here's an article for some of the newer Prince fans that don't know the story behind the excellent The Gold Experience

By NUVO Newsweekly
March 15, 1995
Every so often, an album creates such a buzz, it reaches mythical proportions before it's even released. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan and the Band recorded The Basement Tapes, a series of freewheeling honky-tonk tunes that the world had to wait until the mid-1970s to hear.

In 1995, we have , the artist formerly known as Prince, and The Gold Experience, a barn-burner of album which Warner Bros. was supposed to released Tuesday but didn't, for unknown reasons.

The basic story of The Gold Experience is thus:

has wanted to release the album since February 1994. Warner Bros. has declined to release the CD, according to this rumor, and is not allowed to release this disk on his own.

Another version of the story says Warner Bros. and have come to an agreement about the release of The Gold Experience. The release date was set for sometime in March 1995. Surprisingly, hasn't delivered the master tape to Warners, so the story goes. A interview this weekend by Bob Merlis, Warner Brothers' vice president of communications, with the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, confirms this.

Merlis said WB is "eager" to release The Gold Experience, but will not deliver it to them.

Yet another story says will release four albums this year, including The Gold Experience, in order to conclude his legal squabble with Warners.

But yet March is half over and still no sign of the album, at least as officially planned.

But those Internet junkies in the know have discovered that has made available, or allowed to be made available, most of the 17 songs on the album via a file-transfer protocol server in Holland.

What this means is that any Nethead with a $10 account can log onto the server, as NUVO did, and download digitized versions of studio versions of the songs either or Warner Bros. doesn't want to release.

The songs have been available on the Dutch site for months, but during the last part of February, someone, presumably or one of his associates, gave the operators of the site new master copies of many of the songs -- in order for fans to download.



His best album yet
For once, the buzz is correct; The Gold Experience is possibly the best album, on every level, by Prince or in the past decade. Not since the bygone days of Controversy and 1999, the two albums which sound most like The Gold Experience, has the little man from Minneapolis concentrated so hard on the genre which made him famous: the three-minute pop song.
In the past few years, in the opinion of many, the albums of Prince have drifted in and out of either failed experiements and crass commercialism.If that's the case, then The Gold Experience breaks the mold.

From the album's first song, "Pussy Control," you know the man is in charge:


Good mornin' ladies and gentlemen,
boys and muthafuckin girls
This is your captain with no name speakin'
and I'm here to rock your world
With a jam that will soon be classic
about a woman you already know

Elsewhere, on "Endorphinmachine," a song which wails with the fuzztone sound of 's guitar, another woman is introduced, one to rival the infamous "Darling Nikki" or any of the heroines of Prince's music, a woman who's "got more booty than Peru's got keys."
The longstanding obsession with sex has is also very much in evidence: in "319" he arranges an X-rated photo session with the occupant of hotel room 319; and in "I Hate You," his beloved is always "giving her body to another in the name of fun".

But the artist formerly known as Prince also takes a shot, so to speak, at the gangsta rappers and others who would dis womanhood, in his song "Days of Wild":


Hooker, bitch or ho?
I don't think so
I only knew one, but I never told her, though...
A woman every day should be thanked
Not disrespected, not raped or spanked
And if a woman ever say I did
Then she's a muthafuckin' liar and I'm a set-up kid
'Cause I'll tear shit up, y'all, and that's my style
And these are the days of wild

But the most outstanding songs are the title track, an anthem reminiscent of, but superior to, "Purple Rain"; "Dolphin," a song about estrangement that sang on Late Show With David Letterman last December; and "Billy Jack Bitch," a song about Minneapolis Star-Tribune gossip columnist C.J., who has on occasion referred to as "the artist who formerly knew how to write hits" or "Symbolina."
It's the music to "Billy Jack Bitch" that is most astonishing. There it is, for the first time in a decade, the swirling synthesizer sounds and thumping bass of the old-time Minneapolis sound, when Prince and the Time were knocking around the Twin Cities with songs in their head which were about to change the world.

Years ago, Prince used to write in the liner notes to each of his albums, "Love God ... May you Live 2 See the Dawn." The concept unifying The Gold Experience is a computerized voice which says, "Welcome to the Dawn."

Fans and casual observers of the bizarro-world career of Prince who have scoffed at his recent work will find plenty of reasons to be cheerful about The Gold Experience.

There's only one catch. You can't buy the album yet. Or maybe ever.

But we're about to show you how to acquire your own homemade copy of The Gold Experience. Welcome to the Dawn, indeed.

Great album. At that time, his best since lovesexy.