The other day while listening to an early version of Carmen Electra I realized it was, in fact, a female counterpart to .

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is a massive ego-trip, a great deal of the lyrics address the fact that Prince is just the funkiest, coolest artist/man on earth and that he kicks ass in bed.

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Carmen Electra is... a massive ego-trip, a great deal of the lyrics address the fact that Carmen is just the funkiest, coolest artist/woman on earth and that she kicks ass in bed

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Given that both albums were recorded more or less at the same time I find it pretty interesting that they reflect the exact same preoccupations and that CE was almost conceived as a female answer to . Not that it's impossible to make similar connections between earlier female side-projects such as the 6's or Jill Jones and their contemporary Prince albums, but here I find it particularly obvious. I mean in more than one way D&P, , CE and GN constitute some sort of a quadrilogy anyway, but the relationship between and CE is particularly obvious.

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The funny thing is that despite having been conceived at about the same time and sharing the same basic concepts lyrically, both projects have an entirely different vibe. While was one of the most ambitious and musically complex effort ever recorded by Prince at the time, the production on CE sounds pretty rushed and not particularly taken care of. And if you add to that, of course, the personality and voice of the lead vocalists, you end up in one case with a magnificent album where the excesses of ego trip become part of what makes the whole daring and outrageously beautiful, and on the other hand you have a really gross caricature of a supposedly hot female that is more of a laughing stock than a anything admirable.

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Same boogie, but entirely different results

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CE could really have been something else entirely, if Prince had not tried so hard to do something that would sell and, instead, had focused on doing what he does, only with a female vocalist.

He just listened to hip hop too much. That's all.

NorthC said:

He just listened to hip hop too much. That's all.

Precisely I'd say the exact opposite: he didn't listen to enough hip-hop, or he wouldn't have come up with such clumsy caricatures of it. Not that I dislike all of P's hip-hop efforts at that time, there was some really cool stuff, but overall there was a lack of understanding of what made hip-hip great whenever it was great, and I suspect Prince thought he was too cool to do his homework and that since in his opinion hip-hop was lazy music for lazy non-musicians, he could emulate it in his sleep

That's another way of looking at it! I think we can agree that hiphop didn't inluence Prince in a good way. That said, I kinda like the Carmen album. It's better than the one he made for Mayte anyway. But the best Pince-produced album in these years was Mavis Staples' The Voice. Just a shame that only half of it was Prince...

There are a handful of good tracks on here, but not enough good material to fill an album.

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Also, the fact that 'All That' uses the music from 'Adore' almost entirely is a crime.