The Gold Experience (1995)

By the time this came out, Prince was well on the way to reducing himself to a public figure that shuttled vaguely between the ludicrous and the pathetic. He had engaged full-on in a feud to the death with the major label with which he was under contract, Warners no less, going so far as to legally change his name in an attempt to get out from under. Once "Prince," he now claimed his name as a mystifying symbol (rendered in keystrokes as something like "O(+>," which then needs to be swiveled, in one's mind, a quarter turn clockwise); it was acceptable and indeed encouraged to pronounce it "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince," or "The Artist" for short—Prince, man, that's a lot of work! Too often lost in all this willful confusion is the fact that he was not only still capable of producing the finest strains of funk, rock, and pop, but was doing so actually at a rate practically alarming. Here, even as the ongoing identity crisis continues to deepen with a pivot from his former name-brand color of purple to the all-new (and relatively short-lived) gold, he casually tosses up an hour and five minutes of choice tracks (notably, for me, "P Control," "Endorphinmachine," "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "Dolphin," "319," "I Hate U," and "Gold") accompanied by little bits of foofaraw, mostly in the transitions, and only a tiny handful of misfires. In the era of vinyl, that could easily have been a major release double LP with gatefold, but for Prince it was all in a year's work. All during the '90s he was getting his stuff out at the rate of easily one or more generously packed CDs per year, with remarkably little waste across the breadth and depth of them (even as something we may as well call "Prince fatigue" was surely setting in as well). In fact, in many ways The Gold Experience stands as the gateway album to his second half of the decade, a strange period when he was attempting to get out of the hated contract by firing off multiple albums—many strange, all with attractions—followed by the energy and stamina he demonstrated after he was finally on his own, releasing three- and even four-CD packages. Although arguably they are packed with a good deal more filler than found during his peak years (and I don't see how they couldn't be, all things considered), they all come with their blazing fine moments too, ranging wide from raw hard rock to jazz fusion. Let's put it this way. If you're going to buy three albums by Prince from the '90s this should probably be one of them. But wait—three is not nearly enough. Make it five. Your choice.