Shit That’s Good! Crap Albums I Love # 54 – Prince, Emancipation

From time to time I like to share some stories about albums I love that are duds – either I’ve found a way in to appreciate it through sheer stubbornness – or I just loved it on first listen.

Prince, Emancipation, 1996

I pretty much like every album released in Prince’s lifetime. Apart from one. And I won’t name it. See if you can guess. But it’s worse than any of the ones that usually get mentioned in that 90s-glut of him over-releasing. In fact, most of the ones from the highlighted period are ones I’ll regularly defend I love the Love Symbol record, and Come, The Gold Experience and the reissued Black Album. What a phenomenal run. I rate Chaos And Disorder, though I’ll acknowledge it’s not ‘good’ – at all. But it arrived when I was collecting up the albums on CD, first time around. I’d committed. I was all in.

And then Emancipation seemed to be the one where the joke was carried too far. This one broke everyone’s spirit. (Never mind that Prince’s spirit was broken too).

The real issue around this time wasn’t the music – everyone was just confused by, and then sick of, the name-change story. Prince went full Cosplay too, writing SLAVE on his face trying to cancel his record-company; he’d be cancelled far quicker today, but the record company probably would be too. Anyway, we all got a bit sick of this much material back then, but Prince was paving the way for new deliveries. He was nearly an internet pioneer as a music-maker, but his control-freak tendencies got in the way.

Emancipation is the easiest one to pick as the point when people stopped caring because it’s the obvious example of Prince not caring about his audience, not exercising that quality control. It is a triple-album (and no one was making those). It is 36 songs. And it is made for the already overly-long CD format. By 1996 we were knee-deep in hip-hop skits and end-of-album hidden tracks and bonus content. It was all getting too much already anyway. And then Prince took it way too far.

But I remember wanting to like Emancipation. And not having to try too hard. There are songs that work. There are songs that vibe. There is enough here to make a decent album.

And so I’m doing y’all the favour – and finally making the single-disc album it deserves to be. There’s a longer exercise where I make the double-disc album that would have been the ultimate proof that he had something to say and could go large with it.

But that’s a problem.

Because he didn’t actually have a whole lot to say. Not only were people sick of hearing from him, and in this way, but his words were running low. He had no message, no quirk, no tricks. He was just creating funk grooves and ballads but he had no wit hanging on them, where once he was quite the smut-poet.

I love this album because it is real line-in-the-sand stuff too. You owned this album, you were really admitting to something. You had gone deep. Full noise. You were a Prince fan. You were in the club. And possibly hosting the next meeting

.

You’d gone full Method Listen on the Prince Catalogue. You were busy working out how to find some of those bootlegs that were being talked up in 1996.

So, it’s not a great album at all. It probably is pretty crappy. But I still hear it as the noise made by an artist in defiance. And I hear it as a listener that was so fully committed to the bit as to be buying anything and everything. And back then, that was how we showed our fandom.

I still maintain it’s not terrible. And I do reckon my single disc version works in a way that the triple didn’t – and could never. For it is an exhausting listen trying to get through three hours of this. I only ever did that once – right through. But I’d take it a disc at a time over two or three days, sure. No issue.

There are other crappy albums by Prince. And there’s definitely one that’s far worse than this. But this is the one that feels like the time when even many of his biggest fans through the towel in. And that feeling stayed – for close to a decade in some cases. It was Musicology, and Prince’s decision to ditch the name-change, the protesting, and to play the hits at his gigs, that brought everyone back. And a bunch of phoney, fairweather types came crawling in out of the woodwork too, proclaiming they’d always been a fan. Like, lol.