Idk if i've ever sat through the whole thing since i got it. Never really cared for the contemporary sounding Prince. But, after this, I think i'll go take a lesson, but it'll have to be tomorrow, friday night, college freshmen, you know the deal

Disc II- listened to it just now

"Sex in the Summer" seems to symbolize the kind of life Prince lived before he found love. He was always looking for a good time with the ladies. The lyrics suggest how he's commonly interested in one-night stands. How does this not bother me? I don't know. There's something enjoyable about this song. It's got a fun beat and its easy to sing along with. Either this track gives you the feel of summer or what he means by the title is enjoying sexual relations in the summer of your life, which he currently is (38 in the year 1996).
The one question I still have involves a certain something that provided the initial beat for this song. Did this heartbeat inspire the song or did he want to write a song around the hearbeat so this certain someone could truly be part of the work dedicated to him and Mayte.

"One kiss at a Time" probably has some of the best falsetto Prince has ever done. It's FLAWLESS and absolutely gorgeous. This R&B track's music was constructed with such precision and everything seemed to be in place just because the song wouldn't be complete without it. The lyrics are just as incredible, especially the 2nd bridge and the bridge towards the end of the song that begins with "if every man could love their woman the way that eye love u, time would stop and the sky would fall..."

"Soul Sanctuary" is one I've heard a few compliants about, people saying they don't like it and in some cases, makes them gag. Sure, the lyrics at times might be a little mushy, but you can't really blame him for this one because he didn't write them. It has a nice flow to it and I agree that the lyrics especially in the bridge towards the end are pushing it a bit. The main problem I have with this song is how his falsetto doesn't quite hold as well as it usually does. At one point towards the end, it sounds like his voice cracks or something because its slightly painful to the ear.

"Emale" is guilty for being the most addictive song on this entire disc. It gets stuck in my head so easily that its not even funny. It's easy to sing along to, the beat is contagious and the rhythm in the second verse makes it to die for. At least in my case. Not many seem to enjoy this one as much. What I can figure so far about its meaning is that there's a gang war and the gang leader is trying to use the lover of the other gang leader to get even with him for robbing the local cornerstore. Towards the end of the 2nd verse, he promises the girl that he'll kill her unless she dumps her current lover and becomes his.

"Curious Child" is part one of my favorite of this album. I've said before that there's a bit of a Romeo & Juliet Shakespearan vibe with the harpischord and saying she's on a balcony. The atmosphere this song creates seems to transcend time and take your mind away so you may be able to dream. I'll admit that this song creates a very dreamy atmosphere and its probably one of the most beautiful things he'd ever written musically.

"Dreamin' about you" is part two obviously. It's always cool when he has two songs that segue into one another like he did here (also on Planet Earth when he goes from "Future Baby Mama" to "Mr. Good-night", like this like was a pleasant surprise I never expected). He uses two different persona here that he creates with his voice. His falsetto, singing voice is beautiful and creates the atmosphere while his speaking voice maintains it and makes you feel it from another angle. Of course I'm always a sucker for him speaking on his songs.

"Joint 2 Joint," aside from the back-up vocals, is one of the grooviest dance tracks he's ever written, though the lyric suggest its more of a sex romp, haha. I'm not so much bothered by the lyrics here because the music makes the song way too enjoyable. What I find cool about this song is how it has three different parts. It begins with a couple of verses and the chorus. Then the music picks up and you just wanna get up and dance to the beat. The tap-dance number isn't too bad either . It sounds more like a one-night stand he has to get away from his current relationship, but at the end, he realizes that he needs some time to think about where he's going. The lyric where he's saying that this girl thinks she's his soulmate never fail to make me laugh.
"U don't love me, ur a faker. U just want me for my acres."

Surprisingly when I listened to "Holy River," I knew a lot of the words already. It's probably one of those songs where if you listen to it a couple of times, the lyrics fall in place really easy. Based on the track before this, it sounds like this is where Prince goes to figure out what he's going to do. Spend a little time on one's own, get yourself together and come to a realization. Here he realized that he loved this girl so much that he asked her to marry him. That verse almost makes me want to cry because its so romantic. No doubt, that verse was based on true events.

"Let's have a baby" is such a mushy track. It's so sweet and the lyrics are just simple enough that you can't help but fall in love with it. As beautiful and gentle as it may be, towards the end, I have to remind myself what happened later on and overall, its a sad reminder of what didn't come to pass and how Prince had been denied one of his biggest dreams. He's in a good place right now after all that's happened, but I wonder sometimes if he still has that dream even though he hasn't found the right one yet.

The last three tracks are all interrelated where Prince paints a picture of what his relationship with Mayte was like. "Saviour" alludes to how she helped him through the hard times he was having with WB when he felt enslaved by them and how she helped keep him sane. At the same time, it says just how he believes they'd met before in a past life.
"The Plan" I can't quite figure out its meaning, but its more or less a segue from Saviour to the last song, which seems to reemphasize what he's already said.

My overall reaction is that this album is very sweet and beautiful throughout. There isn't really a track that doesn't fit in here, though given the storyline, I doubt "Emale" fits in, but it doesn't mean I want to take it out of this disc.

Damn!! Imago's doing album reviews now?

That reminds me, I NEED to listen to 'In this bed I scream' again!

calldapplwondery83 said:

what you NEED to do is post pictures of yourself in underwear

i like it enuff.but i was ROFL when i seen copys at a 99cent store on cassette.



all three tapes for 99cent prince U BETTER HANDLE THAT!

You like Prince too much.

Anxiety said:

yeah and Jam of The Year has no hint of jazz anywhere.

what's wrong with him?

Have someone hacked Imago´s account?!

Gimmesomehorns said:

Am I not allowd to love Prince to my full capacity?!?!?!?

Imago said:

imago loves Prince. Don't hate him for it!

Milty said:

Hello, Princess !!

There are several , multiple moments in the album where you can hear influences of Kenny G. and Jamei Cullam

Imago said:

jamie Callum? oh christ.

Anxiety said:

If I were 2 put the CD out it.
Would include and b retitled;

THE LOVE WE MAKE
Jam of the Year
Right Back Here In My Arm
Somebody Somebody
White Mansion
Holy River
Dreamin About U
One Kiss At A Time
Sex In the Summer
Savior
Sleeo Sround
One of Us
The Love We Make
Bonus - in this bed I scream

The perfect DC

MajesticOne89 said:

Just think of it as a really long, satisfying batdick joke.

Gimmesomehorns said:

Am I not allowd to love Prince to my full capacity?!?!?!?

Disc I comes off any typical Prince album. It has 12 tracks, all of varying length and subject. Most of which deal with the gaining, the having or losing of a relationship. A handful of tracks are more extroverted, dealing with letting loose and having a good time, rather than focusing on something personal.

The whole purpose of this 3-disc set was for Prince to truly spread his wings as an artist and release the album he was born to make. Not only celebrate his own family starting to take shape, but also his freedom from his record company. Naturally, the first track gives you the whole feel of freedom. The first line where he says it’s the jam he’s been waiting for, comes right out and says that he’s been waiting a very long time to put something like this together. Therefore, he uses this track to kick off the entire project and show how and why it’s the type of album he’s always wanted to make. “Jam of the Year” is a very upbeat number that has a standard run of verses and chorus, but once that part is done, the rest of the jam sounds improvised at will and the sound of freedom is unmistakable between the sound of the instruments or Prince’s vocals.

The next two tracks deal with the losing and wanting of a relationship, both of which fall into the R&B category. “Right back here in my arms” is more of a group number, using back-up vocals from multiple people that chant the song’s title whenever appropriate. “Somebody’s Somebody” has Prince’s vocals only, but his back-up vocals are layered, giving the song more of a personal feel to generate sympathy. In both cases, the instrumentals back up the lyrics, making you feel whatever Prince wants to get across in the song. “Somebody’s Somebody” is my favorite on this disc because of that personal feel to it.

After those three tracks, things start to change direction a little bit. “Getcha groove on” sounds like a track you’d hear at a 70’s discotheque. Prince starts the track with a narrative about how he just got paid and now he just wants to get out and party. The story then shifts when a couple of characters are introduced as they enter the club and comment on the goings-on. This track feels like a throwback to the group Earth Wind and Fire with its catchy beats that make you want to get up and dance.

Afterwards, you go back even further in time to the 1940’s when big band music was the most popular. “Courtin’ Time” is a short track where Prince simply explains how he’s “courting” a girl and wants to make her his. While the previous track made you want to go dancing at a night club, this track makes you want to grab a partner and do the Quickstep across the dance floor.

Both of these tracks sound a little dated, though there’s probably a reason for it. That reason is “Betcha by Golly Wow,” a song Prince grew up with and decided to cover and remake for this particular album set. It seems that even a musician as gifted as him needs a little help describing what he feels for his special one. This is most likely because he believes very strongly that Mayte is his special one, his soulmate that he’d been waiting for all his life. No song he could write could describe quite what he felt for her like this one. The spoken portion he does towards the end of the song says it all.

“Sometime a man can’t find words to express all the thing he feels inside, but even just so often, the words of another who’s truly in love seem to work out fine.”

After all that is said and done, Prince goes back to the present and comes out with somewhat futuristic track titled “We Gets Up.” While the title makes me want to gag because that’s not proper English (and yet I have no problem with Getcha ur Groove on and Betcha by Bolly Wow, also titles that aren’t in proper English), it has a good beat. It’s a song that addresses the thoughts and feelings of Prince and his back-up band. It’s another group effort that is anything but a love song with more of an extroverted subject matter.

“White Mansion” is another R&B track where Prince tells the story of a relationship gone bad and it contains elements of his life as well as attitudes towards his old record company. He talks about how having a white mansion is his dream, but towards the end of the song, he dismisses it, saying how people who live in them are arrogant and leave others in the cold.
Come to think of it, I don’t know what the hell this track is about, haha

“Damned if I do” sounds like an updated version of his old song, “Strange Relationship,” which is filled with contradictions. No matter what he does, he can’t seem to do anything right. “Strange Relationship” is where he addresses as much as he hurts his girl, he hates that he does, but can’t seem to control the contradictions that take place in the relationship. He places the fault on the girl here unlike before where he was the one with the problem.

“I can’t make you love me” is another cover song that seems to continue from where the last song left off. In the end, the relationship is lost and Prince realizes that he can’t make this work unless she wants it to. Well done as it is, the song gets very repetitive after a while, making it one of my least favorite tracks on the whole album.

“Mr. Happy” is a song I’m still getting my head around and can’t quite get into. The delivery of the lyrics remind me somewhat of the popular “Days of Wild.” Then during the rapping section, some of the lyrics spoken are references to other songs Prince had written in the past. The subject is more about Prince, but it doesn’t have quite the same personal feel to it, so I feel like its closer to “We gets up” than any other track.

He chooses the end the album with a song that talks about the loss of a relationship, interestingly enough. Next to the title of “In this bed eye scream” on the album insert, is “For Lisa, Wendy & Susannah” written backwards, leading me to believe he wrote this song with them in mind. Back in the mid 80’s, Prince would write songs and leave them for Wendy & Lisa to finish, giving them a very close bond that he doesn’t have with his other past band members. At some point, he lost touch with Wendy & Lisa and had since had a shaky relationship with them. This song has a bit of a psychedelic edge to it much like his work with them was and the harmonies he had in the bridge were among the best in any song he’s written. Susannah, he’d collaborated with a couple songs that ended up on Sign o’ the Times and is someone he’d written many songs about, which is why she gets thrown in the same category with Wendy & Lisa. Overall, this is one of the best written songs on this disc. The music’s good and the lyrics are very catchy. The list goes on and on about reason why I love this song. Together with “Somebody’s Somebody,” these two songs give enough reasons why Prince is awesome.

[Disc II: coming soon]

Emancipation CD 3
If any of the CDs evoke any sense of the Old Prince—the obsessive, experimental, head-scratching, ‘old’ Prince, it’s the last CD in this album.
The album opens with the sparse , slave-hymm styled, ‘slave’ a song sounding oddly -like an under-produced demo (compared to the rest of Emancipation). New world is very much something I’d expect from Dirty Mind or Controversy. The Human Body proves that Prince could easily release an electronic album if he so desired…in his sleep.
Missteps, to me are the exceedingly annoying and unnecessary, la la la la la means I love U and disco-infused Sleep Around where, once again, Prince proports that it’s a man’s duty to keep his woman from straying—cause you just know those bitches can’t control their vaginas without a man’s guidance and attention.

Da Da Da is also a track I really really wish Prince would apologize for. I mean, it sucks ass.

No.....no.....no.....no.....no.....

Face Down...Da..Da..Da.. Sign of the Times...Mr Man...

you need sum funk in your trunk and get out of that box.....