NoSwan said:

Pichfork just revisited The Gold Experience album with a brand new review. Here is the link to the article: https://pitchfork.com/rev...ience/amp/

Thanks for this. One of my very favorite albums.

all that glitters IS gold

Gold experience is one of my favorite albums.Probably his best album of the 90's imo

LoveGalore said:

Good to see Alan Light wrote it.

i'm actually friends with his son - no lie

Cool review. Gold is one of my favorites.

It's, by far, his best work in the 90s. I've often called it the Purple Rain of the 90s.

It has everything on it you'd want in a Prince album, and more.

My only exception is "Shy." I've fully removed it (don't even try to tell me otherwise) from my playlist and remixed the adjoining tracks. I never miss it.

The chord progression on "Gold" is so wonderful and varied, different from previous stuff.

"Endorphinmachine" is a fucking rocker that rivals "Let's Go Crazy." (yeah, I said it, but LGC is still the top of the heap).

"Dolphin" never gets the rocker tag that it should.

People shit on "We March," but it's really not just a great message, but I think it's his nod to new jack swing. New Jack Prince.

The ballads like "Shhh," "I Hate U," and "TMBGITW" are stellar material.

There are funk workouts - "319" (which sounds like what Funkadelic would do today), "Billy Jack Bitch," and "Now" are sweat funktories.

I even love the b-side "Rock n' Roll Is Alive," and I could probably fit it somewhere in the tracklist.

It's just the best of the best of anything that came out in the 90s.

For fun, Fenwick and I came up with an enhanced playlist that put in a few other era-worthy tracks.

P Control

Endorphinmachine

Shhh

We March

The Most Beautiful Girl In The World

Rock n' Roll Is Alive

Interactive

Dolphin

Now

319

Acknowledge Me

Billy Jack Bitch

I Hate U

Gold

[Edited 3/6/23 20:25pm]

Is employment at Pitchfork contingent on 40 paragraphs of preamble before getting to five sentences of actual review?

Their funk/R&B retrospective reviews are most egregious, just straight-up copy/pasting review fragments and tidbits from 20 years ago.

This review contains all the dated Gold review tropes railed off one by one. Requisite Come shade CHECK, "Gold Experience is easily the best Prince album of the decade" hot off the 1995 press release CHECK, requisite Tony M. shade CHECK (btw "Jughead" was three albums prior but go on and crowbar that in to flex the .5 seconds of google search org link cred), did we mention Come sucks, did we mention the rest of the career sucks, reference 2-3 other mainstream-catered albums as proof they surveyed the entire 90s/00s and 10s oeuvre to definitively report the rest of the career indeed sucks, check, check, checkcheckcheck.

Just an abysmal website, consistently awful, but especially, considerately awful when they step outside their lane of twee indie plop. At least they spared us of the direct phrase "return to form", a first for a Gold review, though certainly that was the overall message to be extracted.

TrivialPursuit said:

It's, by far, his best work in the 90s. I've often called it the Purple Rain of the 90s.

It has everything on it you'd want in a Prince album, and more.

My only exception is "Shy." I've fully removed it (don't even try to tell me otherwise) from my playlist and remixed the adjoining tracks. I never miss it.

The chord progression on "Gold" is so wonderful and varied, different from previous stuff.

"Endorphinmachine" is a fucking rocker that rivals "Let's Go Crazy." (yeah, I said it, but LGC is still the top of the heap).

"Dolphin" never gets the rocker tag that it should.

People shit on "We March," but it's really not just a great message, but I think it's his nod to new jack swing. New Jack Prince.

The ballads like "Shhh," "I Hate U," and "TMBGITW" are stellar material.

There are funk workouts - "319" (which sounds like what Funkadelic would do today), "Billy Jack Bitch," and "Now" are sweat funktories.

I even love the b-side "Rock n' Roll Is Alive," and I could probably fit it somewhere in the tracklist.

It's just the best of the best of anything that came out in the 90s.

For fun, Fenwick and I came up with an enhanced playlist that put in a few other era-worthy tracks.

P Control

Endorphinmachine

Shhh

We March

The Most Beautiful Girl In The World

Interactive

Dolphin

Now

319

Acknowledge Me

Billy Jack Bitch

Rock n' Roll Is Alive

I Hate U

Gold

[Edited 3/5/23 21:09pm]

Surely Days Of Wild should make the cut..

.

TGE is my favourite album, tied with Love Symbol, but it'll always be tinged with 'can't believe he left DOW off it.' And to a lesser extent Acknowledge Me.

.

I couldn't get enough of those 2 on my The Beautiful Experience VHS and was gutted they didn't make the album.

dodger07 said:

chaos come and the rockers on crystal ball are so much better than gold .. that album blows

TrevorAyer said:

chaos come and the rockers on crystal ball are so much better than gold .. that album blows

TGE is easily the most overrated album in his catalogue, bar none.

Literally every TGE review in media history is seething with this palpable sense of straight up borderline telling the audience out of 40+ albums of material if you grab Purple Rain, then TGE, well, you pretty much got all there is to Prince there.... also Come was a contractual obligation that had "Prince: 1958-1993" on the cover, not sure if you were all aware...

Geetar nerds overhype it because it has more geetar. End of hype.

[Edited 3/6/23 6:35am]

The only ´frustration´ I have with the Gold Experience is that it could have been "THE NPG album", exploring the full potential of that band. I would love to see ´Days of Wild´, ´The Ride´ and ´Interactive´ there. And I don´t like some overproduced keyboards. Wish it was a more raw album. But it´s one of his greats.

Those keyboards are indeed the main reason the album has aged like limburger.

i was actually in the recent pitchfork article about elliott smith if any1 read that

lustmealways said:

i was actually in the recent pitchfork article about elliott smith if any1 read that

Did they put out some new posthumous material from teh Elliott?

WhisperingDandelions said:

Did they put out some new posthumous material from teh Elliott?

No, I just helped surface 6 albums he recorded in high school and college. In case you didn't know, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of material that exists that has yet to be released or even documented to exist. People don't really think of him as a prolific artist, but he was, and there are large swaths of his recording history that have gone completely unexplored and sadly it looks like it will remain that way as I don't believe his family nor UMG really consider exhaustive and comprehensive releases something that needs to happen, though I'm working to change that.

lustmealways said:

WhisperingDandelions said:

Did they put out some new posthumous material from teh Elliott?

No, I just helped surface 6 albums he recorded in high school and college. In case you didn't know, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of material that exists that has yet to be released or even documented to exist. People don't really think of him as a prolific artist, but he was, and there are large swaths of his recording history that have gone completely unexplored and sadly it looks like it will remain that way as I don't believe his family nor UMG really consider exhaustive and comprehensive releases something that needs to happen, though I'm working to change that.

Awesome. Considering his history with Heatmiser and successive, almost yearly solo releases it was honestly quite askew how few outtakes were ever actually released... just seemed erroneous, even From a Basement on a Hill was reported in numerous outlets as originally being intended as a double LP, yet nada outtakes or B-sides.

It's odd the fam/label don't seem to care, in indie circles he always seemed to have quite the rep. It's like if Cobain's estate figured eh, nah, nobody's interested in this dude's unreleased material.

it's easily his best album of the 90s."I Hate U" stands out as one of his finest,most soulful singles ever.

Come is better and more cohesive than gold and is in fact a top 5 p album

LoveGalore said:

TGE being great doesn't mean everything else is awful.

The friggin' review this entire thread is about says the complete opposite, though.

"The Gold Experience feels like the last time Prince, or The Artist Formally Known as Prince, tried to walk that tightrope, doing weird stuff like “Shy,” a dreamy tale of a female gang member, or the unhinged vocal on “Now,” while still assuming the pop audience would follow him. Soon, these directions would bifurcate: on the one side, the cynical, Santana-style all-star-guest strategy of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic or the calculated throwback sound of Musicology, and on the other, five-CD box sets and instrumental or religious-themed albums."

All of Rave's happenin' club chart-toppers of 1999 like Chuck D. and Ani DeFranco, that album is a literal who's who in '99 literally. every. track. And the excess of "religious-themed" albums, why those could be genres unto themselves considering there's literally no other descriptors that come to mind for these "albums" other than "religious-themed albums" we don't even need to call 'em by name. And of course this review hits the org right in the feels pointing out that he'd never reach a zenith of "weirdness" like every org'ers #1 favorite Gold track "Shy" ever again, if only our man would ever be that weird'n'cutting-edge again in the remaining 20+ years of his career but sadly no dice, "Shy" was the last bit of true experimentation he had in him.

Stick to the thread topic. Which is: this hack's deja vu review of TGE.

[Edited 3/6/23 7:54am]

I absolutely love TGE, but there are a few things I would change:

.

I wish he'd used the single version of "The Most Beautiful Girl In The World". That track was just about perfect.

.

I'm not a fan of "I Hate U". The lyrics tiptoe over the line into cheesy territory. It shouldn't have been the first single.

.

I wish he'd tweaked the lyrics to "Endorphinmachine" so that they weren't such a garbled mouthful ("You there, with the serious-lookin' disposition"). And I wish he'd used the version without the cowbell.

WhisperingDandelions said:

Those keyboards are indeed the main reason the album has aged like limburger.

.

- Prince was a great producer when he wanted to, but he also loved some keyboards that became dated.

WhisperingDandelions said:

skywalker said:

WhisperingDandelions said:

LoveGalore said:

TGE being great doesn't mean everything else is awful.

The friggin' review this entire thread is about says the complete opposite, though.

"The Gold Experience feels like the last time Prince, or The Artist Formally Known as Prince, tried to walk that tightrope, doing weird stuff like “Shy,” a dreamy tale of a female gang member, or the unhinged vocal on “Now,” while still assuming the pop audience would follow him. Soon, these directions would bifurcate: on the one side, the cynical, Santana-style all-star-guest strategy of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic or the calculated throwback sound of Musicology, and on the other, five-CD box sets and instrumental or religious-themed albums."

All of Rave's happenin' club chart-toppers of 1999 like Chuck D. and Ani DeFranco, that album is a literal who's who in '99 literally. every. track. And the excess of "religious-themed" albums, why those could be genres unto themselves considering there's literally no other descriptors that come to mind for these "albums" other than "religious-themed albums" we don't even need to call 'em by name. And of course this review hits the org right in the feels pointing out that he'd never reach a zenith of "weirdness" like every org'ers #1 favorite Gold track "Shy" ever again, if only our man would ever be that weird'n'cutting-edge again in the remaining 20+ years of his career but sadly no dice, "Shy" was the last bit of true experimentation he had in him.

Stick to the thread topic. Which is: this hack's deja vu review of TGE.

[Edited 3/6/23 7:54am]

The review does not say everything else that decade was awful. The quote you copied is instead about one of the tightropes Prince has always walked - this one being having the freedom of being a cult artist (eg as in ATWIAD) vs achieving the popularity of a rock star (as in PR). It is not saying that everything else that decade was crap. The reviewer shoots their own argument in the foot by demonstrating that he still walked the same bifurcated tightrope with subsequent albums by seeking to be a cult artist with TRC and pursuing popularity with Musicology and Rave. To which I could add the "Experience" marketing ploy used to promote the TGE album and single sets like the "Beautiful Experience" and the "Hate Experience".

What excess of religious themed albums other than TRC? Despite your claim that "we don't even need to call 'em by name", you do need to name the excess of these.

"Shy" is in no way Prince's last weird or cutting edge song - it was not weird, not cutting edge and there were subsequent weird and cutting edge songs that followed. I assume you are trying to be sarcy with the claim that Shy is every orgers #1 favourite Gold track.