Back when Prince was leaving Warner Bros. , he said that he was going to make a album that he was born to create. Do you like the music on Emancipation, do you feel that out of the 3 disk it only has about 1 disk worth of good material?
Do u still listen to the Emancipation CD's today? How do U feel about them.

i've never liked the album.

I really like this album. I've never understood why Prince's later work is so hated.. I love parts of Emancipation as well as New Power Soul and Rave.. 3121 is probably my least fav of the later stuff.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was listening to N.E.W.S. While his inspiration and style are very different nowadays compared to the early years, I think there is some great music that gets slept on..

ohh well, just my opinion..

i don't like the album as a whole and I was dissappointed when I ordered it a few months ago. though I would say it has a few gems I do love, like Dream About U, Somebody's Somebody, and Face Down.

I enjoyed the Emancipation CD's. All three!

I don't listen to them anymore but that's only because my sister stole them from my car...the thieving heffa!!!

Most of the material I really love but there is some material on the CD that just seems to be filler music that I didn't care for. Not many but a few. What I don't understand is how he could write all that beautiful music for Mayte then a year or so later ship her off the Spain.

Actually yes I do like the Emancipation cd set,and I do listen to it often.

I LOVE EMANCIPATION! It's in my top 10 for sure.

I love the entire thing,and listen 2 it very often.Some of my fave songs r on there!

sexxydancer said:

I agree-I love it too

I think it could have been a strong double cd. So I never listen to one of the cd's all the way through.

as an aside, it's sad to listen to how excited he was to be a dad. Knowing the eventual joy and tragic dissappointment. I still think this was huge in his and Mayte's break up.

Interesting topic b/c the other day (don't ask me why) I was watching a little bit of when Prince went on Oprah to promote this- 10 years ago at this point. I really dug the album when it came out- there was great Prince stuff on all 3 discs. Disc 2 was my favorite, but I found interesting stuff on 1 and 3.

In recent times, I've found disc 3 to be to "club-ish". "Slave" and "Face Down" are barely ok, but I was never too cool on those house tunes (I forget the titles, but songs #2 and 3), his version of "La La La", or "Style". On the other hand, the rest of disc 3 is still pretty good. Disc 2 sounds dated these days because of the early internet references, but the 2nd half worth of ballads still sound good, especially "Saviour" and "Friend, Lover...".

I guess that I like disc 1 best these days because of the strength of the 1st 4 songs and the last tune. I'm not really too big on the rest of disc 1.

Watching Oprah was wierd. I'm 10 years older and, having lost a child to miscarriage recently, I REALLY FELT PRINCE'S RESPONSE WHEN OPRAH ASKED ABOUT THE STATUS OF THEIR KID- "OUR FAMILY EXISTS, MORE TO COME, AND THAT'S ALL I'LL SAY". The rest of the show was cool, especially the performances ("Sleep Around" should have been a single"), but Prince's composure and words about that situation spoke volumes and that's something that I didn't understand then but respect the hell out of now.

Disappointing album.

It's just too samey and unadventurous... and all a bit generic sounding.

There's alot of good stuff on Emancipation, but there's a helluva lot crap too. Disc 2 is the most consistent, even if it can get a bit saccharine.

Right Back Here In My Arms
Somebody's Somebody
White Mansion
In This Bed Eye Scream
One Kiss At A Time
Dreamin' About U
Joint 2 Joint
The Holy River
Savior
Face Down
My Computer
The Love We Make

...I think they're the only real first-rate songs on the album.

BorisFishpaw said:

Which ones do you like from it?

I have to say I think I have gotten through the album once all the way. It's probably the only one I don't know all the song titles from.

I have a few issues with Emancipation.

First and foremost, there is too much music. If it were all good, that'd be one thing but it's one of the only albums he entirely had free reign to do what he wanted to with no bounderies. This only meant that he could finally put out a triple album with all of the material he would normally edit or weed though to get to one disc.

Secondly, it is about the most blandest thing he has put out. The weak track completely take away from the stronger tracks. There is more filler and fluff...and a lot of songs I feel are very trite. I think he wanted to prove he could come up with 3 CD's worth of material, but the day and age where the music was completely good had passed. This should have been a NO HOLDS BARRED album and it turned into a tepid feely good album that appealed to the mainstream BIG TIME. He even went on Oprah to push said album like the day it came out.

Thirdly, the covers. FOr a man known NOT to do covers, he certainly chose some weak assed tracks to cover. I had never heard of Bethcha by GOlly WOw until then. I have yet to even hear the original. Same goes for LA LA LA means I love you. The Joan Osborne cover was good, I guess, but at the time he was doing this The Christ thing (replacing the Cross) and that song smacked of the type of religion he was feeding us then. You would think he'd do a JB cover or Jimi or even Joni.

You could get a decent one disc album from Emancipation and that's the way it should have been.

I have a 50/50 love for it! It's 2 long and it has a lot of ballads.

Still the last half of disc 3 is excelent!

He recorded this album without the line up of the original N.P.G., i think that the album would've been better if had recorded them with Sonny T, Micheal B.,Mr.Hayes and Tommy Barbarella. It would've had a way different sound, a lot
more funkier, the new line up of the N.P.G. he had recording this album was lame.

I like the album in general, but it is not one of my faves

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SS4GOKU said:

Some songs of the album still feature that lineup of the NPG. One of Us is one of them.

But I agree with you. The albums needs a real band and Michael B. instead of Kirky J.'s drum programming.

I loved it. Sex in the Summer, Jam of the Year, Joint 2 Joint just to name a few...Saw him tour for this and remember the big cutout on the stage before the concert with the symbol guitar. I thought this was a very strong point in Prince's career...the critics and general public would disagree...

man i love it, ive had it for about a month now and i listen to it regually, the main riff for "right back here in my arms" and "white mansion" just blow me away

It's one of my favorite albums of his. And the second disc has some really nice love songs. I'm touched by his version of I can't make you love me on Disc 1. I also think Sleep Around on disc 3 is one of the funkiest songs ever.

www.myspace.com/noseecrets

Yes I like it and listen to it often.

I always love trying to compile an essential 1 disc version. Joint 2 Joint is one my all time favorites, he sounds like a mad scientist cutting and pasting so many different sounds together. Disc 3 is great on its own, experimental and totally original.

Jam of the Year
New World
Human Body
Sleep Around
In This Bed I Scream
Joint 2 Joint
Holy River
Slave
Face Down
One of Us
The Love We Make

Emancipation is the crowning monument to Prince's irrelevance. Having exhausted his shrill righteousness on The Gold Experience, he now had nothing left in the tank, and his poverty of spirit shows.

I would compare Emancipation with M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Lady in the Water, in terms of what they represent in each auteur's careers. Both were their first works outside their original label/studio, which they left under under bizarre and dubious circumstances, both are incoherent messes, both were heralded by their own creators as deeply personal, revelatory works, and both were miserable commercial failures.

On top of all that, Prince and Shyamalan were both celebrated wunderkinds who had one monster hit they could never quite duplicate, and both are insular control freaks with giant egos who likes to stay on their home turf. Two fascinating talents, for their artistry as well as their tendency toward self-sabotage.

dream factory/crystal ball/sign of the times would have made a good triple album because at the time, prince's mind was clearly overflowing with so many ideas and so many new influences he wanted to incorporate, but i dont think even the biggest fan of the come/gold experience era would deny prince was really just treading water in the mid nineties. and this was where he really proved he had jumped the shark. the first two discs are nothing but bland and one-dimensional generic mid-90s r&b, with very little personality as well as sickeningly cheesy midi-heavy production/instrumentation. he even uses a fucking midi metronome as percussion at one point for god's sake. everything blends into one big colourless pool of nothing that rarely actually even sounds like prince. in this bed eye scream is great, one kiss at a time is good, nothing else i ever bother with. the third disc is where he finally tries some more ambitious stuff, but it usually fails before its even started (the two unbelievably lame attempts at techno). face down is cute, slave is alright if a bit underdeveloped, emancipation is serviceable by-the-numbers lovesexy-style funk, but thats it.
[Edited 1/13/07 10:05am]

One of his best works ever imo.

padawan said:

Yo...I like the fact that you keep a lot of the nuttier Prince fams in check, but you went off a cliff with this one homie....Any music head would tell you that while Prince's commercial peak was Purple Rain, his artistic/critical peak was Sign O The Times...In fact the man has various albums that display an artist whose career goes way beyond whether or not they could quite "never duplicate" a monster hit... ..Is the midget a insular control freak? Yeah...Does he have an ego the size of Texas? Hell yeah...Welcome to the rock n roll...


My biggest beef over the years with the midget is the way he has been a bitch towards the fans at times (To me this is his biggest crime...)...As for me, I could have taken Emancipation as just two albums (hell, maybe just one...) There's some good songs on there that needed breathing space...But Emancipation is hardly Prince worst moment...That era is reserved to the late '90s highlighted by Rave....But that's another thread...
[Edited 1/13/07 10:29am]

SS4GOKU said:

100% agreed! I like the album overall,especially disc 2, but the artificial instruments at times really brings it down.