No other album I've ever heard has been such a monumental test of patience than Prince's Emancipation. I mean, it's all good music: the funk grooves, R&B beats, electricfying vocals and hard hitting guitar mixed with Prince's usual dirty and explict diatribes of the night before never cease to amaze. But there's just so MUCH of it that by the time you're done with the second disk and onto the third, you start to wonder if the dulled edge of the CD is enough to cut through you neck and kill you. Or you may just be asleep. Yeah, whatever.
It's useless to do a track-by-track review of this 180 minute behemoth, mostly because a) everyone does that, and it's stale as hell, b) there's 36 tracks here, and c) I doubt even Prince can keep the songs straight. Hell, he wasn't even going by Prince at this time. But the actual album, Emancipation, is impossible to describe. The songs are long and supposedly epic, but it sounds as if Prince couldn't find a way to end them. It sounds like a great concept album idea, 60 minute CDs packaged in a three-album set, but the tracks have no sense of being together, or the album moving as a mass. Instead, Emancipation moves like an iceberg, as you slowly tackle one track after another.
This isn't horribly bad, however. The songs, as I said, are all pretty good, and if you're a Prince fan, you were definitely partying like it was 1996. But this album is I believe out of print, and if it isn't, well, your better off not buying this anyway.
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