StoneCrib said:

See theres the rub, since Prince wasnt into C&D, and supposibly didnt give a shit, its the last cd that is just raw wonderful prince. Production is at a minimal, thank god, and the tracks are just off the cuff ideas musically and lyrically.


Id be happy if prince did more just WTF stuff and didnt analysis every song he creates.

Thats pretty much why musicology and 3121 kinda suck.

lazycrockett said:

Amen!

StoneCrib said:

Well, I can only confirm what the experts say who have researched their info very carefully; such as Uptown's The Vault which says this:

26 April 1996: Prince attends a meeting with Warner Bros. executives in LA. A termination agreement had been worked out whereby Prince would be free to leave the label after delivering two more albums, instead of the three that he owed them. To get out of the deal, Prince agreed to a reduction of his advances on royalties. His reconfigured 1992 contract had called for him to deliver six albums, of which Symbol, Come and TGE were the first three. The soundtrack to Spike Lee's Girl 6 film didn't count towards the fullfilment of the contract (neither did the Black Album, released in 1995).

Prince presented Warner Bros. with two albums at the meeting, C&D and The Vault. Both albums came complete with the artwork design and the record company had no influence whatsoever over the contents of either album. It was a 'take it or leave it, fuck you' situation, according to a Warner Bros. executive."

Also:

"The Vault is a collection of mostly unreleased songs attributed to Prince. The album was delivered to Warner Bros. in April 1996 along with Chaos and Disorder. However, instead of rushing out The Vault at a time when Prince's career seemed to have reached a standstill, Warners elected to hold off on the release until a later date"

As I said before, there seems to be a willingness to trash C&D simply because it clearly stated 'contract filler on the sleeve whereas The Vault escapes most of the wrath even though it was filled with tracks compiled in the same mindset. While the albums were clearly quickly put together contract fillers, the actual tracks were mostly pre-recorded songs not even intended for these projects, but still tracks that he'd worked as hard on as all his other tracks. And if he didn't think they were that good, well in at least a few fans opinion he made a mistake because these 2 albums are filled with good stuff.
[Edited 7/11/06 2:29am]

StoneCrib said:

If Prince "buried that trash the moment he dropped it for WB" then how do you explain him bothering to put up the unreleased video for "I Like It There" that you maintain Warners MADE him do on the npgmc cyberclips room?

It is well known that Prince records videos for many songs that never get released - see the Kevin Smith talk - at the time, he must surely be into them. The videos are funded by Prince, usually filmed at Paisley Park, no involvement or interference from Warners at all. Zannalee and Same December were created well before Warners even agreed to accept C&D, so how could they possibly have forced Prince to make the videos for the project which didn't even exist at the time?

Dinner with Delores was almost called Dinner with Mulva.....


....anyone....anyone..

metalorange said:

amen!

metalorange said:

Ah, ok. Yeah, it sounds about right on all fronts then. Thanks for the info.

metalorange said:

It all depends on what his contract asked him to do. WB Plantation & P probably agreed to do videos just for his singles and at his leisure since he was way in Minny and had the means to do so. It could all still be contractual and P probably told WB that he'd do them when he felt like it, but it all was probably part of the contract deal to keep him closer to them.

StoneCrib said:

I'm sorry, but I think it's completely illogical to suggest that part of his contract with Warners that he make videos for tracks that might never even make it onto an album! He made a video for Empty Room and it didn't even make the album! I think it is far logical to believe that part of Prince's visions for his projects are the visuals and videos, and on a whim he just records videos on the off-chance they might come in or be used. There are also promos for Daddy Pop and P. Control that have not seen the light of day. He's still doing it, it is known he recorded a video for A Million Days but it never got released as a single.

I understand it forms part of your argument that he didn't like the tracks on C&D and therefore must have been 'forced' by Warners to do videos for them, but that still doesn't explain why he chose to put I Like It There in the cyberclips room out of all the videos he could, if he hates the C&D tracks so much.

metalorange said:

Do you really think WB just let P do what he wanted? I'm sure they went over possible scenarios for what was to be released. WB is a billion dollar company for a reason...surely not because P did what he wanted to do. There were DEFINITELY outlays for how their business relatinship worked, so these things were more than likely discussed.

And I'm sure P liked a FEW cuts off the album, so him using a few in cyberspace doesn't shock me, the real thing is why he doesn't/didn't use them beyond the deal with Warner. The Emancipation album dropped later that year and C&D was a distant memory...now why was that?

it would be stupid for prince to make purposefully bad music just to screw over WB, because that would also reflect on his own reputation and legacy.

Anx said:

I don't think he made bad music, I just think he gave WB some of his lesser shit and shit he hadn't re-worked - Outtakes and/or Throw-aways.

Greatest Prince album EVER!! (IMO)

StoneCrib said:

sometimes i think prince makes so much music, he loses sight of what's great and what's mediocre. look at what hasn't been released and is being circulated as bootlegged studio material - as we all know, some of it is AMAZING. then look at some of the songs he's really tried to push over the past decade or so, some of which have been true yawners. maybe to him, "good" and "bad" means more about the mood he was in when he created the tracks than the actual quality of the music. who knows?

Anx said:

I agree.

StoneCrib said:

Sure, there were always discussions, particularly around the time of TGE/Come, about different configurations and Warners wanting certain tracks they'd heard over others. But ultimately Prince had the final decision. If you're trying to argue that Empty Room/Zannalee/Last December were originally planned to be singles and that's why Warners 'insisted' Prince do videos for them, well then logically if they had the power to compel Prince to do stuff like that against his will they would also have got their way and got Empty Room on the album. The fact that they couldn't force Prince to include Empty Room shows that they really didn't have that power, and the argument falls apart.



Oh, so there are a few cuts Prince thought were actually really good on C&D? Isn't that what some of us have been arguing all along, that at the very least the ENTIRE CD is not the 'trash' that some people regard it as.

I don't think Prince not playing C&D after Emancipation is really indicative of much. Once he's onto the next project, he rarely plays tracks from the previous one. And particularly when he'd left Warners, there was no point in him promoting C&D when he had his own independent album to promote. There are plenty of albums he hasn't played songs from very much after the project got 'old' for him - including Emancipation. Does that mean he thinks Emancipation is trash too? No, it's just the way he is.

metalorange said:

how much have we heard him play live from 'musicology' this year?

metalorange said:

No, what I'm saying is that NONE of us know what the arrangements were but NO record company lets their artists do whatever the fuck they want, so P had the understanding that to help push singles, videos were to be made. It was probably in the contract, trust me on that. You don't sign 100 million dollar deals and not have certain shit in place to satisfy both parties.

And this was never an argument against people that liked C&D, just about how shitty the album was altogether.

StoneCrib said:

There was probably something in the contract or at least an arrangement that he had to make videos for singles from WB albums (though "Pink Cashmere", "Letitgo" and "When 2 R in Love" don't really support this). It's rather unlikely though that there was something in the contract telling him that he HAD to make videos for tracks in advance just in case they might be included on an album 2 years later. Having in mind Prince's work style, that would mean he had to shoot a video for EVERY new song he recorded.

The unreleased videos for most C&D tracks (with the probable exception of "Dinner with Delores") obviously were all made quite some time before the album was released, around the time of their recording, whenever Prince felt like shooting them. See "Empty Room", there's a video, but it never even made it on an album.

Hi,

I too really like the Album.

Reading the post got me thinking...at the time the album came out I bought a copy of Mojo magazine (quite a respected British music mag much like Q) and the review was amazing! It dedicated 2 full pages to it. The reviewer was raving about "I rock therefore I am" even going as far as saying he wanted to be in the first club it was played in so he could dance his little ass off!

I belive they gave it 9 out of 10. I wish I still had a copy of it. It always stuck in my mind.

Laters

flinty said:

The guy should seek medical advice. As much as I like the album, that track is really crap.

EmancipationLover said:

there was an "actual" video for "letitgo", unless i'm missing your point (since there was a video for "when 2 r in love" but it was all text, and i think there was a video montage made for "pink cashmere")...i just saw the "letitgo" vid recently and was shocked to see it was an actual clip with actors and prince schtupping mayte and all kinds of things.

StoneCrib said:

Sure, there are certain things contractually Prince was supposed to do for Warners. I just don't think that making videos for a project 2 years off was one of them! I'm sure they would much rather he concentrate on the project at hand! So we come back to the original argument that the videos prove he was once really into those songs and didn't consider them 'trash' at the time.

(As for the $100 million deal, it's been shown that actually Prince never received such a sum. The deal was for $5million advance on royalties for each of 6 albums, but only if each album sold 5 million copies otherwise the advance would drop drastically. This was just after D&P which sold over 5 million and I guess Prince thought he could achieve those numbers easily - which he didn't, his next projects fell far short, so clearly he must have got far less than what he hoped for out of the deal.)

Anx said:

Really? Because IIRC, here in Europe only a "Pink Cashmere" kind of montage was released, which was a reason why it never got any airplay on MTV Europe (which was still very good in 1994 and used to play stuff like TMBGITW or "Lovesign"). Maybe there's a different U.S. version???

My guess always was that the video for "When 2 R in Love" looked like it did due to Prince refusing to shoot a proper video for it, so they simply decided to do the "blackscreen" solution instead of releasing the next montage.

EmancipationLover said:

Unless I'm mistaken, I think that's what they were saying - that Warners themselves produced videos for When 2 R In Love and Pink Cashmere because Prince wouldn't play ball and make one himself (whereas Letitgo seems to originally have had a video with some Prince input).

metalorange said:

if anyone hasn't seen the letitgo video, it's over at, um, ou-yay ube-tay.

and yeah, i think when there was more stakes in having videos accompany singles, WB would step in when prince couldn't be bothered.

EmancipationLover said:

No, I think you're misunderstanding me...when I say they had that in the contract, I meant that WB and P had an agreement that he were to do a certain amount of videos for singles they would then both agreee would be released.

In other words: Say Prince does 12 videos for 12 possible singles, and then he and WB get together and pick the singles along with the videos that go with the single.

This is the one official Prince album I've never heard. I've bought it twice and misplaced it both times, so maybe it's meant to be.

StoneCrib said:

Ah, o.k. But that would mean that Prince only could start shooting videos when at least the album tracklist was final, probably even after decisions on singles already have been made (at least partially, to avoid shooting expensive videos for nothing). In the case of C&D, that means videos shot after April 1996. As far as I know, many of the videos discussed here (like for "I like it there") were shot earlier. Meaning that Prince shot them because he felt like doing so. Meaning that he must've liked at least those tracks...

EmancipationLover said:

Oh yeah, I don't think the dispute is did P like them...but just how MUCH did he give a damn about them?