What is up with ppl saying best album since SOTT? Are you kidding me?

What is up with ppl saying best album since SOTT? Are you kidding me?

Ok now i v been a prince fan for over 20 years and i always defend and stuck up for our little funkster.Over the last month i have read dozens of reveiws of 3121 all of them good to excellant, and with Universal hyping the hell out of it i was so excited and couldn t wait 2 get my hands on a copy.
I pre-ordered via Play.com, paid £7.95 including postage and received it on Saturday morning.
I will apologise to everyone as im now going to slate this record.I am so, so so so disapointed it is untrue, it so lame i just cant believe it. After all the hype i v read about it there isn t one song on the whole CD that makes me think Wow this great i v got to play that again in fact i found myself pressing the skip button. The tile track is good but after that, Satisfied is the only other track worth playing. Loita is ok gets a bit cheesy, incense&candel is naf, love is average, fury is weak compared to the live version on SNL, The word is trying to be funky be i aint feelin it and then The Dance is an old song re-done and the final weak wimper of something trying to be funky is Get on the Boat,well i m sorry prince but i want 2 get of this boat. This cd will now collect dust while i listen to my other prince cd that are so much better than this drivel.
For the first time ever i am loosing patience with prince, lame lame lame !!!

the host with the head gear is sort of an idiot. "prince should listen to more outkast." really? an artist should do another's style?

sallysassalot said:

I suggest you try listening to some Sly Stone and then Joni Mitchell and Parliament Funcadelic and Santana and then get back to us about "an artist doing another's style". Prince isn't that original, you know. He's a great assimilator, but not an innovator. (I'm quoting Joni Mitchell, BTW.)

Me? I'm listening right now to Architecture in Helsinki, Magic Numbers, Wolf Parade, Kraftwerk, Sunn O))), !!! (aka Chk Chk Chk), Arcade Fire, 50 Foot Wave, Editors, M.I.A., White Stripes... and a whole lot more that I cannot remember right now. Oh, and a compilation of Prince 12 inch mixes from the 1980s that make me wonder what the hell happened to Prince that causes him to release mediocre dross like Musicology or Rave or 3121, or pretentious muso-wank like N.E.W.S or Xpectation, or religious bile like The Rainbow Children.

prince's sound has been prince's sound for ages. sure, he's used the tools that those before him have provided but he's built his own thing with those tools. if you think prince has only assimilated other artists sounds that's your bag to carry. great and thanks for coming.

i still say it makes no sense for someone to tell an artist who's been copied to turn around and copy the person copying him. wouldn't he then, in all actuality, be telling the artist to copy himself? and if so, isn't this what prince is already criticized for?

Compare the influence of Susannah Melvoin on Prince's music to that of Mayte or to that of Mani.

David Bowie is championing Arcade Fire, one of the most vibrant new bands out there right now. Prince is hyping Tamar, a failed talent show contestant who brings nothing to the table. That simple fact speaks volumes.

Let's see: Black Sweat = Prince trying to imitate The Neptunes, who are themselves of course ripping off the sound from 1999.

David Bowie is championing Arcade Fire, one of the most vibrant new bands out there right now. Prince is hyping Tamar, a failed talent show contestant who brings nothing to the table. That simple fact speaks volumes.

Should Prince listen to more Outkast? Yup. Though perhaps not their most recent work. I'm not saing he should imitate them, but would it really hurt him to listen to something that wasn't recorded 30 years ago, or that he wasn't involved in?

How come Prince only covers songs that have been played to death, while nerdy English kids run specialist record labels that put out compilations of obscure soul/jazz/funk? Take that NPG Radio segment in the Musicology tour: why the hell is he playing Love Rollercoaster like he just discovered the tune, whereas it was covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers mere years ago for the Beavis & Butt-Head movie and had been a hit then? And why was he playing the same covers over and over again, while he could easily do new songs each night?

It's no coincidence that Prince made his best music at a time that he was surrounded by band member who weren't afraid to challenge him and expose him to things he barely knew about -- and I'm not just talking music here. Compare the influence of Susannah Melvoin on Prince's music to that of Mayte or to that of Mani.

Yes, and it was a pretty interesting discussion.

Please take the following as a kind of stream of consciosness of what I remember (only caught the name of one person)

Some of the things that were said:

the presenter called him the 'polymath pixie of pop' and this was his 'newest musical opus - the enigmatically titled 3121'

'he's updated his seminal Paisley Park sound of the 80s for a new generation'

the guy called Kwame called it "fon-kay" with a fresh sound & instrumentation' although 'there's a bit in the middle that's mundane R&B'. He was raving about it.

it 'reeks of funk'

Then they discussed how's he's tipping his hat back to the likes of James Brown - but then agreed that he's tipping his hat back to Prince. The presenter questioned whether he was listening to too much Prince and not enough OutKast, for example. The blond woman countered, "How can you listen to too much Prince?"

The dark-haired woman gave props to any 5ft man who could make her alliterate.

The blond woman asserted that this establishes that he's "really great on his own" but not collaborating. She mentioned a couple of times that Ta'mar has a voice but no personality. There were negative mutterings about the Latin stuff.

The one guy who wasn't convinced by the album said he was going to say negative things but when he saw the clips on the screen (they showed some old stuff followed by Fury at the BRITs, Te Amo video, Black Sweat video) it made him want to reconsider.

Kwame said, "Just listen to the guitar work"

They then discussed whether 'the kids' would like this. And the general consensus was 'no', despite his being a pioneer in txt msg language and that this was for the older generation. Also, some of the 'lounge' stuff would be pretty popular in the current musical climate.

Kwame was just happy that it wasn't a situation like Michael Jackson a couple of years ago - "a middle-aged man trying to sound hip". This is FRESH JAM.

They also discussed a little bit about the religious nature of some of the lyrics. The negative guy thought they were laughable, Kwame thought they were interesting.

The negative guy said parts of the album reminded him of Sign O The Times (the album), at which point the blond woman asserted that it was his best album since then (HOW MANY TIMES HAVE WE HEARD THAT IN THE LAST DECADE?!?!) but the negative guy thought the lyrics were too full of 'self-regard'. Nothing political like Sign O The Times - 3121 is his house and it's all about partying and gettting 'satisfied' in there.

Overall, it was extremely postive and a very interesting discussion.

I hope somebody posts this video, thereby saving too many people from reading my unstructured scribblings.