Another thought. it is probably a good thing the magazine is so expensive. It eliminates the possibility that casual fans might buy the magazine and then read those two star reviews with an upturned nose at Prince's musical ability.

EmmaMcG said:

purplerabbithole said:

Damn, that sucks. I was hoping finally someone would take all his music seriously. Were there any hidden masterpieces or particulary strong reviews that you were surprised about? HOw did Hit and Run II and AOA fare overall?

[Edited 9/16/17 5:31am]

The songs on Phase One got mostly 2 stars, there were a couple of 3s and June got a 4. Phase Two fared slightly better. Mostly 3s or 4s with the exception of Baltimore, which got 5 and Revelation, which got 2. Not all of the reviews are negative, for example Don't Play Me and Black Sweat received 5 stars. But even though I like both of those, I can't see them as being 5 star songs if Darling Nikki is a 2 star song. I don't agree with a lot of the reviews and I think some of them could be very off putting for a potential Prince fan but it's still a worthwhile read, I suppose. It's good to hear other people's opinions from time to time, especially when they differ from your own.

jjam said:

pricetag said:

TheDigitalGardener said: Another tight penny pincher complaining about the price of things. That much I read.

Well £8.99 is steep for 120 or so pages.

The irony of someone called pricetag taking someone to task about a comment on the price of something...

If you knew the Prince reference you'd get that there's no irony.

I haven't seen it in many places in London yet - I found it in one of the big Sainsbury's stores. It's got to be available somewhere around the Arndale or maybe one of the bigger WHSmiths like in Piccaddilly Station?

jcurley said:

Deleted - l'ange bleu - moderator

Darling Nikki... 2 out of 5 awarded to a stone-cold Prince classic? How can any song on Purple Rain be awarded a 2 rating?

Something in the water...

"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit..." --Osacar Wilde

purplethunder3121 said:

"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit..." --Osacar Wilde

Deleted - l'ange bleu - moderator

Deleted - l'ange bleu - moderator

purplethunder3121 said:

pricetag said:

You conveniently left out or didn't know (I suspect the latter) the rest of this quote, "...but the highest form of intelligence". No one's trying to be funny here.

A good thing because you aren't. Even though you are under the delusion that your ill-mannered remarks to people are quite clever when they aren't. The intelligience part of the quote doesn't apply in this case. Troll on...

Not familiar with this quote. Is it one of yours? It's a bit of a mouthful, just so you know.

EmmaMcG said:

purplerabbithole said:

2/5 for Darling Nikki??? Oh my god, I can only imagine how they will review his later work (especially once he dissolved the Revolution). Why even do a whole magazine dedicated to him if they don't like the man's most famous music. Let me guess--$$$$$$

Revelation also scored a 2. I know everyone is entitled to their own opinions but those are two of my favourite Prince songs. It seems like they grade them on how popular they are or how much they sold. A lot of the singles score high, Raspberry Beret gets a 5, whereas album tracks and lesser known songs get 2 and I've even seen a few get 1. Like, seriously, a 1 out of 5 for Dear Mr Man. 1 out of 5 is "Crazy Frog" territory, there's no way you could score a Prince song that low. Unless it's Purple and Gold.

I'm not saying that Revelation or Darling Nikki necessarily deserve a 2, but I do want to say that the reviewer is probably are rating the songs against each other--I mean, I don't think there's much in Prince's body of work that's below a 3 in comparison to the major run of pop music (with nearly everything a 4 or 5), but what use is a list of a few hundred songs ranking between 3 and 5? So a Prince 1 or 2 is not the same as Crazy Frog. It's a different scale already. And if I had to put a Prince track at 1 (and I think for a list like this to mean anything, the weakest songs have to be down there), I've got no problem with Dear Mr. Man being there. At least Purple and Gold is strange along with bad. Dear Mr. Man is musically dull and lyrically nothing he hadn't done before.

EddieC said:

jjam said:

EmmaMcG said:

purplerabbithole said:

Are we talking about album reviews or song reviews here?

Prince has got like 400 songs to be reviewed. "A Few"?

EmmaMcG said:

purplerabbithole said:

What about 3 and 4 star reviews?

There's a few of each, especially 3 star reviews.

Well, I guess it's obvious why this is Bart's recommendation.

EmmaMcG said:

EddieC said:

I'm not saying that Revelation or Darling Nikki necessarily deserve a 2, but I do want to say that the reviewer is probably are rating the songs against each other--I mean, I don't think there's much in Prince's body of work that's below a 3 in comparison to the major run of pop music (with nearly everything a 4 or 5), but what use is a list of a few hundred songs ranking between 3 and 5? So a Prince 1 or 2 is not the same as Crazy Frog. It's a different scale already. And if I had to put a Prince track at 1 (and I think for a list like this to mean anything, the weakest songs have to be down there), I've got no problem with Dear Mr. Man being there. At least Purple and Gold is strange along with bad. Dear Mr. Man is musically dull and lyrically nothing he hadn't done before.

I don't think they are being scored against each other. It just seems to me that the guy reviewing them isn't that big a Prince fan. There are more 2 star ratings than there are 5 star ratings.

I haven't seen it yet (and probably won't for awhile), so I can't really say what they're doing in the Uncut guide--but that's how most of these big career review things (including some others I've read from Uncut) really seem to pan out in my experience. Mid-range ratings (and a 2 is still mid-range) usually dominate. There really should be few 5s if tracks are rated against each other. The best Prince is the minority. The majority is mid-range--it's mid-range Prince, and thus better than most people's best, but unless you're going to be giving everything 4s and 5s (not very helpful in my opinion), you're going to have to have a fair number of things lower down. And the difference between those midrange ratings (like a high two and a low 4) is often much less significant than it might seem, at least in my experience. The break between a 4 and 5 would be much more important.

Years ago (shortly after Crystal Ball's release), I set myself a task, a sort of theoretical "how would I introduce someone to Prince's work and career arc", and as part of that I decided to sort the tracks from each album into 3 categories, and enforce a fairly strict (and arbitrary) 1/3 of the tracks into each one. So, for a nine track album like Purple Rain, it was three top/essential tracks, three average tracks, three poor tracks. It was tough to stick to the 1/3 restrictions. I didn't want to say many tracks were poor, because I still liked them--but I also had to admit they were weaker than the others they sat beside on the album. But the 1/3 at the top was also often hard to do. Most projects had a clear 1 or 2 tracks that just jumped out. The THIS IS CLASSIC type obvious answers (hanging around the org, though, I've realized that many of the obvious tracks aren't obvious to everyone). But then, when I needed one more track to fit the quota, I'd find that instead of a clear great tracks, there was a cluster of two or three or three tracks at about the same level of quality, and only one could make the cut. They were all good tracks, but I could also tell there was a real difference between that group and the obvious classic tracks. None of them was a clear standout choice for the top 1/3 from the project. And there was often another pretty sharp break before the truly weakest track(s).

Compared to a 5-point rating like Uncut has done, my obvious classics would be the 5s, the weakest of the bottom third might be 1s (many projects probably wouldn't have a 1, or not more than one of them). But most of the "weak" third, all of the "average" third, and often at least some of the "top" third would be somewhere between 2-4, and which number a track received (2, 3, or 4) would be fairly meaningless--and probably variable if I did the ratings a month later. The real difference between a 2 and a 4 rating would probably be less significant than the difference between 3 and 5, or between 3 and 1, even though the arithmetical difference is the same--and maybe between 4 and 5 (in most cases) and almost always between 2 and 1. This isn't really math, and you can't get too tied up in the actual number. I'm not sure what the actual "definitions" are that Uncut provides for their ratings (if any), but the following is what I always think of when I'm reading a 5 point rating, and it generally seems to fit, no matter what the official language is. There's a big gap between the best (5) and the pretty good (4), and between the worst (1) and the not bad (2). Not bad and pretty good are really just slight variations of okay (3). I think most of Prince's work is remarkably good, and only a handful of tracks (probably fewer than 10) aren't pleasureable for me. But nearly all would receive ratings of 2-4 if I were forced to rate them within Prince's full output--but I also would hate to try to do that task (I never completed my project, and that was in 1998). So I don't have a problem with that happening in Uncut's ratings. I expect it--and I generally see it when publications do this sort of career review.

As to whether the reviewer is a Prince fan--have you read the sort of ratings people around here give Prince's tracks? There are a number people on the org whose fandom I wouldn't question who rank a good chunk of Prince's work as 1s on a 10-point scale.

I must say I am disapppointed by the content of this magazine for a number of reasons.

.

I have a few of the Uncut Ultimate Music Guides on a number of different artists so therefore have been waiting expectedly every month for them to feature Prince.

.

I've always enjoyed the ones on other artists and they have certainly took me back to revisit their music.

.

Maybe it is because I have a more in depth knowldege of Prince then I do other artists but I found so many basic mistakes in this publication, as well as many ommisions.

.

For example how can you do a bio of his albums without mentioning Newpowersoul, Exodus or 2gether? I know these are technically NPG albums but stil.......

.

And why it continues to title "Family Name" as "Family Way" is particularly annoying. No review of Purple Rain Deluxe either......

.

Maybe my expectations were too high.............

Harps said:

I must say I am disapppointed by the content of this magazine for a number of reasons.

.

I have a few of the Uncut Ultimate Music Guides on a number of different artists so therefore have been waiting expectedly every month for them to feature Prince.

.

I've always enjoyed the ones on other artists and they have certainly took me back to revisit their music.

.

Maybe it is because I have a more in depth knowldege of Prince then I do other artists but I found so many basic mistakes in this publication, as well as many ommisions.

.

For example how can you do a bio of his albums without mentioning Newpowersoul, Exodus or 2gether? I know these are technically NPG albums but stil.......

.

And why it continues to title "Family Name" as "Family Way" is particularly annoying. No review of Purple Rain Deluxe either......

.

Maybe my expectations were too high.............

Fair points. Insightful too. Somebody earlier moaned about the price. That wasted time.

dodger said:

I had a flick through it in Tesco and came across a photo from the Nude Tour of Prince with 'The Gang Boys.'

It's a reprint of the original review from 1990, complete with error at the time (there was no easy fact checking back then)