feeluupp said:

67Cadillac said:

I honestly can't see a big hit out of any those songs. At least Lovesexy had "Alphabet Street," which was kind of a watered down "Raspberry Beret" and thus had a bit of commercial appeal. I can't see something like "Moonbeam Levels" being a hit in 1989.

Agree... At most it would have been a very average album, musically "better" than BATMAN to close out his 80's career.

There is no hit on the Rave album, even if those configurations have "good" songs, nothing is groundbreaking. Pink Cashmere yes it's a great beautiful song, would it be a hit in 1989? No. Moonbeam Levels would not be a hit either, to be honest none of those songs would be a hit. Electric Chair might have cracked Top 40 but it wouldn't be a big hit especially since the rest of the album really sounds nothing else like the rock vibe of Electric Chair...

I think 89 was a big turning point in Prince's career, it's almost as if he been there done that and was at an artistic block... I mean juding by the configurations of Rave it was a bunch of songs that really didn't belong with each other, Electric Chair to If I Had A Harem to Pink Cashmere all in one album? I really don't think that would flow properly, I guess he really didn't have a concept at that time he was doing so much all at the same time, Rave album, Graffiti Bridge script, was a lot, then the Batman offer popped out of nowehere.

This conclusion, which for the most part is true, is a sad look back at that time 4 Prince.
He never actually recovered in the way of having another strong cohesive concept album expression, outside of Rainbow Children(2001).

Without the movie, the album wouldn't have made a damn bit of sense.

Genesia said:

Without the movie, the album wouldn't have made a damn bit of sense.

I think it's the other way around.

It was obvious to me that Prince had most of these songs in the can already and force fed some samples and overdubs into them to somehow make them fit the film, resulting in the first blatant cash grab of his career IMO. I didn't fault him for it and, shit, who amongst us wouldn't have done the same thing? The Batman logo alone guaranteed a platinum record, no matter what was on it, but all along I always felt like the music was thematically crammed into the movie and never quite fit. Burton seemed to feel the same way. It worked and kept him in the limelight, but the Batman elements were never essential beyond selling a shit ton of albums.

In 1989, you could have slapped a Batman logo on a dog turd cupcake and gotten 5 bucks for it. that shit was HUGE and, if you weren't there, its kind of hard to understand. The hype was palpable and very very real. Think Star Wars levels of big.

I mean, aside from Batdance, without the samples and the title changes, the fucking thing has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Batman. Not even a little bit. Material wise, there's nothing here that couldn't have very easily stood on its own merits and a lot of it is quite strong; at least half of it. The Future, Electric Chair, Vicki Waiting, Scandalous, Partyman and, dare I say it, Lemon Crush, are fine tracks in their own right and have fuck all to do with what Burton did - or even the character.

I honestly think the Batman connection hurt the album and the material more than it helped.

herb4 said:

I mean, aside from Batdance, without the samples and the title changes, the fucking thing has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Batman. Not even a little bit. Material wise, there's nothing here that couldn't have very easily stood on its own merits and a lot of it is quite strong; at least half of it. The Future, Electric Chair, Vicki Waiting, Scandalous, Partyman and, dare I say it, Lemon Crush, are fine tracks in their own right and have fuck all to do with what Burton did - or even the character.

I honestly think the Batman connection hurt the album and the material more than it helped.

I agree with you on the point about how the album would sound stripped of the Batman samples and the Batdance track and this is exactly what I was asking in the first post. Remember how The Beatles went back to the Let It Be album and remixed as Let It Be... Naked, stripping it of all Phil Spectors string overdubs and recorded studio dialogue of the band talking between tracks? It makes you think of how well the Batman album would stand stripped of all things Batman, and I think A) it would still still stand as a good set of tracks, and B) we'd see that the Batman stuff is a little superficial, just being themed icing on a quite delicious cake. Ok, maybe not the best analogy, but you get what I mean.

Now if we go back to the actual song lyrics on the album we can see they are almost all attributed to either Bruce Wayne, The Joker, Or Vicki Vale. But as you say, there perhaps aren't as many direct references to the actual plot of the movie, events, or characters as we might think. For example in The Future there are the lines:

"Yellow Smiley offers me X
Like he's drinking seven up
I would rather drink 6 razor blades
Razor blades from a paper cup
He can't understand, I say to tough
It's just that I've seen the future
And boy it's rough"

Iv'e seen people say those lines reference to the scenes in the movie where the Joker laces hygiene products with Smilex and unleashes them on the public, but to me they seem to be Prince talking about his (alleged) bad experience on ecstacy (or X) that is said to have lead to him pulling the Black Album a couple of years earlier. We know also for example that Vicki Waiting is a reworked version of Anna Waiting, so it's not a stetch to imagine that Prince had a lot of material that he thought he could fairly easily rework to fit into the the soundtrack to a Batman film. You're definitely right when you say that anything with a Batman logo on it was big business back in the summer of 1989, but like you say I think this album legacy get's a little forgotten about now because in people's minds it's so tied up to a specific time and movie, or thought of as something not quite as valid than his other work or seen as a throwaway novelty because of that big logo and the Batdance single.