Alexandernvrmind said:

You really have to go back a bit further and start with the brilliant Dirty Mind when you run that list:

Dirty Mind>Controversy>1999>Purple Rain>ATWIAD>Parade>SOTT>Lovesexy

Eight MF'n albums -- in nine years -- in which Prince, IMO, did not put a foot wrong. It's one of the greatest runs in the history of recorded music.

David

ladygirl99 said:

Amen to that - Mountains is a good song and a great track, but Girls And Boys is not only a great song but it's got more hooks than you can shake a stick at - it's got an ABBA's worth of hooks! Definitely the obvious choice for a second single.

(By the way - Bobby Z comes across in Per Nilson's book as being a really thoroughly nice bloke. Just thought I'd say.)

livewire said:

Amen to that!

In that period with those albums he's just in sync with the world
only: on Dirty Mind you hear is going to get there,
and when lovesexy came out I had the feeling he was getting out of sync.

I remember reading this crap back in the eighties, Prince is totally unqualified to judge his own material. He thinks the stuff he does now is his best work probably. That's not for him to judge, it's for us, the critics and history to judge, and Parade is one of his most creative albums.

Parade is one of my all time favorite's of all time. When it came out, it was so different then anything else that was out at the time. I played it on my cassette recorder till I busted it! I went through atleast three of them! My favorite song on it is, sometimes it snows in april. One thing I love about being a fan for 23 years, is each cd takes me back to the time and place in time where I was when it first came out. Parade was a great time, and it takes me back to simple pleasures. It also reminds me of that facination I had when I first heard it, wondering what was going on in Prince's world.

Just to make this a racial thing (because that's a always so fun on these threads) Parade is maybe his most white album, certainly the most European sounding.

He was having issues at the time of people saying he'd abandoned black folks, his first fans (the movie had the same questions asked of it).

Sign was more R&B, and then of course the Black Album took it further.

Maybe that's part of his disowning of it at the time.

I think that comment (which he gave to the Musician -magazine originally, by the way) was more linked with the disaster that what became of the movie. He would see the two obviously as closer to each other, being the author of both. He had really wanted the movie to be a success too.

But seriously, when I first heard NPS I couldn't believe it was the same guy who had come up with Parade 12 years earlier. It was like the decade younger himself was years more artistically ahead and mature than what he became later.

That's exactly what was going down during the "Parade" era. And it was also abandoning the fans that had been with him through the years, long before "Little Red Corvette" and got him to the point that Warner Bros. would even consider letting him make a movie.

Pop fans were pissed with "Parade" also because it was some far out, weak classical shit, but R&B fans were extremely pissed. Prince had become a major joke on the radio and in the clubs.
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[Edited 2/22/07 13:32pm]

NDRU said:

I thought Around The World In A Day was and even a couple of his former bandmates said so too? I think that Parade is a bit funkier than ATWIAD only because of Kiss, Anotherloverholeyonhead, Girls and Boys, and even New Position. and also the songs from Parade had gotten more airplay in typical R&B stations than ATWIAD as those stations would only played Pop Life and Raspberry Beretonce awhile.

ladygirl99 said:

Yeah I think it was both records together that really hurt his R&B standing, and maybe ATWIAD is the less funky of the two. But Parade still sounds more Euro to my ears. French can be funky.

I thought Call My Name was a great hit but only for R&B stations. Parade is my second favorite album of all time. The fact that it didn't sell too much and the movie bombed made me like the music even more. It was the first album where I really started to realize that Prince makes music for himself.

Cool,
glad he thought it was a failier. If he hadn't felt the need to prove he can produce a better album we might not have SOTT. I love both albums just SOTT a whole lot better!
I wonder what album he feels is his best work?
[Edited 2/22/07 15:12pm]

NDRU said:

Oh I agreed with that overall about the album is very Euro. Also that sort of explain why it did much better in Europe than here in the States. Also despite at the time R&B stations only played Girls and Boys and Anotherlover just like they would played Housequake or Adore instead of If I was Your Girlfriend, R&B fans who followed Prince around that era agreed that "Kiss" was a misleading single and when he choose Mountain as a second single and heard the album overall, some of those fans thought he lost it. I also read an old Ebony book which published in 1986 and they did a cover article about Prince and like an issue after that one appeared several editorial letters from people who read that Prince issue and dissed him badly not only about the Parade album but his interracial romance with Susannah and also about the way he screamed when he had that nightmare about that black lady so overall some of his former black fans during that era thought he soldout.
[Edited 2/22/07 16:09pm]

I love Parade and it has grown on me over the years. The thing is, Girls and Boys was the second single in europe and was very popular. I think it would not have made it as well in the USA as it did not have anything close to a US-friendly radio sound. But...failure or not, Parade sold bunch worldwide, had many great songs and critics in Britain loved it and it was considered one of the best albums of the year by most music critics. It was daring, different, creative and NOT made for the charts. Parade earned Prince a great respect in europe. I remember Prince being on the front page of one of the most popular music magazines in Britain, called The Melody Maker(of course in1986) The picture was from a Parade concert and the headline was "The greatest show on earth" Needless to say I framed that front page!

ZiggmanZoo said:

Yeah Europeans love Parade to death and it did better than even Purple Rain if I am not mistaken on the UK charts.

We would never know how Girls and Boys would have done in the US charts had Prince released it as a second single but I know that Girls and Boys received a lot of airplay in my local Rnb station (I was just 6 and I remembered too!) and it did well on the US R&b charts so did Anotherlover. My old r&b station mirrored the bigger USA R&B markets of how they played songs so I can imagined they was playing Girls and Boys too! My older friend said when she was in high school at the time folks were singing Girls and Boys and everyone thought that was going to be the second single, but Mountain shocked many and wasn't liked according to her. Mountain did okay in the R&B charts, but it didn't stay as long as Girls and Boys and Anotherlover. I noticed too that the R&B stations that I listened to online and my local one can be very rebel when it comes to play Prince's songs as they obviously would play his R&B friendly songs. They refused to play some of his released single songs like Why You Wanna Treat ME SO Bad but played unreleased singles like Sexy Dancer and Feel For you and don't play If I was Your Girlfriend but would play Housequake and Adore, or don't play Little Red Corvette but would play International Lover and Lady Cab Driver and so on.

I agreed with you, once I became more appreciated over the album as I got over the years, it was very creative and also very bold. I really like just about every track on that album. Still I like SOTT better than Parade though.
[Edited 2/22/07 17:00pm]

Anx said:

LOL seriously because it's in my collect with the rest.

when i hear parade wasn't funky i just think people is tripping, it's funky but the layers of instrumentation cover a lot of it. It's funky as hell when you strip it all down, or if your ear is good enough to hear the undertones.

vainandy said:

[Edited 2/23/07 20:19pm]

How can anybody think that was a failure when it's still being sold 21 years later and not in the bargain bins either. I think that Prince is a perfectionist and doubt that he's fully satisfied with a lot of his own work when he releases it. Parade is the bomb!

When's he gonna do an album directed at the Native Americans? I mean, come on, let's here an Iroquois Smoke Dance song or Shawnee Stomp.....get with Northern Cree and do some pushups, man! He could call it Drum and Dance. Here's the tracklist:

Grand Entry
Straight Dance
Crow Hop
Grass Dance
Fancy Dance(Girls and Boys)
Cloth Dress Dance
Buckskin Dance
Jingle Dress Dance
Gourd Dance
Sneek Up Dance
Round Dance

Raise yo' dance fan and honor the drum. Enter the Circle.

hell yeah! i'd love that. I used to think that some of his notes in u got the look had a movie indian cinema type of tone. he's part injun too, as well as white and philipino.

Prince could have been shooting down the album to gear everybody up for his future works. As soon as he puts out one album, its old and he wants you to pay attention to the next project that he wants to release two months later.

I love UTMC. Its funny that one song he claims to be proud of, Kiss, wasn't arranged by him.
[Edited 2/24/07 11:57am]

Fuck u, Prince.
I like Parade.

Parade has a timeless quality that I'm not sure he ever fully pulled off prior or since.
[Edited 2/24/07 15:45pm]

and anyone who says girls and boys ain't as funky as anything he ever did is full of it. I've always maintained that the use of the classical instruments, veered towards being funk more than classical in nature. the winds on Life Can Be so Nice, could easily have been a keyboard line from his earlier work.

MarcelJ said:

In that way it is a classic. I really appreciate that album. Maybe looking back now he does too...

I remember reading articles like those also but they were usually in a pop magazine like "Rolling Stone". I remember reading stuff like "Prince has gone back to his R&B roots" and then I would read more comments of them comparing late 1980s albums to early 1980s albums and saying they were similar.

Usually these music critics in these pop magazines only know funk that comes from extremely popular funk artists from the 1970s such as James Brown, Parliament, etc. Ask them about Con-Funk-Shun, Lakeside, Dynasty, Fatback, etc. and they have never even heard of them.

The only reason I can think of them comparing those later albums to the earlier albums is because they heard more funk than rock on them and figured Prince was trying to please his R&B fans. What they don't realize is, that funk with horns and jazz was very outdated in the late 1980s and the R&B fans did not want to hear that. They had lived through the 1970s and they were not ready to revisit it.
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[Edited 2/24/07 18:00pm]

vainandy said:

most of the pop fans that I know, because i hardly knew any hardcore fans, thought he did "lose it" or was "getting weird". I remember there was a dude who dressed just like Prince in his Purple Rain period, totally disowning it at Sign O' The Times. Prince was of course testing his fans and himself. That is what an artist does, takes risks, many people still dislike the beatles best stuff because it was classical or european, everyone is different. I don't think an artist should try to stay the same though.

ladygirl99 said:

these posts r funny.... Kiss, Mountains, Girls & Boys and Anotherlover....were all over WPGC, WKYS & WHUR here in DC. In fact they would play the 12" versions. DC remains to this day one of his stronger markets along with Detroit. Theses stations also had no problem with playing Raspberry Beret, Pop Life & Shes Always in My Hair on the radio!!!!

Alot of people jumped off the band wagon because unlike Purple Rain or 1999 which were rock and pop albums the work that followed them was extremly uneven and experimental. In any case black people dug the singles from Parade...they just didn't dig the songs around them