Since links to reviews are popping-up randomly in various threads, I just felt it'd be nice to have a separate thread from orgers' reviews for music press reviews (not that they are necessarily better than ours, I've read a lot of amateur writing so far by so-called professional writers ).

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Please post links or copy/paste reviews here

No?

I like the second half the album much more....But Grantland thinks its his best "pop" album in years....What do I know???...lol

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Grantland

Paisley Overground: Prince’s Best Pop Record in a Decade Is Hiding on Tidal

Music

September 9, 2015

When he is an old man he will wear purple, or he won’t, and he will waste not one second of thought on the question of what it is we want from him. But until then, Prince Rogers Nelson, the Joyce Carol Oates of the funk, remains obligated to at least occasionally acknowledge the existence of casual Prince fans by putting out records like this one, HITNRUN Phase One, on which he’ll role-play as someone who cares about currency and concision if that’s what turns you on. And for what it’s worth, the dizzying, frustrating Prolix Prince period — an era of countless new Prince albums that expressly weren’t the new Prince album, of triple-live-yawnzo talk-show-jazz odysseys and fan-club-only curios and CDs delivered glued to the Daily Mirror, among other cockamamie outside-the-system distribution schemes — has been over for a while now. The tight and bright Art Official Age from 2014 was his first new product since 2010’s limp 20Ten, and you got the sense he’d turned a page, even if he couldn’t resist competing with himself in the marketplace by putting out a drab hard-rock album credited to his all-female touring band, 3RDEYEGIRL, on the same day. To wish for a Prince who doesn’t test us at least a little is to miss the whole point of Prince.

Maybe most crucially, Art Official credited Joshua Welton as co-producer, the first time Prince has shared that job since he persuaded Lenny Waronker to let him self-produce For You in 1978. For years, Prince fans have kicked around the question of whether it would behoove him to accept the input of true collaborators — a Questlove, a Pharrell, a The-Dream, a Devonte Hynes, a Deep Cotton, or any other acolyte who might steer him away from boilerplate and back toward the True Purple Light. Even speaking as someone who has A&R’d more than a few fan-fictional Prince comeback records in my head over the years, this scenario also seems founded on a willful misunderstanding of the man’s whole deal; something tells me he’d sooner wear flats to an awards show than let himself be second-guessed, even by another visionary. The 25-year-old Welton — whose previous claim to fame was a reality-TV-documented stint with BET trivia questions Fatty Koo and whose wife, Hannah, is 3RDEYEGIRL’s drummer — probably owes him too much to ever become the Rick Rubin–style sensei that essentialist Prince fans have been pining for, and that’s probably why he got the job. But his presence clearly brought some fresh air into the room, and Art Official turned out to be a surprisingly focused testament to just how much pop life Prince has left in him.

HITNRUN Phase One — Prince’s first record since declaring the Internet dead and then relocating his streaming presence to Jay Z’s gated artists’ community, Tidal — might be even better. We open, on “MILLION $ SHOW,” with a robot promising not to hurt us and a coy sample of the “Dearly beloved … ” speech from “Let’s Go Crazy.” But the “Mind if I turn on the radio?” bit from “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” would have set the tone almost as well; this is the most sounds-o-the-times Prince album in forever, elastic R&B dialed in to EDM, the bleeps and buzzes of contemporary club-rap, and the industrial lurch of Yeezus. (Prince has been pitch-shifting his voice up and down for decades, but I swear I can even hear a subtle whisper of Auto-Tune here and there, like a touch of Botox at a starlet’s brow.) But it feels weird and backhanded to congratulate Prince for successfully assimilating the dominant electronic textures of one of recent history’s more notably Prince-indebted pop moments, just like it would be silly to praise Martin Scorsese’s next bravura tracking shot as an homage to Cary Fukunaga.

What’s important isn’t the degree to which the minimal basic track for “HARDROCKLOVER” apes Kanye’s “Amazing,” but the sly way Prince slips in and out of the music’s constraints, monotoning “Ain’t no rapper tryna be a singer / I’ma make her moan” before plugging in his guitar and hosing the room down with napalm. And while the world could probably have gotten by just fine without a reworking of the Art Official highlight “This Could B Us” that adds pensive dubstep woob-woobs, there’s something thrilling about hearing Prince glide over the clamor for two minutes before grabbing the controls for an extended instrumental vamp that threads the needle between Drake’s “Shut It Down” and Funkadelic’s “Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts.” Time and again, it’s as if you’re watching a 57-year-old escape artist calmly assess a trap he’s never been in before, then somehow cough up the key.

And if one of the few new things we learn about Prince is that his favorite Stankonia deep cut is “Xplosion” (or so I hear, when the harpsichords kick in on “Ain’t About to Stop”) — well, look, to want something more personal than that is unrealistic, too. He’s been an inscrutable (glyphlike?) protagonist on his own records for years — a charismatic host who gets the party jumping and slips away before it’s over, having revealed nothing about himself. (Except his oft-reiterated belief that “dead blood kills interferons,” a longstanding platform issue for our hero, whose Jehovah’s Witness faith prohibits transfusions.) So the most interesting note HITNRUN hits is the one it ends on. Earlier, on the weird boast song “X’s Face,” there’s a rap about how black don’t crack and beige don’t age, but on the spare, cryptic closer “June,” named for a certain Artist’s birth month, Prince puts a pot of pasta water on the stove, asks an anonymous halfway-out-the-door love-object some unanswerable questions (“Why did you come to this planet? … What did you have for lunch today?”), watches a Richie Havens record spin on the stereo, and admits he sometimes feels he should have been born earlier, “on the Woodstock stage.”

The artist that the stream of his consciousness most brings to mind here is, I swear, Lil B’s on Rain in England. He sings about waiting, maybe about a life of waiting, and you’re not sure he knows for what. How did it get so late? When did it get so cold? “Somebody famous had a birthday today,” he sings. “All I saw was another full moon.” Then the pasta starts to boil over, and the song ends and he’s gone, having been more present here for the last three minutes than he’s been for the previous 34. I was sad to leave his internal monologue; I assume his reluctance to be bogged down by linear time and his own words will prevent him from ever writing his version of Dylan’s Chronicles, and I understand that Prince wouldn’t be Prince if he talked to us like we were his friends (because he’s not our friend — he is someone we will never comprehend). But I promise to pony up for a paid Tidal subscription if he’ll agree to host an extemporaneous podcast once every new moon.

link: http://grantland.com/holl...-on-tidal/

[Edited 9/11/15 8:06am]

the grantland review is very good. the bad reception of hitnrun among orgers is more a reflection of our inability to understand the self-aware machinations of prince's musical meanderings. The key to the whole album is the line from dorothy parker: "Mind if I turn on the radio." it was meant in a different way then.

Funkyalien said:

the grantland review is very good. the bad reception of hitnrun among orgers is more a reflection of our inability to understand the self-aware machinations of prince's musical meanderings. The key to the whole album is the line from dorothy parker: "Mind if I turn on the radio." it was meant in a different way then.

I agree to a point....I think the first few songs on HitNRun are pretty corny, especially "Million $ Show," "Shut This Down," and "Like A Mack" (the breakdown is interesting though)...And "Mr. Nelson" is taking up space. Was not needed....at all. Those songs don't marry the "now" better with Prince's trademark sounds as well as say the revamped "This Could B Us," "The X's Face," Hardrocklover," "1000 X's & 0's" and "June" (BRILLIANT!!!!!) do. Those tracks work.....And "Ain't About 2 Stop" picks up during the second half...That fucking bass is killer....

But I'm still laughing at the doomsday freakouts some Orgers are throwing out....Shit is amusing. These people need to enjoy life....

murph said:

Funkyalien said:

the grantland review is very good. the bad reception of hitnrun among orgers is more a reflection of our inability to understand the self-aware machinations of prince's musical meanderings. The key to the whole album is the line from dorothy parker: "Mind if I turn on the radio." it was meant in a different way then.

I agree to a point....I think the first few songs on HitNRun are pretty corny, especially "Million $ Show," "Shut This Down," and "Like A Mack" (the breakdown is interesting though)...And "Mr. Nelson" is taking up space. Was not needed....at all. Those songs don't marry the "now" better with Prince's trademark sounds as well as say the revamped "This Could B Us," "The X's Face," Hardrocklover," "1000 X's & 0's" and "June" (BRILLIANT!!!!!) do. Those tracks work.....And "Ain't About 2 Stop" picks up during the second half...That fucking bass is killer....

But I'm still laughing at the doomsday freakouts some Orgers are throwing out....Shit is amusing. These people need to enjoy life....

yeah...the point isn't always whether the music works for you or not. the point is, i think, to truly comprehend why he has made music like this. I don't buy the theory that prince doesn't know what works and what doesn't work anymore.

He has made this music in a very self-conscious manner as always, the trick — and enjoyment — is to be intelligent enough to know the irony when it hits you.

it's essentially the same problem many of us must have had when My Name Is Prince came out.

On the surface, it's braggadocio, but essentially it's self-image-deprecating too, and ties in with the theme of Prince trying some new-fangled pop sound which he doesn't quite feel, but nevertheless puts himself bang in the middle of it and then tries to put his stamp on it. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. it takes guts to do this.

somewhere down the line in his career, prince's genre-bending tendencies stopped serving the song and became an exercise in itself. But he always makes it clear that he knows he's feeling a new thing.

I'm coming to the conclusion that prince's idea of being a serious pop star and our idea of a serious pop star is quite different. end of the day, he's still the quintessential pop star, straddling generations, trying newer and newer sounds, still trying to work the radio. this is harder work than coming out with a madhouse-type album. probably being a serious sessions musician bores prince.

so the question -- whether a certain song/album is good or not -- is the wrong starting point. there will always be divisive opinions. the enjoyment is to see prince squirm in a new role, then wait to see if he comes out smelling like a rose. why does he put himself through this?

Found this review on a site called Suffield Times (http://www.suffieldtimes....ne/108998/). It looks like it was run through some sort of thesaurus check (as opposed to a spellcheck), as many words have been replaced by similar words, leaving us with an unintentionally humorous review. My favorites are the references to the Prince classics "Let's Go Loopy" and "Soiled Thoughts." This thing is a mess:

It is sensible that Prince selected Labor Day to ship his new album, given the emphasis he is put recently on his devotion to work.

Launched early Monday solely on the streaming service Tidal, "HitNRun Part One" comes lower than a yr after "Artwork Official Age" and "PlectrumElectrum," the 2 discs Prince put out final fall as a part of an sudden rapprochement together with his previous main label, Warner Bros. Data. The album additionally follows a few stray singles, together with "Stare" and "Baltimore," issued via numerous digital-music suppliers — a way of distribution he famously declared "utterly over" in 2010.

Even the title of the brand new document, drawn from Prince’s present tour (on which he is been saying live shows simply days earlier than they occur), leads you to consider that a second quantity could possibly be on the best way. For a man who not way back appeared ambivalent about reentering the pop mainstream, this frenzy of exercise seems like an indication that he needs to be a part of the dialog once more.

So does the sound of lots of his newest songs. As he did for "Artwork Official Age," Prince, 57, enlisted Joshua Welton (who’s married to the drummer in Prince’s band 3rdeyegirl) to co-produce "HitNRun," and like the sooner report, the brand new one pulls deeply from the type of digital dance music that now dominates pop.

"Shut This Down" has processed robotic voices and stuttering dubstep synths, whereas "Ain’t About 2 Cease" places a menacing machine beat underneath duet vocals by Prince and the British striver Rita Ora, who is aware of one thing about co-opting fashionable types. "X’s Face," with a stark industrial-funk groove, suggests an EDM remix of Prince’s nice 2006 single "Black Sweat."

As that track makes clear, Prince’s recent dialect makes use of bits of his established grammar. In "This Might B Us," for example, he drops a clipped rhythm guitar lick among the many layered keyboard elements, connecting it not solely to the cleaner-lined R&B model of the music that appeared on "Artwork Official Age" however to previous hits like "Kiss." (He additionally quotes "1999" and "Let’s Go Loopy" at the start of "Million $ Present.")

You are reminded in these moments of how a lot affect Prince’s music nonetheless exerts on immediately’s soul mavericks reminiscent of D’Angelo, Frank Ocean and the Weeknd. One facet of what they’re making an attempt to stay as much as is the rigorous high quality management Prince exercised on basic albums like "Soiled Thoughts" and "Purple Rain"; that dedication to excellence is partially why D’Angelo took greater than a decade to finish final yr’s "Black Messiah" and why Ocean has stored followers ready for his follow-up to 2012’s acclaimed "Channel Orange."

But Prince appears to have shaken that perfectionist streak. Whilst he sings in "June" about having been born too late for Woodstock — an period when rock was dominated by the cautious album-length assertion — Prince on "HitNRun" seems unbothered by the necessity to make each music rely: For each gem akin to "X’s Face" or the blistering "Hardrocklover" (through which he guarantees to make use of his guitar to "make this lady scream"), there is a half-considered reduce akin to "Like a Mack" or "Mr. Nelson," which principally makes a dreamy vamp out of Prince’s 2014 music "Clouds." And it is that willingness to chase down an concept, even an insignificant one, that makes Prince look as trendy as he has in years.

Does that imply "HitNRun" may extra precisely have been titled "HitNMiss"? Certainly, it does. However Prince catches one thing indelible about our provisional age in "Fallinlove2nite," a stunning disco jam about specializing in the pleasure at hand. Don’t be concerned if it does not final till tomorrow, he appears to be saying; he’ll be up early to seek out one thing else that will get the job carried out.

I think the last link points to an article that's been run through google translate. The original might have been written in a foreign language, which can come out like this when automatically translated. Fun stuff, lol.

databank said:

Since links to reviews are popping-up randomly in various threads, I just felt it'd be nice to have a separate thread from orgers' reviews for music press reviews (not that they are necessarily better than ours, I've read a lot of amateur writing so far by so-called professional writers ).

.

Please post links or copy/paste reviews here

.

Or perhaps you could update the wiki article.

BartVanHemelen said:

murph said:

Let's talk about the reviews.

It's obviously a mixed reception at best, but the good reviews have strong arguments about what this record really is. As there are two other phases by all indications, it will be interesting to see how it fits with the other parts of the project .

It was bound to offend the purists but Prince didn't become Prince by being a purist.

Funkyalien said:

Funkyalien said:

yeah...the point isn't always whether the music works for you or not. the point is, i think, to truly comprehend why he has made music like this.

I totally agree with this line. At this point I'm more interested in the creative process of an artist than by the result as something I expect to entertain me. It will or it won't, but what I like is to try and figure out what was happening

datdude said:

Funkyalien said:

Wow, Funkyalien! Props due, loved your post, thoughtful, and well written, i think are correct about P. U must be an alien indeed, don't let the Org taint u and please post more often

thank you. i will try to post when i have something to say. have been in the org close to 13 years, maybe more, don't remember. the org, lately, is too black and white. the trick, as always, according to me, is whether we are enjoying prince or not. i think we are.

good or bad? do i like it or not? is strange relationship better than clouds? is x and y liking the music? isn't a and b trashing it yet?

all of us forget that prince is a progressive pop star. we are all too used to progressive rock, phish and tull, but progressive pop? alien territory.

i think most of the org loves prince, contrary to opinion building up in the mass-media about this being a "laugh at their hate " site.

but all of us are a bit shortsighted sometimes, blinded by our love for the prince music we like.

there is a reason prince is bigger than his fans. there is a reason prince will out-live us all.

i think the org comes around to it, eventually. prince might make a popular album today, or yesterday, but there is always an intellectual element in the approach to the music.

[Edited 9/13/15 12:33pm]

[Edited 9/13/15 12:36pm]