde sound, 2) black and other non-white fans who dug his r&b/funk joints, and then 3) fans of all shades who just dug everything he did. That was (and still is) his core. Some fans belonging to the first 2 factions fell off and came back periodically, but the core fanbase stayed strong. His core audience resembled a jazz following. It still does.

IMHO, if any distinctions can be made on racial lines, I would say the black audience supported him more post-PR than the white audience did, the R&B charts bear that out, and without the black fans Parade may not have even hit platinum, even WITH Kiss. From a personal standpoint, more young black folk my age were more knowledgeable of Prince's post-PR output than young white folk.

But I'd say this. If Prince had launched a megatour stateside like he did in Europe to support Parade, he could at least have matched the sales of ATWIAD. But I don't recall him touring the US for Parade or SOTT.
[Edited 12/30/04 11:04am]

What if he would have followed up with a "Purple Rain part2" after PR, before going off to ATWIAD and Parade? I think the pop audience would be more understanding of his direction change, if he had released a PR part2. Most of the pop audience only knew him for Purple Rain, one HUGE album, and the very next release was ATWIAD, which really caught people off guard. If he were to release another album closer to the PR sound right after PR, he might have solidified his pop base more, and when it's time to release ATWIAD, the pop fans would be more willing to accept the drastic change. All these "what ifs"...but what do I know

mrmarcus said:

That is one hypothetical I'd co-sign.

Threads like this make me appreciate artists who do their own thing all the more.

I think that's more of an age thing because from what I have seen from people my age, it is the exact opposite. I'm 37 and "Purple Rain" was released the summer before my senior year in high school. Most average black people I know over the age of 35 can and will name just about every Prince song out there before "Purple Rain" before they even mention anything that came later. Prince was THE soundtrack to their entire junior and senior high years. Anyone younger would have been in elementary school and by the time these people reached high school, Prince's late 1980s albums would have been out. People that have lived through and loved the earlier Prince albums while they were popular, are much less likely to be accepting to this style change than those that haven't.

Most average white people I know, of any age, if asked about Prince, their first response is either "Purple Rain", "Little Red Corvette", or "Kiss" and have absolutely no knowledge of anything before the "1999" album, except the few that ventured out and bought some of the earlier albums because they heard they were "nasty".




I think if it was a tour like the "Musicology" tour, playing a lot of the old hits, it would have been successful. I think if was just his new material at the time, I think it would have bombed. Poor attendance to the "Sign O The Times" concert movie is proof of that.
[Edited 12/30/04 11:45am]

I totally agree. I've always said that Prince should have never changed his style until around 1990 when music was changing as a whole.

vainandy said:

The age makes a tremendous difference, then. I am 33 and was a freshman in high school when Purple Rain came out. I had liked the 1999 singles but considered Prince basically a novelty act and a freak. Purple Rain changed my perspective on music and my life. Many of my black friends and a few of my white friends said the same thing and kept up w/Prince throughout high school (Lovesexy). Most of my white friends in high school loved PR, bought ATWIAD when it came out, but really didn't pay any attention to what Prince was doing after "Kiss" (which was unfortunate b/c they missed out on SOTT).

In retrospect, when I talk to friends over 35 about Prince, they say they loved the old-school funk P used to churn out before PR, they liked PR okay and then he lost them after that. So we're both right considering the big differences between our (high school) generations. Most black folk your age were on their way to "gone" after PR, and many black folk my age stayed on for years after PR.




Although a good deal of concert flicks don't do well, I would definitely agree with you on that. The Parade concert I've heard included a lot of prior hits and faves, including stuff from PR, 1999, Dirty Mind, etc.

mrmarcus said:

It would have been "Roadhouse Garden" right. That's a popular rumor. It had a lot of PR timespan material probably with less psychedelic production. It would have kicked ass and sold well. He always keeps us guessing if nothing else.

As for the original question, it's always been a progression with prince. The 'what if's' are endless. Sign O the times may have been a triple album "Crystal ball" if Under the cherry moon had flopped....etc.

vainandy said:

Wouldn't that have made him a musical follower, instead of an innovator?
Were not many of the artists in the 90's inspired by the many different things P did in the 80's? Had he just stuck to one or two things, how do we know if the relevance or intrigue of his music would still be there?

OdysseyMiles said:

You're right. That's why P is the artist and we're on his website. Only he and God know his next move and why he's making it. Only they know when he makes the right choice.

He would have still been a leader. Those groups in the late 1980s, like Ready For The World and others, were copying his sound. That's when he should have stuck around and shown them how to do it up right.

As far as the artists in the 1990s and today being inspired by him, they always say they were but I don't hear the influence in their music. The only two I hear it in is Lenny Kravitz and Terrence Trent D'Arby. Most of the others are strictly balladeers that maybe try to sing like him a little bit. The majority of Prince's albums were uptempo funk and rock with a few slongs on each one. The majority of the artists of the 1990s and today are midtempo and slow with no uptempo tracks at all. If that's what Prince inspired, then I wish they had never heard of Prince. Sounds like they were more inspired by Whitney Houston than Prince for the slow factor alone.
[Edited 12/30/04 13:31pm]

I've just come to the conclusion that Parade is the far superior album in terms of being completely different in form from PR than ATWIAD was supposed to be. Sure enough ATW is labled the psychadellic trip and it has those elements, but it sticks more to the accessible music that the fickle pop fans from PR were expecting than Parade. On ATW, there are at least good songs that were easy to play on radio, where as Parade has only two ( KISS & Anotherloverholeinyourhead ) and has so much orchestal parts that frivolous fans wouldn't tolerate. IMO, Parade has moved into my personal No# spot of Prince albums, until my mood changes.

vainandy said:

Sounds like you forgot to mention the entire Neo-Soul movement of the mid to late 90's. Countless Rock stars and Country stars have also cited P as an influence. You see, you don't have to hear his influence in their music in order for it to be so. They don't have to be copying him in order for the influence to be evident. His way of trying different things may have inspired them to do different things. Just like Miles Davis's ability to stretch inspired Prince's.

vainandy said:

Prince was leading the way in funk-rock. after PR, he kinda abandoned that role, and funk-rock as a whole, died more or less. Then the Red Hot Chili Peppers picked it up.

I disagree with most. I think that Parade is awesome and would've been a great follow up to PR. The songs on there such as kiss, are so funky and I think correspond more with the image he had in PR and the image along with the music is what kept the casual Prince fan coming back for more.

jenet8701 said:

I couldn't agree with you more!!!!

jenet8701 said:

I don't know. Do U Lie,, cut-off shirts, finger waves and Christopher Tracy's Parade are a far cry from When Doves Cry, trench coats, perms, and Let's Go Crazy. I still say he did the right thing in releasing ATWIAD after Purple Rain. It's more of a bridge to what was to come.

Great point! Funk as a whole by other artists seemed to become more scarce after Prince changed his style. That's another reason I wish he had kept it up a little longer. Maybe it would have influenced other artists to do more funk and maybe ballads wouldn't have taken over the radio like they did.
[Edited 12/31/04 10:06am]

vainandy said:

Like I said in one of my earlier posts, he never completely abandoned the funk/rock style in the 4-5 years after PR. I hear it in Tambourine, America, Kiss, Love or $, She's Always In My Hair, Hello, Housequake, Mountains, Dance On, No, and various and sundry other B-sides and extended versions. Not to mention his side projects like the Family.

Prince never abandoned the funk. He just made it a little harder to look for and/or people weren't paying attention.

Also, Prince was churning out some pretty mean stuff with the NPG in the early-to-mid 90's, but he was in virtual exile then.

But the funk he was doing in the late 1980s was not the kind of funk that people knew and loved him for. The general public was not accepting his new style so naturally the current artists at that time were not going to be influenced by it and try to compete with him as they had before.

Meanwhile, more and more ballads started taking over radio and less and less artists made funk. His rival Rick James was no longer what he used to be so people weren't going to compete with him either. Cameo started getting more laid back with midtempo tracks like "Candy". Midnight Star got more mellow. The Barkays continued on but their stuff wasn't what it used to be.

Prince was still kicking out the uptempo jams but no one cared to compete with them because they had a weird vibe to them.

vainandy said:

All that is true. But my point still stands. What he was doing with Dirty Mind, Controversy and 1999 was out there too. But his brilliance in the post-PR period wasn't completely ignored. The "long strokes" of Raspberry Beret, She's Always In My Hair, Kiss, and Love or $ got nice airplay on the local R&B station backinaday. But heads weren't quite ready then, and for the most part, to this day, they sleep on the nice funk he cranked out during that period.

Prince's transition was brilliant. He put just enough funk on the albums to still get R&B airplay and keep a few of those fans. Of course the R&B community was not going to turn their back on him completely because they are the ones that made him a star and put him on the map from the very beginning. He had been very well loved in that circle. Normally, when another black artist does a complete turnaround like Prince did, they are accused of turning their back on their black fans. That's not the case with Prince, the white fans weren't liking his new style either. I think that's why R&B stations still supported him, he didn't sell out to the pop crowd, he just went in a weird far out direction that pissed everyone, both white and black, off.

I remember, in the mid to late 1980s, R&B stations down here playing the hell out of tracks from the new album on the day of it's release. Their intentions were good but I know a lot of people that did not buy the album after they heard these songs on the radio. By the time "Sign O The Times" came out, I wouldn't even listen to the radio the day of it's release because I knew it wasn't going to be the "old Prince" and I was afraid if I heard the songs first, I would be too disgusted to buy the album.

The B sides "She's Always In My Hair" and "Hello" were also a hint of the "old Prince" to keep old-timers like me still hanging on.

Prince has always been very smart in his strategies.