Yeah, The Love We Make has to be one of Prince's best ever songs, its so touching and atmospheric.

Se7en said:

BorisFishpaw said:

Even that wouldn't help IMO. Even if you edited it down to a single disc of the best tracks, it still doesn't come close to his previous album The Gold Experience in terms of Songwriting, fire and musical range. There's more ideas and diversity in The Gold Experience's 12 songs than Emancipation's 36, which is what makes it feel like such a missed opportunity.

Emancipation isn't a bad album, it's just an OK one. Which compared to Prince's previous output is disappointing. It's also the point when he seemed to stop trying to push the musical envelope and create something new and different. Instead of setting trends, he just seemed to follow them and blend in with the crowd.

I'm listening to the album now, probably the first time in 2-3 years (aside from the odd single track).

A few of your comments are dead on:

• There's no "fire" - everything seems to be on auto-pilot

• He's not pushing the envelope

• He's following trends on this one (and, sadly, most of the albums that follow this too)

I think the songwriting is actually better than The Gold Experience for most of the album, but a lot of the songs drone on and end up sounding the same. To me, this is Prince's "mellow R&B album".

You're right, I take it back about the songwriting. Emancipation's main problem is not so much the songs themselves, it's down to the production/execution. Which just hammers out what little variation and diversity there is on the album, turning everything out into this bland samey middle ground.

[Edited 5/8/11 2:52am]

Jeez u made me feel old, can it be 15 years already... yeah... i remember the day i bought it...

I still consider it an absolute masterpiece, possibly Prince's best album ever. Not as edgy as the 80's albums 4 sure, but an amazing mix of deeply inspired love and spirituality songs with delicate and complex arrangements. Sometimes maturity and mastery over one's form of art can rival the craziness of an artist's early years, and that's where Emancipation stands IMO.

Of course, I'm one of the few folks here who really dig the sound of the plastic years, so...

The argument that the album would have made a great single disc is somewhat flawed. We have had many threads on here where people whittle the three discs down to a single disc and inevitably the end result is very different for each person. A lot of people claim that Emancipation has too much filler but there is very little agreement on what exactly are the filler tracks.

For me the biggest flaw in the album are the cover tracks. "One of Us" is the only one that improves over the original version. I would have been happy if the covers were dropped in favour of the outtakes that surfaced. I thought it was kind of special that Prince had never released a cover song and when he did he lost a little bit of that uniquness that he had.

rialb said:

The argument that the album would have made a great single disc is somewhat flawed. We have had many threads on here where people whittle the three discs down to a single disc and inevitably the end result is very different for each person. A lot of people claim that Emancipation has too much filler but there is very little agreement on what exactly are the filler tracks.

For me the biggest flaw in the album are the cover tracks. "One of Us" is the only one that improves over the original version. I would have been happy if the covers were dropped in favour of the outtakes that surfaced. I thought it was kind of special that Prince had never released a cover song and when he did he lost a little bit of that uniquness that he had.

I kind of agree, insofar as I was just underwhelmed by the ones he chose. It was such a taboo thing for him at the time that I felt shit like "Betcha By Golly Wow" wasn't the type of interpretation I was looking for...

rialb said:

Love this album, it's probably in my top five.

Agreed. Like you say nobody agrees on the "filler" tracks that should have been edited out and I agree with another poster that it's his last great album of new material.

I totally forgot to include "Betcha By Golly Wow" in the mix. I was really excited about Prince and Mayte at the time. I don't know if it's because I was a teenager and watching my favorite musician enter into a new phase of life, etc. but it was a great time for him. I was really sad to see things turn out the way they did.

It's been almost 15 years, and it's STILL a piece of shit with chunks of corn. And his band at the time...*shudder*

It's not one of my favorite Prince albums.I like a handful of songs but I can never listen to it all the way through without skipping any tracks.

alexnvrmnd777 said:

It's been almost 15 years, and it's STILL a piece of shit with chunks of corn. And his band at the time...*shudder*

I like shit with chunks of corn!!!!

thedance said:

I don't love Emancipation like I do with the classics (1978-1995),

I still LIKE Emancipation though, after all those listenings over the years it has grown for me.

I rate Emancipation a good album, but still not a classic like The Gold Experience, or those 1980's Prince albums.

Like most Prince fans I have a problem with the plastic sterile sound on Emancipation.

It could have been a very much better album with a more rough production, (damn Kirky).

Imo: 8/10 to Emancipation

Ok, I was listening to Joint 2 Joint recently and he says something about happy to be a Human BI-ing? Ok, I really hate to ask this but---is he talking about happy to be "BI" as in bisexual? Or, am I just reading too much into that lyric...Prince and his sexual ambiguity really comes up at strange times, so perhaps that why I wondered about that lyric. Thoughts?

I can't believe it's been 15 years.

holy my fuck shit

SeventeenDayze said:

Ok, I was listening to Joint 2 Joint recently and he says something about happy to be a Human BI-ing? Ok, I really hate to ask this but---is he talking about happy to be "BI" as in bisexual? Or, am I just reading too much into that lyric...Prince and his sexual ambiguity really comes up at strange times, so perhaps that why I wondered about that lyric. Thoughts?

Do you know what...I never read anything into that...but interesting point. I just felt he was doing it as a play on words not meaning anything but who knows.

I never quite understood the woman's speech about "Dicks, Toms and Harry's are not the same, some dip their lower lip as if to suckle poison" etc. Sounds sexual but don't get it.

[Edited 5/9/11 9:54am]

SeventeenDayze said:

It's hard to believe that it's been 15 years since the "Emancipation" album. What are your thoughts on the album all these years later? Does it sound better, worse, the same? Could Prince have released Emancipation in 2011 to a warm reception?

Everything produced and released has been right on time. If it was released today, then he would still have to be with Mayte because she was the 'muse' / inspiration for 90% of that album.

I was feelin' my man then too ... 4 1/2 out of 5 album

SeventeenDayze said:

Ok, I was listening to Joint 2 Joint recently and he says something about happy to be a Human BI-ing? Ok, I really hate to ask this but---is he talking about happy to be "BI" as in bisexual? Or, am I just reading too much into that lyric...Prince and his sexual ambiguity really comes up at strange times, so perhaps that why I wondered about that lyric. Thoughts?

lol, no. Seriously. Sometimes he's just an artist.

It has sadly become very dated and uninteresting. This was the album that he referred to as 'the dawn' of his new career. I guess it really was, if he was trying to announce the new phase of his career as boring and a series of missed opportunities.

Disc 1 & 2 one of my all time favorite CD...love the funk, romance and the real...love it...love it ...still a emancipation girl

novabrkr said:

Good album. Not every track on it suffers from the softer production style. "The Holy River", for example, sounds just great the way it is. However, it was his first album that had a considerable number of R&B ballads on it and it made the overall package sound a bit dull. We didn't really call that stuff "R&B" back then though - we called it "MOR".

It's still got some edginess and wackiness on it: "Joint 2 Joint", "Face Down", "In This Bed I Scream", "New World". I thought "My Computer" reflected the times pretty well and it sounded beautiful when the internet had just become a worldwide phenomenon. "The Love We Make" is a pretty good "sequel" to "Purple Rain".

As pointed out previously, it could have been easily turned into a 2CD release without even having to take too many tracks out of it. You can put 75-80 minutes of music on a single CD and many of the songs on those three CDs have all kinds of additional intros, outros and sound effects taking up the space.

The cover art on it was inexcusably terrible for such an expensive release. I won't defend that.

"My Computer" is one of my favorite songs on the album. I also really like "White Mansion." It's interesting to hear Prince singing about Internet chat rooms and his financial problems instead of hearing what an awesome lover he is for the 1000th time. Those songs most likely have been cut if the album had to fit on 2 discs.

The album has a sense of purity, renewal, redemption and spirituality that is appealing.

as has been said before and much after, this could have been a very good single 12 track disc. As always [most times anyway] he really did put some filler in there - he manages to do that with most CD's be it 36 tracks or 8 tracks!!. A lot of these Emancipation songs I can imagine being used on the Disney channels!!

dated.

with the exception of a few very nice songs this album absolutely sux.. i could make 1 decent cd from the 3

although i really liked his hair during this era

Se7en said:

I'm listening to the album now, probably the first time in 2-3 years (aside from the odd single track).

A few of your comments are dead on:

• There's no "fire" - everything seems to be on auto-pilot

• He's not pushing the envelope

• He's following trends on this one (and, sadly, most of the albums that follow this too)

I think the songwriting is actually better than The Gold Experience for most of the album, but a lot of the songs drone on and end up sounding the same. To me, this is Prince's "mellow R&B album".

This is exactly how I feel about the lion's share of this album and why I always stick up for it.

The production is certainly plastic and takes away from the impact of some of the songs. But I'd say about half of this album is great composition-wise.

It's the drum programming that sucks the life out of the production, in my opinion. Lazy library beats, lifeless sounds. Prince's talents as a drummer and programmer contributed so much to his earlier albums, but here it just sounds like he was barely involved in the beats. Notable exceptions being My Computer, Slave and In This Bed I Scream. I would have loved to have heard Holy River with live Prince-played drums...

NouveauDance said:

eireboy34 said:

Play it after Lotusflowershite and you'll see how second rate P's music has become.

Really? For me I'd switch those around.

It's less bloated with throwaways than Crystal Ball, but for me most of D1's nonsense. Still there's enough thereafter to make it his best nineties' release, maybe.

The quality tracks that instantly spring to mind:

Sleep Around, The Love We Make, NewWorld, Friend-Sister-Mother-Wife, La-La Means I Love U, Dreamin' About U, The Holy River, Courtin' Time, Betcha by Golly-Wow, Get Yo Groove On, My Computer, Emancipation.

BorisFishpaw said:

Militant said:

Could have been a killer single disc, and even an outstanding double.

Even that wouldn't help IMO. Even if you edited it down to a single disc of the best tracks, it still doesn't come close to his previous album The Gold Experience in terms of Songwriting, fire and musical range. There's more ideas and diversity in The Gold Experience's 12 songs than Emancipation's 36, which is what makes it feel like such a missed opportunity.

I agree with Boris here, Emancipation was his first really bad album IMO. I was so excited about his newgained freedom, but what a plastic garbage we got with that album...

funkaholic1972 said:

BorisFishpaw said:

Even that wouldn't help IMO. Even if you edited it down to a single disc of the best tracks, it still doesn't come close to his previous album The Gold Experience in terms of Songwriting, fire and musical range. There's more ideas and diversity in The Gold Experience's 12 songs than Emancipation's 36, which is what makes it feel like such a missed opportunity.

I agree with Boris here, Emancipation was his first really bad album IMO. I was so excited about his newgained freedom, but what a plastic garbage we got with that album...

Admit it! You are the reincarnation of Helen Keller!!!

wow a wide range of opinions on this one. I'm pro-Emanciaption overall. While there are some cringe-inducing songs of prince's awful New-Jack phase on here (Eg "Mr. Happy," "right back here in my arms"), I still think this album was the last time Prince actually tried to make a GREAT album. He was aiming for the fences on this one. The album's flaw as everyone has pointed out is the stale production, which had to have been born out of some strange instinct to sound "mature" to go along with the excellent, more mature and more personal lyrics.

"Holy River," "Lets have a baby", "Sex in summer" "My Computer" , "In this Bed", and even "White Mansion" showed very personal, relatable sides of prince, which had been missing.

At the time, I though this set was a good, albeit flawed, first volley in a new era for our guy but alas I think the death of his son really changed everything. Had the little guy survived, I think we'd be talking about a very different person now.