KoolEaze said:

Noodled24 said:

I don't think there is such thing as an "album for the fans" we're such a diverse bunch everyone wants something different.

I don't think D&P is a particularly commercial album. There are 4 VERY obvious hit singles. There are two more that are radio friendly.

After those you're left with

Thunder

Daddy Pop

Strollin'

Walk Don't Walk

Jughead

Push

Live4Love

I don't think any of them were written with the charts in mind.

Well...you do have a point there.

By the way, are you familiar with the first configuration of that album? When Gett Off was still Glam Slam 91? Even though it´s basically the same album it has a totally different vibe and I doubt it would have been the success that the later configuration of Diamonds and Pearls was.

Can´t even believe that he thought that the previous configuration would make a decent album...to me it sounded all over the place and very sketchy.

Yeah, I've seen the early tracklists. It doesn't at all seem like a commercial album.

I get the impression someone told him to go away and come back with some singles.

Personally I love this album. I can see why some people think it suffers from being over-produced. However I don't think the singles suffer from that, plus it was 1991.

"Daddy Pop" is IMO the most over-produced song on the album. It's a killer track but everything is so shiny and sugar coated that the fuck is dampened. Same with "Push", great little Prince track that ended up being worked on too hard. I think even "Jughead" would have some merit had it been an instrumental track, rather than using it to dis his manager.

following Graffit Bridge the film

idk as a hardcore fan I felt like this was for commercial success & to replenish the banks

For the mainstream. It never stuck with me. Money Don't Matter 2Night, Strollin I always feel have some kind of strong vibe to his core sound and music. But the rest eh
The image was so clean and polished too. I just never got me.

SPYZFAN1 said:

I was surprised that he didn't tour for "D & P" in the States. He did great on Arsenio's show... MTV, BET, and VH-1 played many of the videos and the title track was played heavily on R&B radio (next to Mariah and Whitney). I guess by the end of 1991 he was already done and was ready to move on.

I liked the concert i saw from the tour very much. It was so over the top! Sorry you guys overseas didn't get the chance to watch it.

OldFriends4Sale said:

following Graffit Bridge the film

idk as a hardcore fan I felt like this was for commercial success & to replenish the banks

For the mainstream. It never stuck with me. Money Don't Matter 2Night, Strollin I always feel have some kind of strong vibe to his core sound and music. But the rest eh
The image was so clean and polished too. I just never got me.

Just can't get on board with calling D&P a commercial album. Granted there are 4 singles which scream top 40 hiit. But the rest of the album? not so much.

I will say, the singles on the album are so blantently obvious that they must have been included deliberately - Someone said "We NEED something for MTV & Radio".

It was a change in sound. Not just the inclusion of a rapper. The live band sound to me, was just incredible. If Tony M wasn't on the album I'd have said this was the maturation of Prince's sound. Even with Tony M, musically speaking I think the album has a lot to offer.

[Edited 5/30/16 4:17am]

D&P was the first time I heard Prince. The title track is beautiful.

Was the inclusion of a rapper and hip hop elements into his band and sound really such a challenging thing for certain sects of the audience to digest?

You guys make it sound like this record was his equivalent of "Drawing Restraint 9" or something.

.

[Edited 5/30/16 5:01am]

I agree that D&P was a very commercial album. All of a sudden everyone was listening to Prince, especially those that didn't before and everyday you would walk into a shop and they would be playing either Cream or D&P. That had rarely ever happened before.
My favourite tracks were "Willing and Able", "Money Don't Matter 2Night" and "Insatiable", but I must admit it's one of his albums that I rarely listen to.
*
In fact, this just occured to me: I had friends who despised him, made fun of him all the time, called him queer and the lot, made fun of me because of how much I loved him, and bought Diamonds & Pearls. That's how commercial that album was, imo.

[Edited 5/30/16 6:13am]

" Yeah, I appreciate that, but notice the songs that keep being mentioned. The big 4. Remove those and it's totally not. I don't mean that as a negative. Just to illustrate it's an odd collection of songs. Unless it has the big 4 to anchor it. It opens with a "Christian Rock" song.

Those 4 songs ARE commercial, and scream top 40. However something like; "Daddy Pop" is Prince cultivating his "Godfather of Pop" image for the first time, with a pop-infused take on James Brown. It hardly seems coincidental that it was also 1991 when MJ contacted MTV to instist they refer to him as the King of Pop. "Daddy Pop" was never going to be a top 10 hit though, lets be honest.

I think D&P is the first sign of WB pushing back and not allowing Prince to release anything he wanted. If he'd presented them with an earlier configuration of D&P it's easy to see a record company just saying "Fuck that, come back with some hits". Which to his credit, he did.

The whole D&P era was special to me because it was the one time when I experienced a new Prince project happening from inside the States (me being from England). I was in America for the last 6 months of '91 and I enjoyed turning one or two people on to Prince that 'fall' (see, one never forgets the lingo, lol). I remembered seeing one of the music mags while I was there (could have been Billboard or Rolling Stone, I can't remember), and it was basically asking if Prince still had what it took.

Like many others here, I think Prince made D&P to prove just that...... that he DID still have what it took, in terms of laying a golden egg for the record company. It was such a contemporary and accessible album that I have to agree with what others have said, that this was an album made not for his existing fans, but to bring in new ones and strengthen his hand while negotiating a new deal.