This is all of my envy.  "If only..."



 

I just can't care about these new Stones.

Oh, I would like to talk about how horrendous their album cover is though.

I think it's important to discuss how a band with billions of dollars at their disposal, has just used a cover design that looks like it was made  on a 20 year old computer.

It's shameful

I picked up the last two Animal Collective albums together.  I already posted from the most recent one, Isn't It Now?.  I like that one better than the previous one, Time Skiffs, overall but there's plenty of good stuff to go around.






 

Diamonds and Pearls is, for me, a disappointing choice for the Prince estate's series of "super deluxe" releases.  It might make sense commercially, as D&P is probably next in line as the highest grossing album behind 1999, Purple Rain and Sign O' the Times, and that's not exactly a coincidence.  Prince has always had an uncanny knack to drop a hit when on the precipice of irrelevance.  (He would write "Most Beautiful Girl" to counter a record exec who told him he'd never have a number one again.)  Much like Musicology, a decade later, D&P sounds calculated as "Prince product", buying him some time to then indulge in more personal and ambitious, and more interesting, material.  I'm not as expert on this '91-'92 era, but I'm surprised that they managed to gather three CDs worth of unreleased material.  Not surprised that Prince could produce that amount of songs, only because the bulk of rumored or bootlegged material from the early '90s is associated with his '93-'94 project The Dawn instead.  I haven't made it to these outtakes yet, so I can't attest to their quality.  (Maybe they include demos he made for Carmen Electra and Ingrid Chavez.)  I went straight for the show (above), which is excellent as always.

But in terms of what I would prioritize with these Vault releases, I would prefer some other possibilities.  Pre-1999 is a fecund era.  A high-quality concert mix of the original Revolution (with Andre Cymone and Dez Dickerson) would be essential.  The Around the World/Parade period certainly needs some recontextualizing, and would complete a comprehensive chronology of his most creative period ('82-'87).  The aforementioned Dawn, which has never been satisfactorily compiled in bootleg form, has the potential to rewrite the significance of the otherwise commercial doldrums of his 90s output.

It's more understandable why the estate would skip over the period between Sign and Diamonds, because it's marked by a number of unrealized projects.  And it's telling that the two most realized projects of that time, Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge, are arguably among his weakest.  But, again, this is why these types of expanded releases can salvage and recontextualize the material.  Taking the abandoned projects - Black Album, Corporate World, Rave Unto the Joy Fantastic - which included a lot of material that would be incorporated into Batman and Bridge, and even some of his other side projects with Shelia E and Margie Cox, or, hell, even that session he did with Kim Basinger, and perhaps a more serious case could be made for what Prince's vision of the time looked like without being cracked by distractions and contractual obligations.