Calculated awesomeness using sophisticated algorithms.

[Edited 6/5/12 20:40pm]

Emancipation89 said:

Very interesting list indeed but like someone pointed out the title is misleading. You broke the albums down to songs, rated those and then added up the score - that's great but still, the way you graded these albums has nothing to do with science. You just ranked them by using both numeric and alphabetical grade system. (I see you consider 80/100 is A- and 71 is B.......Why can't professors @ my school be as generous as you )

But I wouldn't really do what you did because I have to consider how each album as a whole sounds when I try to rank them. I see Rainbow Children, Emancipation and Graffiti Bridge are down the list and Dirty Mind is way up there. I assume it was the "filler" songs that dragged down the average? To me, how the album flows overall, what story it delivers, how cohesive it sounds or how many different genres it covers, how it stays relevant with the title of an album etc etc. are all little factors I consider important. So ranking each songs and then calculating the average isn't really my style. But like I said, very interesting method!!

I agree with the idea of listening to the album as a whole and that this should play a role in determining a rating for that album.

I'm oldschool and usually listen to an album from start to finish. I want to experience the different songs and moods - it's an emotional journey. Some of Prince's 80s albums were very good at providing a range of songs to express different moods and also an overall story. Prince's albums that were soundtracks/attached to movies are very good examples - Purple Rain, Charade and Batman. I love these albums. Sometimes I'll start to cry at certain parts of the album because of the emotional journey.

Also, being albums attached to movies, I imagine the number of tracks was reduced and refined (and debated by a bunch of people). So each of these 3 albums have only around 10 tracks.

I think the tracks that actually make it onto an album are often a reduced set compared to all the tracks that were considered. In the 90s Prince adds more and more tracks to each album. Some would call this more filler. But if Prince thinks these tracks are worth having on the album I'm happy to have the chance to listen to them (rather than wonder about what I'm missing out on in the vault).

But given the pattern that Prince puts more tracks on albums from 1990 onwards, then based on the method Adorecream uses to assess albums, it's no surprise the later ones don't grade as well for him as the early ones.

I'm happy Prince still puts a range of songs on each album. Many artists who have been famous for 30+ years don't produce anything, and if they do it's usually only 1 song worth listening to per decade.

I've been spoilt. My experience of music has Prince up there above most other modern music, so any music he produces has to compete with his own older music. The older music is already programmed into my head, so each new Prince album has an uphill battle. But that said, there are always at least a few new songs that are worth "listening" to. (By "listening" I mean to actually spend time just listening to it, not just using it as background music for whatever I'm doing.)

V10LETBLUES said:

Calculated awesomeness using sophisticated algorithms.

[Edited 6/5/12 20:40pm]

Awesomeness I love it, a cool graph, lets hope you blast a lot of 80s Prince classics on tomorrow his birthday.

Astone, I did actually grade my stuff quite fairly without an 80s bias, yes he has song long albums in the 90s, but he had plenty of 9 and 10 track ones too, and both Chaos and New Power Soul and the truth have less than 12 tracks and score poorly, whereas you will see, most of his 2004 onwards period albums score in the 70s and even into the 80s.

My graph if anything shows a decline right after SOTT, a slight drop to Lovesexy and then a plateau down into the 60s for his 3 mediocre 1989 -1991 projects. I tried to be as fair as possible. If anything I think a lot of other orgers would score the post 1987 period more harshly.

Nearly everyone agrees that Prince's 1990 -1999 period was not as great as the preceding one, but that was because I feel he was chasing trends rather than starting them and he was allowing low quality songs like Jughead, Da Da Da and Shoo Bed Ooh on his albums, there is no way songs of this calibre would be accepted on to his 80s albums, they would have been experiments he would have kept in the vault or larded on to some protege's album as a filler track. I have also graded most of his filler tracks with anything from a 5 down to a 3, with less than 5% of his material getting a dreaded 2 or 1, and its his worst.

I mean could you imagine Solo on 1999 or Da Da Da on Sign o the times, of course not, there were some stand out tracks in the 90s and even stand out albums, but some albums just had too much filler (A lot of us agree that quality control went out the door with Emancipation, and there are numerous "If it was 1 disc what songs would you have for Emancipation") and again he was larding songs with overdubs at the time. Just tonight I was listening to Gett Off and thought about removing the horns, background guitar (Even bring it out, or don't use), the samples and over powering drum beat, it makes it a okay song rather than a killer one.

Not annoyed but defending my method, besides at the end of the day, its just MY opinion, not gospel and i know everyone will have an opinion of their own, I am merely sharing mine.

Adorecream said:

Sorry Bohemian

G rated means general audiences, as the music on Hits 1 is a lot more 'clean' than that on the Hits 2. (I remember when they released it, Prince wanted to call it the Good, The Bad and the Ugly). That dosen't mean that the Hits 1 is Sunday school material, you still have sexy lines like "I ve got a sugarcane etc", but the songs on the disc are mostly less sexual ones such as Diamonds and Pearls, Pink Cashmere, 1999, WDC etc.

Hits 2 was the more xrated material, where the sex in the songs is more explicit, such as Cream, Head, If I was ur girlfriend.

I like this thread more and more and will re-visit.

Believe me, the snow looks beautiful but it's not that much fun when you're trying to get to work. NZ like OZ and other southern places do miss out on world hypes it's true. But you have space, natural beauty and Tahiti is close by right?

Bohemian67 said:

Adorecream said:

Sorry Bohemian

G rated means general audiences, as the music on Hits 1 is a lot more 'clean' than that on the Hits 2. (I remember when they released it, Prince wanted to call it the Good, The Bad and the Ugly). That dosen't mean that the Hits 1 is Sunday school material, you still have sexy lines like "I ve got a sugarcane etc", but the songs on the disc are mostly less sexual ones such as Diamonds and Pearls, Pink Cashmere, 1999, WDC etc.

Hits 2 was the more xrated material, where the sex in the songs is more explicit, such as Cream, Head, If I was ur girlfriend.

I like this thread more and more and will re-visit.

Believe me, the snow looks beautiful but it's not that much fun when you're trying to get to work. NZ like OZ and other southern places do miss out on world hypes it's true. But you have space, natural beauty and Tahiti is close by right?

Tahiti is closer to America than us. We are 1300km (1 mile = 1.6 km) from Australia, 2100km from Samoa, 1800km from Tonga, and 5,000km from Tahiti (They speak French there too, so many of us prefer Fiji and Samoa for holidays). The other thing too, is we are not in the tropics, but the southern temperate zone. The Pacific Islands are an expensive and long trip for us.

I love your enthusiasm though