Publication: Ikon [?]
Date: October 1995
Section:
Page Number(s):
Length:
Title: The Gold Experience Review
Reviewed By: Chris Robers

Good morning ladies and gentleman, boys and mutherfuckin' girls, this is your captain with no name speaking and I'm here to rock your world". So begins the best album ever by the man they're calling... well, prince. Let's be honest. None of us think a thunderbolt will strike us down if we don't stick to the manual. Yet Prince says he's dead. and on this record Mayte says, "Prince es muerto", and in 1989 I, being s visionary, wrote "Prince is dead dead dead dead dead" and took a kicking from all angles for it. he heard me though, obviously. Killed himself of. Regrouped. Came back strong. "Gold" is utterly fantastic, the lusty slinky shag-happy stuff of legends. Lots in a name. Reborn and raising Cain.

Tethered for a year by Warners (it's no ruder than, say, marivn Gaye would be now), vaunted as his masterpiece by an artist who's lost the plot to the point of becoming a joke in recent years, you'd expect it to be dire. But it's higher than a kite. From seconds in, "Gold" is a reckless, breathless, cool-as-hell beast that thinks its "Parade", knows it's God, holds up its hands and thanks itself for rediscovering its genius.

The whole of human life is there, apart from anything other than sex. Oh. there's mention of ancestors on "We March", but the rest is libido. "Pussy Control" takes pAins to show how sexist it's not - "she's the mayor of your brain" - and hails female empowerment - "pussy got bank in her pockets" - in sleazy, pervy, kind of way - "before she got dick in her drawers". it's all very arresting, with its fascist stomps, regal swoops, and self-mocking cosmic smut-as-philosophy.

Racing through "Endorphinmachine", our man is poised enough on "Shh" to express with immense heartfelt love in his voice, a desire to "do it in the kitchen on a table-top". Ooh, the saucy little monkey! "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" remains his finest, most grown-up single. and is superceded by a husky number about reincarnation as a dolphin. Oh Yes.

"You have just accessed the beautiful experience. This experiance will cover courtship, sex, commitment, fetishes, loneliness, vindication, love and hate. please enjoy your experience". Very well. Even when "319" finds him cooing "I just wana holler scream and shout when you let your fingers do the walking in and out and all about", you're blinded by the exhaustive musicality of the phrasing. "Shy" and the new single "I hate U" belie their titles (the latter turns misogyny on its head and conjures 33 syllables from "be with you"). "Gold" itself makes "Purple Rain" sound like a faint drizzle.

For too long the nameless wonder has been snagging his nets and screwing with saturation stimuli, but this monumental groove of a thing is sharp. alert, and has the pulse of a running wolf. What do you call a man this frighteningly, unpredictably, oceanincally gifted? Anything he wants. Boom Boom, and then some.