52 Weeks Of Prince: Week 30

1996 Part 2: Always Had 2 Have Double Everything

Before sitting down to gather my thoughts for last week and this week’s entry, I don’t think I’d ever really given a thought to 1996 as a banner year in terms of volume of material released. Again, this has a lot to do with my being late to the party. I didn’t even start accumulating Prince music until late 1995, so during 1996 it seemed like he was constantly churning out new stuff, so a soundtrack plus four albums worth of new material didn’t feel like that much. Of course, in 2023 I look back on that sweet summer child with bittersweet nostalgia, because it’s just not so.

Truth is, Prince released a tremendous amount of music in 1996. I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t the most he ever released in a year in his entire life, but three hours and forty minutes is a lot by any standard. There were some unique circumstances at work, of course: the soundtrack project for Spike Lee, followed immediately by Chaos and Disorder, which was necessary to extricate himself from his exclusive contract with Warner Bros. once and for all, and then once all that is out of the way, he had the understandable need to take immediate advantage of his long-sought freedom.

If he could have released Emancipation the day after his release from WB was final, I’m certain he would have. Legend has it the interval was less than a week after the contract expired. What we know for sure is that it was released just over four months after his last album. (Just for reference Chaos and Disorder dropped July 9, 1996 and Emancipation was released November 19) The day had been a long time coming, and Prince had the album in the works a very long time.

Since 1982, when Prince had the facilities to start not only recording at a furious pace, but also socking away those compositions and cataloging them for easy retrieval, his albums often achieved what consistency they had because if Prince found himself in need of a solid track he would just reach into the vault and take what he needed from there. Emancipation was not made that way. Of its 36 tracks (!), only three were previously existing. Work began on the project in January of 1995 and continued until October 1996, basically right up to the moment when manufacturing had to begin for the album. It’s surprising that the album is just as consistent as any other great album Prince ever made, in spite of its unwieldy size.

Emancipation is, probably more than any other album Prince ever made, a concept album. It’s not a “concept album” in the sense that David Bowie, Yes or The Who might make such a thing, but it is an album that is trying to get across a few ideas to the listener clearly. First, this is Prince saying* he is making an album in what he considers to be ideal conditions: he has no restrictions placed on him, no limits on time, budget or in any other sense. There are no filters whatsoever. Secondly, this is Prince acting with total faith in his audience as well as his work. He believes that if his work is good enough, people will be willing to buy a triple album. Finally, this is Prince attempting to deliver on his promise of the last few years: if he didn’t have a record label holding him back, his music would be better.

*This is an important distinction, because every note was recorded during the time he was still under contract to WB.

Does it deliver on that promise? To some extent, it certainly does. It’s hard to argue that Chaos and Disorder is better than Emancipation. For one thing, it’s clear that Prince was just more interested in the latter album, and with good reason. It always helps when you’ve got something to prove.

Far more than Chaos and Disorder, Emancipation feels like the real follow-up to The Gold Experience. There is a sense of artistic progression from TGE to Emancipation – albeit it’s not always in a positive direction.

There are a lot of seemingly arbitrary rules slapped on to Emancipation that don’t need to be there. Each disc has twelve songs, each disc has a running time of exactly an hour. Why? When asked, Prince gave some nonsense about Egypt, the pyramids and the origins of civilization. The problem with that is there are songs that are obviously artificially extended in order to reach that running time. So these specific parameters that at first glance sound like they might provide a laser focus for the album instead can give it a meandering quality – not something you want in your triple album magnum opus.

That said, Emancipation is as Prince intended it to be: a monument to what Prince could (or at least would) do when all the safeties and restrictions were removed. Is it, in fact, better than Purple Rain? I’m not sure that’s a fair question, but it’s for damn sure more than Purple Rain, and as a Prince fan then and now, I was always looking forward to the next three hours of new Prince material to hit the shelves. If PR was a masterpiece, this is a monsterpiece, and it’s worth your three hours to listen to it. As I have been clear about so far – there is a hell of a lot of material here. As I write this, I’m still not sure how to organize this. The usual “Tracklist” section with thirty-six tracks feels…daunting.

I Don’t Know Bo, But I Do Know Math

It doesn’t seem like a major question now, but at the time, people really wondered how Prince expected to get an album on to store shelves without a record deal. There really wasn’t any such thing as an “indie” scene in 1996. There was something akin to it, sure. Sometimes it was called “college rock.” It was a space mostly occupied by bands only one of your friends had ever heard of, and it was almost impossible to get their albums with the possible exception of They Might Be Giants. I’m not saying these bands didn’t have merit, because many of them were unrecognized titans that created a subculture that is rapidly becoming the dominant culture. I’m just saying that in 1996 a legacy artist who was trying to stage a media circus and needed distribution for potentially millions of records could not really turn to those channels. Yet.

Instead, Prince signed a one-off deal with EMI. The exact terms of the deal are hard to pin down, but it did allow Prince to keep his master recordings (of course), it had limited-time terms, and it gave Prince what he needed: Emancipation on as many store shelves as possible in time for Thanksgiving.

He also had access to a major label’s ability to generate massive amounts of positive media attention. For example, this was the point where his name became less of a joke. Suddenly, everyone started just calling him “The Artist.” He could go on "Today" and goof on Bryant Gumbel.

“Nobody looked over my shoulder. Nothing was remixed, censored, chopped down or edited .” Prince in USA Today, 1996

It’s also a rare moment when Prince seemed to want to speak to interviewers. He gave the above (extremely misleading) quote to “USA Today” for example. Nobody at WB had looked over his shoulder since For You, and nobody had ever “remixed, censored, chopped down or edited” any of his work. Then there were the more memorable, yet unquestionably lighter moments. Like when he went on the Muppet Show. It’s not often you get to see Prince so excited to be on TV, especially when being there involves making fun of himself. It’s a great show, especially the cold open and the fantastic rendition of “Starfish and Coffee.”

Then there were other, less comfortable moments. His interview with Oprah Winfrey was cagey to the point of being flatly dishonest (more on that later), but his interview with Chris Rock is probably the closest thing to a real peek at what Prince really thought about things in January 1997 as you are likely to get.

Rock has bragged about his interview being as good as it was, and wondered aloud why nobody else ever got Prince to talk. I’m not sure he realized how much Prince simply wanted to talk to him personally. Prince loved comedians, and apparently liked Rock’s work specifically, so was keen to talk to him. Add to that Rock’s questions were more directed not at Prince’s personal matters but at his work, where Prince felt comfortable sharing, and the interview was open and interesting. It also helps that there simply was more of Prince’s work life than his personal life. Of all the interviews Prince ever gave, this is probably the one most worth watching.

Original Title Was “Conception”

The interview with Oprah was very different. It took place in two segments: one at Paisley Park and one at Harpo Studios in Chicago. Oprah knows her audience, and she wanted to talk about his name (which she spent at least five minutes interrogating friends, band members, staff and Prince himself about), his marriage, his home, his wife and his family, especially their newborn.

That, for Prince and Mayte, was not going to be possible.

Mayte gave birth to a son, Amiir Gregory Nelson, on October 16, 1996. He suffered from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. He died very soon after he was born. A couple of weeks later, Oprah’s crew arrived to tape the interview, and Prince lied to her and told her his son was alive. Not in so many words, of course. He said “It’s all good, never you mind what you hear,” but still. Oprah seemed to take it that way, and the studio audience applauded as if they believed the child to be alive and the tabloid hacks a bunch of monstrous hacks.

Mayte did her best to play along with this, but the fact is nobody actually recovers from losing a child in the first place, and adding this on top of it wounded their marriage beyond repair. It would still be years coming, but their split was pretty much inevitable now. Prince, maybe feeling the need to push the fiction as far as possible to make it believable, even took Oprah and the crew to the baby’s play room. In her memoir, Mayte says:

“Oprah saw it before I did. I have to wonder why he took her in there. They stood in the middle of this colorful paradise of toys. It had everything a perfect nursery needs, except for the only thing a perfect nursery needs.”

Sitting for the interview with Oprah was probably the most badly calculated thing Prince ever did (and I’m including when he decided hip replacement would be against God’s will). He and Mayte were both too far gone with grief to make good choices or answer questions the entire world would hear the answers to. The need to hide his private life and the need to promote his work collided in a perfect storm of bad decisions. As I said, no one ever really recovers from losing a child. It’s a terrible moment that will foreshadow everything that happens for the rest of his life.

For now, though, he threw himself into his work, and found a great deal of joy there for the moment. Mayte, however, had no such place to run.

What To Do When You’re Sad At Home

Prince hadn’t toured extensively since summer of 1993, so a world tour was more than overdue. In keeping with his desire to heavily promote Emancipation, he would tour for basically the next two years. Princevault lists almost no shows at Paisley Park from now until Autumn of 1999.

The first time I saw Prince live was in January of 1998 on the “Jam of the Year” tour. Yup, he would even stop in Evansville, Indiana on this tour. His next tour this big would be the “Musicology” tour in 2004. After that, he would tour this extensively, but not in arena sized venues. I’m pretty sure he could have filled such places, but he enjoyed smaller places and smaller crowds later in his life, and it allowed him to tailor his setlists any way he wanted.

Did It Work?

That’s the question, isn’t it? All this promotion, playing the awards shows, touring for two years, lying to Oprah, the EMI record deal, did it do everything Prince wanted it to do? I wish I could simply answer “yes,” but unfortunately, Emancipation was not an unqualified success.

Artistically, I would say that it definitely did what Prince wanted it to do. It moved him beyond the “punchline” phase of the name change at the very least. If he wanted the sales numbers to look good, again, he did hit that bullseye. If he wanted them to actually be good, however, that’s a slightly different prospect.

Back in the day, a service called Soundscan tracked album sales. (These days, a company called Luminate has bought it and rebranded it Music Connect, but I digress.) Michael Bland says the idea for a triple album version of Emancipation was first thrown around in his hearing when Michael Jackson released HIStory in 1995. That was a double album that had one greatest hits album and one album of new material. Soundscan tracked each package sold as two sales, so theoretically Michael was artificially doubling his sales figures by including a disc of his (probably more attractive to consumers) hits along with his new stuff. Prince saw that and thought if you could do that with two albums, why not three?

It's possible Michael Bland didn’t know Prince’s ongoing fascination with releasing a triple album, so he didn’t know that Prince was looking for even the thinnest, most threadbare excuse to release one, but it does make sense that Prince was aware of many of the arcane rules that applied to album sales figures, and how to make them work for him.

So, when he told Chris Rock that Emancipation had been certified “triple Platinum,” that may have been true, but while a single album required three million worldwide copies to reach that level, a triple album only needed to sell a million. That made it far easier to make the case that Warner Bros. was holding him back and that his sales figures instantly went up when he left them if he simply released more discs in a single package. Which, you might think, sounds like he’s cheating. Soundscan thought so too and re-wrote the rules the next year. Even so, if you think that's cheating? Hoo, buddy, just wait for 2004.

Let Him Go Down As A Washed-Up Singer

One lasting memory I have of this time is coming home from college for Christmas in 1998 and being in the music store in the mall, browsing through the Prince section and being disappointed to find that they had stacks of Emancipation albums already in the five-dollar bin. At the time, I assumed that the album just didn’t sell, or the name change just kept Prince out of the mainstream.

For some reason, I really wanted him to have some huge pop hit. Now I’m not sure why, but this was a time when “Total Request Live” actually seemed to mean something. I wanted the artist I liked to be big and relevant. Like a lot of young people, I suppose I wanted my peers to validate my taste by adopting it. But I guess a guy in his late thirties in high heels with an unpronounceable symbol for a name and a deep interest in 70’s funk and the social justice politics of the music industry just doesn’t spark the 1998 kids’ interest the same way as The Brian Setzer Orchestra, huh?

Anyway, doing research for this I found out how those albums ended up in the five dollar bin. Prince’s planned media blitz should have gone on for almost a year. He was planning to release several singles complete with dance remixes and make those commercially available, and also release some songs to radio only. Several videos were shot. Almost none of this actually happened. The reason Emancipation didn’t have a longer promotional cycle is EMI-Capitol went into bankruptcy right before the album came out, so the ability of the label to support the album rapidly dried up as time went on. Prince could keep touring, but the publicity machine stalled. It’s a good thing it sold as quickly as it did when it initially dropped, or it would have been a massive failure.

To be perfectly clear: Prince was never going to have the kind of relevance in the late 90's that I wanted him to have, but the album could and probably would have sold better and made more of an "adult contemporary" style dent if it had gotten more of a push.

The Only Love There Is

More than twenty years later, it’s much easier to take the album on its merits. Those merits have changed as well in the intervening years. Listening to a three hour album in a digital format is a much different experience than having to juggle physical media. You don’t even feel the disc breaks if you don’t want to. If you’ve never heard Emancipation and you decide to listen to it on Tidal, you will not have that inner “tick” I feel between “In This Bed I Scream” and “Sex In The Summer” that tells me I just moved to disc two. I’m not sure if that makes the experience better or worse. When re-listening for this essay, I tried to imagine what it might be like to not really know where those breaks were. I’m pretty sure the above break is pretty seamless, but the one from “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife” to “Slave” is probably more of a bumpy ride.

I didn’t even try to imagine what the experience of listening to the vinyl is like. Imagine every three songs, you either flip or switch a record. I think that might obliterate the breaks as much as the digital listening experience, even if the sound quality is better. And yes, in my experience, Prince’s music is usually better on vinyl just because of his preferred techniques when it comes to recording and mixing. Everything is recorded, mixed and mastered so hot that being on vinyl tends to give you a little more dynamic range in your listening experience. But however you can, you should listen to Emancipation. It’s maybe not, as Prince stated in the press, the album he was born to make, but it was the album he had waited years to make, and it does mark the beginning of the last half of his career.

Tracklist

Disc 1

Discs 1 and 3 could almost stand on their own as albums in their own right, although disc 1 less so, since it is a little more obviously built as an opener for the whole album.

Jam Of The Year

It should come as no surprise that this song opened almost every regular gig Prince played for the next three years. When I first heard it, I thought he was trying too hard, but when I heard it live it was basically played note for note and it completely burned the house down, so what do I know?

Rosie Gaines recorded her vocals on this at the same time that she did her tracks for Chaos and Disorder and the rest of this album. Kirk Johnson may or may not be on drums. Eric Leeds is back on sax and flute with Walter Chancellor, Jr. also on sax. A live version was released on the “NYC” cassette single, which I’ve never heard, and there were also several remixes created but never released.

Right Back Here In My Arms

This is one of the tracks meant to be released as a single that got released. At one point, Prince had a great deal of belief in the track. In November 1995, soon after the song was completed, it was delivered to Brother Jules, a DJ at KMOJ, a community radio station in Minneapolis, who played on the air. It was later cut down for inclusion here.

The vocal sample “and that’s my only mission” is from a track called “Three Shots” by Ninety-9 that remains unreleased as far as I can tell. She’s a hard person to pin down. Everything else is by Prince, the drum loops are the same as “The Good Life (Bullets Go Bang Remix)”.

Somebody’s Somebody

This is one of a few collaborations with music by Prince and lyrics by Brenda Lee Eager and Hilliard Wilson who were friends of Mavis Staples. It is a cool post-New Jack Swing R&B jam that probably has gone overlooked in the catalog. “Somebody’s Somebody” was the B-Side to “The Holy River,” but it and its alternative versions were also broken off as a promo single as well. Of particular interest is the “Live Studio Mix.” It’s unclear exactly who is playing on this. It seems to be either the 1996-1999 NPG or Prince by himself making a demo for the band on how to play the song live. Either way, it’s a much more energetic version of the song.

Get Yo Groove On

Do people still say things like this? “Get your groove on?” “Get your drink on?” I hope not, but in 1996 we all did. We also did a dance called “The Cabbage Patch.” If you don’t know what it is, good for you; Don’t ruin it by googling it now.

Lucky for everyone the song is greater than the sum of its lyrics, despite the odd mixing of the vocals. I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but the vocals always feel like their mixed in such a way as to make me feel like a bunch of gremlins are yelling at me. Yet even after saying all those things, the song is still a banger as far as I’m concerned.

This is the first song on the album that features limited contributions from the 1996-1999 NPG. Mostly this is just backing vocals, but because an opportunity has presented itself, I’m listing them: Rhonda Smith on bass, who will be in that spot for most of the rest of Prince’s life, Eric Leeds on Sax, Kat Dyson on guitar, Mike Scott on second guitar, Morris Hayes on keyboards and Kirk Johnson on drums.

It also features the first instance (I’m pretty sure) of Prince artificially extending a song to make each disc pad out to exactly an hour. The song continues to play for several minutes after its “natural” end after what amounts to a Prince-y version of the Muppet Show ballroom scene plays out in an imaginary dance club, which finally ends with a cowboy not getting allowed in because he’s wearing jeans.

Courtin’ Time

This is my partner’s favorite Prince song, full stop. It’s a damn good choice, even if it surprised me at first that this was the one that grabbed her. Although it does justify my belief that if you like a prolific artist, you should poke around the far corners of their body of work early and often. Like every other love song on this album it was recorded for Mayte. She says it was recorded shortly after shooting the video for “7” in May 1992. This track is just Prince and a horn section, doing a boppy, jazzy swing dance tune that feels like Gene Kelly rather than George Clinton. It’s a great song, and I’d be willing to bet a lot more like this is still in the vault.

Betcha By Golly Wow!

This was the lead single from Emancipation and also his first ever cover song. This was originally a released by Connie Stevens in 1970 under the title “Keep Growing Strong” but the more famous version (and the one this is based on) is by The Stylistics from 1971. It’s remarkably faithful to the Stylistics’ cover, both in instrumentation and in the vocal arrangement. I didn’t hear the 1971 version until probably a decade after this came out, and at first I thought I was listening to Prince.

This was recorded sometime in 1995 with Michael B., Sonny T., Mr. Hayes and Tommy Barbarella.

We Gets Up

This is a song that I like to keep on my jogging list, just because the message is so positive, the BPMs are just right, and Rhonda Smith’s bass is on point. In the middle of thirty-five other songs, it’s easy for this one to get lost, especially because I’m pretty sure that this was just written for Prince to jam with Rhonda. Again, we see a small tacked-on bit at the end as Prince keeps things going to make sure the disc hits the mandated run time, but since that bit has a wicked overdriven rhythm guitar I’m okay with it.

White Mansion

Another song that gets lost in a triple album but shouldn’t. One of those wistful musings about what makes us really happy. Like most of Prince’s wistful musings, it’s pretty naïve and privileged, but it’s a good song nevertheless. Recorded in late 1995, this is a solo recording by Prince with Mayte’s sister Janice playing someone watching TV.

Damned If I Do

I can never decide if I like this song or not because I can never decide how hard Prince thinks this song should rock. If he thinks this is a rock track, then he whiffed it pretty hard. If it’s supposed to be a more Latin-influenced track with an unusually distorted guitar, then it’s one of those quirky Prince album track experiments. The reason it's hard to tell is that the main body of the song seems to be trying to rock, while the coda (which seems to exist to pad the disc out) is a kind of Latin jazz breakdown. I don’t think I’d like the song without the technically unnecessary breakdown.

I Can’t Make You Love Me

Another cover, this one much less faithful to the original arrangement, and somehow is a much better cover for it. Prince’s admiration for Bonnie Raitt has already been talked about, and it really shines here. If there were ever a need to argue for Prince covering the songs of others, this would be it.

Mr. Happy

I think “Mr. Happy” didn’t quite turn out how Prince originally envisioned it, but he should have suspected it might not quite be up to snuff when he found himself thinking “Maybe Scrap D. should get a verse on this!” Even if that really did seem like a good idea, no classic song would start with a guy saying “Turn off that weak jam, man! Mr. Happy’s here, and we’re buggin’.” My friend, if you’re “buggin’” you’re also the one with the weak jam.

In This Bed I Scream

Widely thought of as an apology to Wendy, Lisa and Susannah, you have to wonder why it took so long after this for them to have serious communication after that. Nevertheless, I believe the sentiment when he recorded the song, and a good song it is, even with the padding. And again, even though it is unnecessary padding, it is at least interesting unnecessary padding.

Disc 2

Disc 2 is either the “slow jam” or “honeymoon” disc. It sounds good in theory, but it does give the whole album a dip in pace right in the middle that can drag the album a bit.

Sex In The Summer

The song very much does what it says on the tin – which is weird because the whole song is built around a sample of the ultrasound heartbeat of Prince and Mayte’s unborn child. So it’s weird that way. And again, we have a coda that exists mostly for time. The main track is a solo effort by Prince and the coda is a full band performance with Eric Leeds on various horns, Rhonda Smith on bass, Kat Dyson on guitar and Ricky Peterson on keys.

It's a good enough song to have been a single, but for obvious reasons it was never released as a single, and never even played live.

One Kiss At A Time

A pretty steamy slow jam, even for the dude who wrote “Do Me, Baby.” A solo effort by Prince originally recorded in 1995, it wasn’t played live until 2002, well after the point where the relationship that inspired it had disintegrated.

Soul Sanctuary

The first fruits of a troubled collaboration between Prince and Sandra St. Victor, it’s a beautiful, swirling ballad that doesn’t sound like anything else he produced. I’m inclined to believe St. Victor’s complaints of inaccurate credits, etc. It’s a shame they couldn’t have come to some kind of more amicable agreement.

Emale

The reason you should never be too “clever” with wordplay in your titles is that if Prince had just named this song “Email” it would be a cute little R&B cautionary tale about seeking sex online from the mid-90’s. But instead he named it “Emale” so we all have to roll our eyes and try to forget that before talking about the song. But we can’t forget that. So here we are.

Curious Child

This is an atmospheric, romantic waltz that comes and goes almost before you know it. On another album it would probably get cut, but on a triple album it sticks around, and the album is better for it. So that three hour run time isn’t all bad news.

Dreamin’ About U

This track is meant to almost segue directly from “Curious Child,” so if your music player has some kind of automatic crossfade “feature,” it probably doesn’t come across the way it should. The lyrics feel very much like Prince crashing a poetry slam, but it still plays well, largely due to the interplay between Kat Dyson’s deft guitar work, Rhonda Smith’s extremely cool fretless bass (especially that solo!) and Eric Leeds with his (by now typically) perfectly calibrated saxophone.

These kinds of nearly-instrumental atmospheric tracks would become a more regular feature of Prince’s discography in the coming years, and this early experiment is an excellent indicator of things to come. It never occurred to me before, but Rhonda Smith’s influence on him may have pushed Prince in those experimental, ambient directions more than I have given her credit for. If so, props to Rhonda.

Joint 2 Joint

The only song on the disc that tries to compete with “Sex in the Summer” in terms of having any kind of funky sound to it. I’ve heard it criticized as meandering, but that’s one of the things I like about it. It goes where it wants to go. Unlike a lot of the longer tracks on Emancipation, it earns its long run time by Prince seeming to grab on to another idea and developing it, rather than stapling it onto the end. There is a rap verse by Ninety-9 that was (like all her other appearances) flown in from another track and a tap dance performance by Savion Glover. A “taxi cab interlude” like the one that begins “Lady Cab Driver” segues into the next track.

The Holy River

Prince’s choices for singles didn’t always seem to make commercial sense, and this one perhaps made less sense than most. It was, like most of the songs on disc 2 of Emancipation, about Mayte, and his relationship with her. One of the saddest things about the way his first marriage ended is that he really seemed to believe every word he said about her and his love for her. He was Tom Cruise talking about Katie Holmes. A total couch hopper. Which is, by the way, always a red flag, but still.

Makes for a lovely song, but maybe puts a little too much pressure on a marriage.

Let’s Have A Baby

Oh Lord. Oprah LOVED this one.

Saviour

Note how as we approach the end of the disc, the stakes just keep getting ratcheted up and up and up. Now Mayte is turning into the Messiah. This was recorded in February 1996 in one of the last sessions to feature the 1993-1995 NPG plus Mr. Hayes and Ricky Peterson on keyboards. Three keyboard players, plus probably Prince also on keys. Sheesh.

The Plan

This is an interlude taken from Kamasutra, and will be talked about more when that album is discussed.

Friend, Lover, Sister Mother/Wife

The tail end of disc 2 is the one point in the album where I think Prince maybe just needs to just chew a gummy or two and chill the hell out because this is getting weird. The cumulative effect of all these songs piling up is weird, and this song all on its own is weird. Honestly, Prince, not for nothing, but what if something were to …I don’t know, go wrong with your relationship with Mayte? What then?

This song was played at their wedding reception on February 14, 1996. Because why not? What could go wrong?

Disc 3

This disc might be the only one that could stand completely on its own as an album. It would not say the same thing as the triple album, but it would be a good single album of its own.

Slave

Recorded in mid-1995, this was technically the first single released from the album. On December 9, 1995, there was a late night show at Paisley Park where a cassette with this song and the next track on it. Of interest is the art on that cassette, which is a section of the art eventually used on Emancipation. He already had many key design choices made for this album barely a couple of weeks after The Gold Experience was released.

It's not hard to guess what this one is about. It is one of the catchiest bangers on the album. Most of those are on this disc. In fact, the whole album ends incredibly strong, so if you’ve made it this far, you can relax because the rest of the trip will be pretty easy.

New World

Recorded in Late 1994, it’s an unusual track for Prince in that it is pretty much straightforward EDM. Like the previous track, it is a very danceable, infectious song. Its lyrics deal with fear of technology, gene splicing and the future. It also segues abruptly into the next track.

The Human Body

This song is another EDM experiment that came from the same Miami Beach sessions that completed Chaos and Disorder, though you’d never know it to listen to it. The lyrics are mostly throwaways, but the music is, like most Prince experimental tracks, a fun ride.

Face Down

One of Prince’s more successful attempts at rapping, “Face Down” was a regular feature on tour until he decided to stop swearing on stage, at which point this song became kind of pointless to attempt. There was also a live version released on the “NYC” cassette single. This was taken from the January 11, 1997 performance at the Roseland Ballroom in New York. Remixes were also created, but the single was cancelled before they could be released.

La, La, La Means I Love You

Another cover, this time of the 1968 hit from the Delfonics. This is another fairly faithful cover, even to the extent of sampling a guitar fill from the original. I’ll be honest with you, this song is not my cup of tea. It’s a good cover, and if you like the song, you’ll like this version of it.

Style

I suppose this one has become one of those “deep cut” songs. Hopefully over time people will rediscover this one over time, because it’s just as good as “Cream” or any number of his other latter-day hits. Also, it’s one of the few songs on the album that’s over six and a half minutes long and doesn’t feel like it’s been stretched to fit in that time.

Sleep Around

Another killer jam, a fast-rolling funk that benefits from the Tower of Power horn section. It is artificially lengthened, but it does not overstay its welcome.

Da, Da, Da

This is mostly a Scrap D. song, and I’m surprised to say that doesn’t bother me. It’s a complete change of pace from the rest of the album, and an outlier from most of Scrap D.’s contributions in that he has things to say.

My Computer

Prince had a strange relationship with the internet. This song is about someone lonely using the internet as a way to hopefully reach out and find some kind of connection with a person. It’s sweet, and would be less dated without the AOL samples. Kate Bush also guests on this. (!)

One Of Us

This is a cover of the song by Joan Osborn. The backing tracks are largely taken from another track by Prince called “Love…Thy Will Be Done” which was originally meant for Martika. The 1995 NPG plays on the track. Prince kept this in rotation with the next song for the rest of his life on and off. Osborn’s version always felt like she was singing in such a way as to deliberately try to avoid causing offense. Prince’s version is far more confrontational and is better for it, and I say this as a non-believer myself.

The Love We Make

Probably Prince’s greatest ballad. One of his best songs, full stop. A few problematic lyrics, sure, but all in all, it could go ten rounds with “Empty Room” or “Sometimes It Snows In April” any old day of the week.

Emancipation

Recorded in 1995, this is the thesis for the album, and it is a fantastic, joyous, funky riot that does exactly what it should. The bass is particularly excellent. It is one of his best tracks, and is worth the wait to hear it at the end of the album.

So Then What?

“…the press is going to look at this project as very ambitious. They’ll look at it as a make-or-break project. None of my projects have been make-or-break. I have a lot of fans that will -friends- that will continue to support me and, and my music…”

Prince to Chris Rock, January 1997

Like so many of Prince’s works, it’s easy to forget that when he was assembling Emancipation, he was in the middle of assembling at least three other albums that came out before its release, and he had his eye on several more that came out well after as well.

When the Estate re-issued Emancipation in 2019, it was not a perfect reproduction of the packaging. There was a blank space in the block of text on the last interior page of the booklet. I’m not complaining, because the text printed there in 1996 is irrelevant now, but at the time it was very important to Prince and those people who made sure none of his projects were make-or-break.

It was a small paragraph that said if you visited thedawn (his website at the time) or called 1-800 NEW FUNK you could order Mayte’s album Child of the Sun, the NPG’s Exodus and soon the NPG Dance Company’s ballet Kamasutra would be available. Also, it said that soon a three CD set of previously unreleased material would be available only through thedawn or 1-800 NEW FUNK, and if you wanted to have your own copy of Crystal Ball you should head to thedawn for details…

NEXT WEEK: Prince cracks open the Vault and releases yet another triple album, this time of outtakes, called Crystal Ball