I still rate this album WAY ABOVE Symbol, Gold Exp. & Diamonds & Pearls!

** ducks before being flamed on the board **

Not his best. But THE best Prince album, hmm – tomorrow it'll be another one than today.

A lot of the criticism towards NPS is hold-over from the time of it's release, much like that often expressed towards C&D.

At the time, NPS was kind of the straw that broke the camels back. Fans had stayed loyal through the and 'slave' affair, on the pseudo-promise that the best stuff was being held back until he broke from Warners.

That happened, and we got Emancipation -- Which largely sounded like a watered down, sanitised, version of the stuff he was doing on The Gold Experience -- I think folks gave that album an easy time, it had enough decent stuff on it to make a single LP after all, and the rest, well you could see it as just being the icing on the cake - in any case, it was a TRIPLE album of new material signalling a new, free, no-holds barred era, with promise of even more to come (Crystal Ball was mentioned in the liner notes).

Then EMI folded, which put an end to Emancipation, but then there was the JOTY tour still in progress and the Truth, an acoustic album -- something new and different, and Kamasutra, something different again.

The Truth was restrained and disappointing, Kamasutra was pure masturbation -- so up comes Crystal Ball, and the whole FIASCO of that, which bordered on fraud!! It sounds funny, but I remember people talking about calling the Bad Business Bureaux at the time because credit card info had been taken, and all we had to go on were recorded messages and telephone staff who had no record of our orders!

Crystal Ball turns out to be an unsatisfying mush -- largely a batch of songs from recent years, interspersed awkwardly with the odd legendary 80s track and a bunch of wasteful remixes, all poorly edited together.

In amongst all this, the media had lost interest in Prince other than making a quick jibe the name change and about how he intended to release YET another multi-CD set of stuff only die-hards would be interested in -- AND, yes, AND, the whole Larry Graham THING was starting to crysalise.

!!..... After all this, the next record that comes along is NPS, which sounds just like a condensed replay of Emancipation, but with Doug E Fresh in the mix too!

Oh, it doesn't stop there, after NPS, we get the whole issue of Prince suing fan website ordeal which involved a 'divide and conquer' tactic too, lots of bad feelings about that - PLUS (!!).... the increasingly odd religious outbursts, that at one point I remember bordered on some fans getting upset at some comments made in interviews regarding race (or could be construed in such a way)!



Phew!

THAT'S where the hate for NPS comes from IMO -- I liked the album at the time, I knew it was nothing new, it was treading water, but it was fun, and the live shows in support of the record were fun for me -- So I can still listen to NPS now and enjoy it. Rave, Musicology and 3121 feel like they follow a similar trend to me, only I don't have the same rose-tinted specs on when I listen to those albums.

As it stands NPS is a concise, cohesive collection of pop-funk, much like the said albums above. And, you know, it was never meant to be taken as a Prince album, YES it has him on the cover, he does all the vocals etc, etc - So it's Prince in all but name, but Prince was a free-agent at this point - if he wanted to have the name 'Prince' on it, he would've had it, the NPG moniker is there for a reason -- It was born out the JOTY tour, and as such he saw it as a light-hearted, frivolous party record - Which, in the end, it is.


Thank you, and good night.

1sexymf said:

Think about how it would have sounded with the Exodus Band. That shit would have been off the hook as a band effort. Instead he handed the reigns to kirky j

But I actually love this album. Listened to it the other day and loved nearly the whole thing

Look past the production and you have some amazing classic songs...

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

Maybe it's because of Kirky J that I thinks it's shitty.
A diffenert band sprobably would have did a better job. This band just sounds amateurish and like they couldn't get it together. I was surprised at Prince.