it wasn't good, musically.

whatsurname said:

Well i thought it was alrite, nothing to rave about, but it deserved a place on the charts!

Poor promotion from the record company didn't help. No big singles or videos. I think it peaked at no.16 or 18 in the U.S. It wasn't eligible for the U.K. chart due to some bodged marketing by Arista. But to my ears, there aren't any obvious big hits on it anyway. Still, it's an okay pop album.

andykeen said:

that pun was terrible

Cloudbuster said:

yeah, the promotion was really weird with that album, and i think part of it too was that the relationship with arista didn't go the way prince wanted it, so prince just moved on to his next thing and slogged through whatever promotion he may have been required to do for RAVE. plus, you know, this was a weird time for prince. he was entering a new relationship with his wife-to-be and having to reconcile the whole mayte thing with the media and the public, he was exploring his new faith, and he was starting to drop some of the baggage of the TAFKAP years. there was a lot happening in his life to distract him from promoting RAVE 100 percent the way he did with musicology - it seems he has it together enough these days to get behind a new project all the way if he so desires...and we saw how well he can do that when he puts his mind to it.

interesting comments ... and i agree with almost all of what anxiety said ...

i would only add --- for me .... it came on the "heals " of another Arista artist - Santana's comeback album --- and it was such a "blantant ripoff" of his style (with well-known "pop artist duets")... that is just screamed that Prince had hit the wall or "jumped the shark" ....

gone was the ground-breaking "when doves cry" and "kiss" ....

now Prince was doin it "other people's way" ....

I remember the first time i heard the title track --- having heard it before on a "certain bootleg" .... i was floored !!! this was the "rave" that he sang of ????!!!

anyway ... just my quick op .....

MisterMan38 said:

personally i agree with a lot of your opinion, but i guess i was trying to frame my response in a way that allows for folks who actually DO like the album...in which case, even if you think it was a great piece of music, the fact is, it still flopped. i think it could have been a hundred times as fabulous as it was and it still would have flopped, because prince's focus was all over the place - he was going through a lot of transition - the last thing he needed to be doing at that point in his life and career was trying to play rock star and planning a comeback. the timing was off, his focus was off, and i think the TRC album and the ONA tour was truer to what he needed to be doing at that time. ya know?

Greatest Romance Ever Sold was a bad passageway into the album and it got worse from there. Actually, all the pre-release crap about 0-+) getting an outside producer, which turned out of course to be Prince (please notice the difference between the two entities), wasn't a good foot to start on either. But with a stronger first single, the album could have coasted off that for awhile. Prince, it seemed like, wanted to pull a Santana like comeback but instead of releasing one of the duets, like Santana did with his album, Prince released one his solo mid-tempo numbers. Nice song, too complicated for a single. The video was late too so there was nothing to grab onto for the public at large. Everything Santana did right in his comeback, Prince did wrong

The sight of a forty-something man in skin-tight spandex on the cover probably didn't help either...

Three reasons:
- The material sounding dated (Prince thinking: hey lets use some sounds i used in the past, the peeps are familiar with it, and put some guest artists on it, but dont put them too high up in the mix)
- Wrong choice of singles (I mean, who on earth wants to hear Prince do a truelly uninspired R&B-song as "The Greatest Romance ever told"???)
- A lack of promotion, i guess.

I havent bought this record (No, i am not a fan who buys all his material, whatever the level of musical quality), but i listened a few times to it. The only songs that truelly appealed to me where: I Love you, but i dont trust you anymore and Man of war, because i heard SOUL in these songs, the rest of the record is bland and forgettable in my opinion....

It flopped cuz it was gar-bage.

some very good points ...

i think if i woulda picked a single ... i woulda picked the one with Gwen "i can do no-wrong right now " Stefoni !!!

GottaLetitgo said:

Prince needed a strong lead single to properly launch "Rave"."The Greatest Romance..."was not it.Although,The Neptunes remix was hot!
"I'm not a thug tonight,I wanna stay home and make love tonight!"

He got a massive deal from Arista though, didn't he? I think he took the money and ran and left Clive Davis to carry the can.

So I'm sure P sees it as a success

Prince did all the work -- his own recording studio, production, instruments, songwriting, performances, etc. That was probably even his own video he paid for, among many other things. Arista didn't have to do anything to make some money off the deal -- just sell it to Prince's loyal fanbase -- a couple hundred thousand people, and that was it. Nothing more. Arista made a profit. If they had spent much more money on marketing, they would've lost out on the deal. Anyway, that's what I think. Peace.



P.S. Come on, y'all know that music doesn't necessarily sell because it's good or not. The job of the record company is to create the hype and distribute the music. Arista failed.
[Edited 4/29/05 13:18pm]
[Edited 4/29/05 13:21pm]

Basically it was bad promotion, at least here in the US, it was released on Nov. 9th, and The Greatest Romance Ever Sold single on Oct. 5th the single did fairly well nearly as good as Musicology, and the cd did well in the 1st month going gold, but there was no video and by the time the video debuted in mid Dec. the single was already losing momentum so the video never really got into rotation, the video should have came out in Oct. 2 promote the cd, the video was 2 be made earlier but Prince postponed it when Clive Davis told him he needed 2 promote heavily in Europe so Prince postponed the video shoot and did a lot of TV appearances in Nov. in Europe and filmed it when he came back by then it was 2 late. When it was time 2 release the 2nd single Prince wanted 2 release So Far So Pleased, but Interscope didn't give permission since Gwen Stefani was on the song and No Doubt were about 2 release their new CD, so at this point Prince basically lost interest in the project and so did Arista as they were focusing their attention on Santana's Supernatural, a promo release of Man O War was sent to radio and got very little airplay with no other support.

i'd love if we could keep the thread on this level, instead of basing the fate of RAVE on what we personally thought of the record. it's cool to talk about personal likes and dislikes, but let's look through a bigger lens if we can. lots of crappy music does really well - just take a look at the top ten singles right now - and the industry has as much, if not more, to do with an artist's success than what we music listeners think. ya know?

moral: the alleged suckage of donkey balls does not a failed project make.

this may belong elsewhere but what are some really sucky songs that were recent chart toppers?

Silkilove said:

i'm gonna turn this around on ya first - what top ten songs in recent months do you consider really outstanding?

Rave was a big Clive Davis project at Arista, only Clive got fired the day Rave was released.