1995: You Have Just Accessed...
The Gold Experience
My experience of music does not have strong connections to times and places. Other people seem to remember where they were when they heard their favorite songs for the first time. I have friends who are almost transported by music to moments in their lives connected to those songs. I don’t really feel that sort of thing. I think it might have to do with my Attention Deficit Disorder. Instead of connecting the music to my surroundings, I get involved with the music to the exclusion of my surroundings or vice versa. Having said that, there are a few notable exceptions, even though they lack the typical emotional punch you would expect. For example, I remember the first time I heard Prince and recognized him for what he was.
It was a Sunday afternoon in 1995, with my parents and little brother in a Subway sandwich shop, when the DJ made the obligatory joke about Prince’s name being a squiggle, but here was the new single anyway. I was even more of a pretentious teenager than I am a pretentious middle-aged adult, so on a certain level the symbol-as-name thing made sense to me. At the very least it was unique. The song was good, too. It was a slow jam with a heavy guitar solo, with an obvious, undisguised Al Green style falsetto. Those things didn’t normally go together. I filed all this away for later and ate my sandwich. Later I picked up the single which was called “I Hate U,” then the album, called The Gold Experience and now, 28 years later (!) I’m writing a blog about that artist’s complete body of work. I was fortunate even though I was very late to the party I arrived when I did, because as far as I am concerned The Gold Experience is the best album Prince ever made. For all its faults, it reveals Prince’s contradictions, the cognitive dissonances and blind spots that made him so frustrating, challenging, occasionally problematic, and ultimately compelling as an artist. Sadly, though, it is doomed to go un-regarded as such, because the hostility between Warner Bros. and Prince had reached such a pitch by the end of 1994 that they were practically ignoring each other. By the time it was available to buy, nobody wanted to sell it anymore.
So What If My Sisters Are Triflin’? They Just Don’t Know
Back in early 1994, Prince’s original plan had been to release Come and TGE a few weeks apart. He wanted to achieve the maximum effect from their juxtaposition. WB wanted to achieve maximum sales from two albums. These goals were simply not compatible. So WB released Come and that was that. The problem for Prince was that he was less interested in that album. To him, TGE represented the way forward for his music. To be fair to Prince, while both albums are good, TGE is clearly better. There is a reason Come was credited to “Prince” and TGE was listed as a 0(+> album. Prince wanted Come to hit shelves first, and he wanted to release singles from it, but he did not intend to promote it in any other way. He was not going to tour to specifically promote it. He was not going to do any TV appearances to play songs from the album. He had planned to do all those things for TGE in 1994, but those plans would be utterly pointless if the standoff continued.
The structure of Prince’s contract gave WB no incentive to budge, so TGE remained with no release date as 1994 rolled on. The back and forth over the two albums took so long that Come did not hit stores until August, which would have made it a tough sell to put out another album of new material that year. As it was, The Black Album did come out in November, but it was a limited-time release, almost like a precursor to a Record Store Day kind of event that we have now.
This was a rare situation for Prince. At every other point in his life, as long as he stuck to his guns and was willing to kick up enough of a fuss, he would always, eventually, get his way simply by making it too much of a hassle to deny him. This time, however, he would just have to take his medicine. After fifteen years, WB was putting its foot down. He even started scrawling the word “SLAVE” on his cheek in public appearances. WB was unmoved by these theatrics. There was nothing Prince could do to get TGE out in 1994. The only question now was how he would deal with this new reality.
And He Told Her Not To Know Was Better
"Ladies and gentlemen, our next guest is one of music’s most influential and talented performers. The song he will be doing for us tonight is from this CD right here which is entitled The Gold Experience, and I’m told, uh, this particular CD will never be released. Well, it makes perfect sense he’s here promoting it tonight."
-David Letterman introducing Prince and the NPG on December 13, 1994
He embarked on “The Ultimate Live Experience” tour – a modest European tour (despite the name) focusing mainly on the UK, playing smaller and mid-size venues for the most part. He did all this during the time frame in which you would normally expect him to be promoting Come, because that is the album currently being sold, after all. Instead, the sets leaned heavily on TGE, with most of the album being played during the course of an evening.
Having said all this, setlists regularly included a few songs from Come, “Race,” “Dark,” and “Letitgo” being fairly common. His older hits did not get played out in 1994 and 1995, but b-sides like “I Love U in Me” and newer releases under the name “Prince” like “Pink Cashmere” did occasionally get played. So on the one hand he seems desperate to leave his former work behind, and on the other hand he will seemingly casually retain large chunks of the past that he seemed to be most offended by.
Some Notes On The Versace Experience
One way Prince got music from TGE out in the wild was to partner with Versace to provide runway music to one of its fashion shows for Paris Fashion week in July of 1995. During the event, cassettes of the music were passed out as swag. Called The Versace Experience, only 300 or so copies existed making it a very rare item indeed. I never even saw it circulate as a bootleg, although the tracklist was known.
After Prince’s passing, the Estate reissued the cassette as a Record Store Day exclusive (cassette reissues! what a world we live in!), and later released the album on CD and LP. It’s a curious thing to listen to outside of its original context. Except for a few songs specially tailored for this project, all the music on TVE are severely edited, sometimes with a clumsiness so obvious it has to be intentional. On the other hand, taken as a whole, it’s an interesting collage. I can see this working as music for a fashion show. It’s sort of the opposite of ambient music: it’s deliberately intrusive.
Even though it’s billed as a promotional item for TGE (the full title is The Versace Experience: Prelude 2 Gold), the most interesting tracks are not found on that album. “Sonny T.” and “Rootie Kazootie” are a pair of orphaned Madhouse tracks. Once again,
Prince reminds us that he has at least one album in the vault that would be very cool to hear, and we will not be hearing it any time soon. Thanks, Prince. The other two tracks unavailable elsewhere are “Chatounette Controle” and “Pussy Control (Control Tempo) (Edit)”. The latter is clearly a remix, but the former seems to be something put together specifically for this project, with lead vocals by model, actress and author (and a person with an interesting life when I looked her up) Veronica Webb. I’m pretty sure the title doesn’t translate exactly right (?) but I think it more or less does the trick.
A final track worth mentioning because it will come up later is called “Kamasutra Overture #5.” It is later renamed “Serotonin” when it is released on the album Kamasutra. It is an instrumental track meant to be part of a ballet written for the NPG dance company. According to Princevault, this track must have been just barely completed when it was put on this album, which probably explains why it got renamed over time. It’s just worth noting that this project was already well underway years before it saw any kind of wide release.
Ain’t Nowhere To Go If You Hang Around
What this all boiled down to in the end was that when The Gold Experience finally did get released it was September of 1995, and as far as Prince was concerned, that album had come and gone by now. His conflict with WB was looking like it had finally reached a point where he could see some light at the end of the tunnel, so his main interest was doing whatever was necessary to disentangle himself from Warner Bros., and promoting The Gold Experience (again) was not one of those things, so it did not merit any attention. In fact, the only thing that did shake his focus from that single goal for even a second was a request from Spike Lee, which will be talked about next week, and even that failed to merit much effort from him, in spite of his very deep respect for Lee’s work.
As for Warner Bros., they’d be damned if they were going to promote Prince’s album for him. So there sat The Gold Experience, an album on par with any of Prince’s great masterpieces. As good as Sign O The Times, if not as socially relevant. Better, I think, than 1999 or even, yes, Purple Rain. Certainly better than his all-time best seller, Diamonds and Pearls. It barely sold half a million copies, and while it was well-received by critics, it was not really noticed by many other people, which isn’t surprising, considering it was unpromoted, Prince did not tour or give any interviews, make any appearances or otherwise even really acknowledge the release really even happened.
And then the album vanished.
The Case of the Disappearing Prince Record
It was basically impossible to buy a new copy of The Gold Experience from late 1996 to June of 2022. Seriously. You could pay upwards of $300 for a lightly used CD. I jealously guarded mine. Occasionally, I would run across one at a used CD shop in pristine condition for cheap (the fools! they don’t know what they have!) and I would buy it and squirrel it away like Gollum under the Misty Mountains. Which isn’t as crazy as it sounds – I had my original CD so long it finally died from CD rot.
For years I assumed it was just the soured relationship between Prince and his label that caused this situation. The album didn’t sell well, so WB just assumed nobody wanted it. It wasn’t until just after Prince’s death that I found out the real reason, and it’s a weird one.
In 1995, two songwriters, Bruno Bergonzi and Michele Vicino sued Prince for plagiarism in Italy. They claimed “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” stole a hook from their song “Takin’ Me To Paradise.”
What’s so strange to me here is that while I don’t believe that Prince actually plagiarized the song, I do believe these songwriters are sincere in their belief that Prince did so. It’s hard to believe otherwise. They spent almost twenty years trying to convince the Italian court that Prince stole their song before they finally managed to succeed in 2015, I have a hard time believing they would do this if they didn’t believe it. And it’s true, there are a couple of sections that are definitely similar. That lilting keyboard hook does feel like the intro, and there is a long enough run in the chorus that would probably spook me if I were in Bruno’s (probably quite stylish) shoes.
There has been some kind of settlement made between the parties to allow the song back into the wild, so the album is available again, but while the litigation was ongoing, the album was kept completely unavailable for a long time. When it finally did resurface on Tidal a few years ago, it was without “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” which definitely felt weird to me.
So What Makes This Album So Great?
The Gold Experience is Prince’s last album as any kind of true mainstream artist, and as such it’s his last album that has any pretentions to being a pop album. This is the end of the first half of his career, and it is the culmination of everything that has come
before while also a hopeful look at the future. It’s probably his most focused album outside of Purple Rain, but that album only has nine songs to TGE’s twelve, and it has more than double the run time.
Conceptually, this is Prince’s most mature album to date. So many times when talking about his material, I’ve talked about the feeling of searching for something. Here, that feeling is still present, but for the first time there is also the adult sensation of having found something as well. There is finally a sense of experience (no pun intended) on which he bases the direction of future searching.
He has finally stopped trying to synthesize new forms of music by leaning into them blindly. Instead of attempting to “rap” in the purest sense, he is now doing something closer to what musical theatre would term a “patter song,” which works far better for him and the audience. He is responding to the alternative music movement not by emulating it, but simply by picking up his guitar again and playing it loud and distorted. It’s a wise move – because it works. He’s not pretending to be James Iha, nor is he trying to figure out why Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar only has one pickup. He is doing what he knows how to do well, and trusting that will be enough. Of course, the deadly secret is that he has made himself irrelevant to such concerns anyway, but someday these things will matter again, so all the better if he starts correcting his course now.
Last year, The Gold Experience was reissued on vinyl as a Record Store Day special. It was a reproduction of a promotional pressing from 1995 that had the album on three sides, and remixes of “I Hate U” on the fourth side. The remixes were cool and all, but the idea that TGE would be released on physical media again after so long, completely
intact with “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” was an absolute dream come true. I actually went to my local record store the day before and bought an unrelated LP (Gary Numan’s Telekon which you should also listen to because it’s rad as hell) just to have an excuse to ask the staff and make absolutely sure that tomorrow they would have my favorite Prince album ever. They assured me they would.
I was pretty sure they were lying, but I showed up two hours early anyway the next day. I had another record store in mind just in case. And another one in Kentucky an hour away. All unnecessary, of course. It sounds wonderful on vinyl, none of that too-hot mastering that you get on CDs. So good. Anyway. Listen to The Gold Experience, the best dang Prince album there ever was.
TRACKLIST
Note: as with “Exodus” there are a bunch of segue tracks. These are all “NPG Operator” interludes where you are supposed to be in a kind of VR experience where you’re being taken through a kind of Wonka factory sort of place and shown “experiences.” I won’t comment on these, but know they are there.
P Control
Something tells me this song is still on frat house playlists. I hope it isn’t, but I bet it is. I mean, okay, fine, yeah, I like the song too. I spent too many years hollering “Pussy Control” in my car to pretend I don’t like the song now, but still. There are people on the internet who will tell you this song actually has strong feminist vibes to it. That is some old bullsh*t. Like all straight men (myself included), Prince’s feminist credentials are, even on his best day, suspect. Not saying this song is as misogynist as the title implies, but when the third verse starts with him telling you why he’s “known as the player of the year” and then he objectifies a woman to her face as having “a body that will make every rich man want to sell, sell, sell!” I don’t think you can actually say that this is about women’s empowerment as much as Prince’s empowerment. So you can take your feminist arguments elsewhere. Yes, it’s a banger. But that’s all.
Endorphinmachine
If Prince had been willing to make some effort to sell this record, this could have been a bigass hit for him. It definitely should have been. Some of his best studio guitar work is on this track, and it might be his best rock song ever. Even better than “Peach,” and could easily go ten rounds with “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Like so much about the album, it's a sadly missed opportunity.
Shhh
This was originally written for Tevin Campbell and was included on his album I’m Ready in 1993. His version is…adequate. It’s a slow jam by an excellent R&B singer of that time. There is nothing really wrong with it. Prince’s version just has a lot more going for it. There are dynamics, tempo changes, more daring vocals, and guitar work that just add up to a more tense and sexy sounding song. Sorry, Tevin. Your version just sounds like karaoke next to this one.
We March
The mid-90’s were very much a time where the idea of peaceful protests had started to gain some traction in the public consciousness again. For some reason, people thought we were due for “another 60’s.” I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean, but I heard that several times, especially after the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdicts. This song had that spirit in a big way. It was supposed to have been played at the Million Man March in October 1995, but I’m not sure if that’s actually true. Nona Gaye contributes background vocals on this.
The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
This album version is slightly different than the single version released in 1994. The outro is different, some of the instrumentation is different, and the mix has been changed as well. According to Princevault, it’s not a complete remake, but it is an extensive re-work.
Dolphin
This is a great example of Prince at his most melodramatic. I have never been sure if this song works as intended or if it’s just silly. I mean, it’s definitely silly, but does it work on other levels? Hard to be sure with lyrics like “If I came back as a dolphin would you listen to me then? Would you let me be your friend? Would you let me in? You can cut off all my fins, but to your ways I will not bend. I’ll die before I let you tell me how to swim.” I mean…even I’m not that bad of a poet, Prince.
Now
This is one of the goofier songs on the album (in spite of what I just said about “Dolphin”), but I like it anyway. It’s also one of the first songs recorded for this project, way back in October of 1993, and the production kind of shows that vintage a bit. I’m a little surprised this song made the album and “Days of Wild” got bumped to keep it in. We’ll talk about that song in a few weeks, but it just seems weird that a song Prince played live for the rest of his life got cut to make room for this, a song that according to Princevault was played live until January 20, 1996, two months after the album’s release. Just sayin’.
319
This song sounds like stripper music, which is probably why it’s featured in the movie “Showgirls.” This is almost Prince doing Robert Palmer. It’s an excellent, short little sex romp of a song that does not overstay it’s welcome. Nor will this description.
Shy
I wish Prince had made more songs like this. “Shy” is one of the more atmospheric songs Prince ever created. Every instrument is miked close (unusual for Prince), and the whole vibe of the track is just unique and intimate.
Billy Jack Bitch
Yeah, remember when I said Prince’s feminist cred was suspect? This one’s a banger too. Apparently, there was a gossip columnist in Minneapolis who got under Prince’s skin, and this was intended as a lighthearted, thinly-veiled diss track aimed at her. He definitely could have chosen his words better, because it's hard to hit the target of "lighthearted" this way. Lenny Kravitz sings backing vocals on this without credit.
I Hate U
A strange choice as a lead single for an album, but nevertheless, it got me interested. It’s an oddly conflicted ballad, the rare example of the angry slow jam. I’ve always liked it and always will. Fantastic guitar solo. The remixes are also worth checking out, but as with so many of Prince’s remixes, they are decidedly not essential.
B-side:
Rock N’ Roll Is Alive (And It Lives In Minneapolis)
This is an oddity in the Prince catalog: a response track. Lenny Kravitz had just released a single called “Rock N Roll is Dead,” and Prince felt compelled to respond. This song was released as the B-Side to “Gold” on November 30, 1995 (two months after “I Hate U” was released as a single, if you’re counting). Art featured to the left is from 2019, when the song was reissued as a single of its own.
Gold
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