dad and him. There’s a picture somewhere of me and him and his dad, and I remember thinking, ‘This is really bizarre.’ Because I considered him a friend; but didn’t he have other friends who should be at the wedding? I’m an employee. We were on the payroll. It was weird. The minute you started thinking you were tight like a buddy, sometimes you’d get fired. Everyone had their place. Tight as you were, it was a friendship in another way.” Perhaps no song encapsulates The Gold Experience ’s gaudy greatness than “Gold.” Built around a simple keyboard riff and a straight-forward rhyme pattern (“high” and “fly”; “sold” and “told”), it’s incredibly simple, and yet gifted us one of Prince’s most stirring anthems since “Purple Rain.” In the video, the band performs on a stage that looks like Oscars night if it was thrown by King Midas, or Scrooge McDuck. The Artist Eternally Known as Prince stands front and center. The Love Symbol looms largely in the background. Gold glitter rains all around, jumping up off the drum kit’s symbol as it’s forcefully whacked. Despite appearing to be shot in the runic ruins of an opulent lost society, the song voices Prince’s freedom-focused mid-’90s mind-set: “What’s the use in money if you ain’t gonna break the mold.” Everything he did during the period was an attempt to shatter all industry models forever.
The grinding machinery of opening track “P Control” sounds like a swaggering swerve into a whole new era. It’s rare to find a track this dissonant and still so funky. Prince’s voice veers from a hip-hop flow to a wild yodel. In his opening lines, the Kid shouts out the recent drama: “This is your captain with no name speakin’ / And I’m here to rock your world.” The message comes through in clear Technicolor: everything has changed, but nothing has changed. The Gold Experience plays as something of a concept album, with tracks separated by segues depicting computer programs that can be uploaded into the listener’s consciousness (“the beautiful experience,” “the now experience,” etc.). Prince was at the time tinkering with the idea of releasing music via the fledgling internet, but his plans were again halted at the request of music executives. Much like songs could magically make their way up your telephone line and onto your hard drive, Prince was pondering emotions and feelings being uploaded into the human mind. Like many of his best works, The Gold Experience sees Prince run the stylistic gambit. There are scuzzy rock jams (“Endorphinmachine”), grinding funk workouts (“Now”), wounding ballads (“Eye Hate U”), and even a daft pop ode to aquatic reincarnation (“Dolphin”). “Shhh” sees the artist take back the slithering loverman number he originally penned for singer Tevin Campbell and turn it into a sensual power ballad. Opening with a rollicking drum loop that gives way for the singer’s sultry vocals and seductive lead guitar lines, it’s one of Prince’s greatest showstoppers—a track that was still being slid into his live sets years later. Michael B. Nelson enjoys the rare distinction of having a co- production credit on a Prince track. The sweeping dance-funk number “Billy Jack Bitch” ended up including one of the trombonist’s own horn riffs. To stay sharp during time off, Nelson and the rest of the brass collective, known as the Hornheads, would get together and thrash out new ideas. From these jam sessions came an extended horn version of Thelonious Monk’s jazzy piano track “Well, You Needn’t,” which included some original elements. Back at Paisley Park, one of horn players brought the piece to Prince. Nelson remembers, “He even asked me, ‘Who do I have to pay to use that?’ I said, ‘Well, you have to talk to Thelonious’s son, I guess.’ ” In the end, Monk’s music wasn’t included in “Billy Jack Bitch,” but Nelson’s original composition features in the final cut. The album’s debut single, “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” would become one of the Purple One’s most famous ’90s grooves. About eighteen months before The Gold Experience ’s release, Warner Bros. yielded to one of their client’s demands and allowed him to release the song as a one-off single through his own NPG Records, Edel Music, and distributed by Bellmark Records. Maybe their execs were tired of fighting Prince on everything. Maybe they hoped it would tank and the star would return to their doorway with newfound clarity. Instead, “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” a fluttering ’70s-style soul ballad that features Prince’s floating falsetto, was a hit, and his only ever U.K. number one single. The song would later be covered by Mayte Garcia, a young singer who danced on the Diamonds and Pearls tour and quickly became a full member of the New Power Generation. Mayte and Prince’s relationship blossomed, influencing some of his prettiest ballads of the era. The couple married on Valentine’s Day in 1996. Tommy Barbarella was invited to the wedding. He’d grown close to Prince over the years, though was still technically an employee. Getting a new glimpse behind the purple drapes was an unusual experience. “I remember being there with him at the wedding reception out at Paisley Park,” says Barbarella. “I remember posing for pictures with his
A Vindication
The Gold Experience was released September 26, 1995, to solid reviews. The album sold 500,000 copies in the U.S., reaching number six on the Billboard 200. Lower numbers than a Prince record could expect to reach, for Warner Bros. it must have felt like a vindication. But the artist’s mind had moved on to the next project already. Rushing through the quick-fire release Chaos & Disorder to fulfill his contract, Prince eventually severed ties with Warner Bros. The 1996 album Emancipation was a celebration of just that—its three-disc format a wild declaration that Prince could release songs however the hell he wanted. For the remainder of his career, he never stopped testing new methods of putting out music. Prince may have gone on to have a strange relationship with the internet, but years before Napster hit, he was dropping online-exclusive albums, confirming his position as a daring digital futurist. In 2007, he finally fulfilled one ambition— releasing his album Planet Earth in the U.K. as a free covermount with The Mail on Sunday newspaper. Freed from his contract with Warner, Prince began using his own name again in the year 2000. On the jazzy loverman ballad “Call My Name,” from 2004’s Musicology , he sounded happy to slide back into his former self, joyfully celebrating his identity through the lens of a lover. “I heard your voice this morning calling out my name,” he sings. “It had been so long since I’ve heard / That it didn’t sound quite the same, no.” In 2014, Prince regained control of his back catalog after penning a new deal with Warner Bros. that saw him release two new records under a renewed license from his old nemesis. It felt kind of perfect: the once self-proclaimed slave, who tried to reimagine the mechanisms of the music industry, returning to the corporate titans on his own terms. It was, perhaps, a symbolic validation of a battle in which he took his fair share of licks. For Prince, though, it had always been about the music. “My music wants to do what it wants to do, and I just want to get out of its way,” he told Forbes in 1996. “I want the biggest shelf in the record store—the most titles. I know they’re not all going to sell, but I know somebody’s going to buy at least one of each.” .
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( opposite ) A 1995 advertisement for The Gold Experience , featuring some of the critical praise the album received at the time.
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