Prince - The Gold Experience

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NME.COM feature on Prince - The Gold Experience album including album review, artwork, tracks, listen now, tour dates, discography and more.

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Release date: 26 September 1995

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Prince - The Gold Experience: Wikipedia Album Entry

The Gold Experience is an album released by Prince (his stage name at that time being the love symbol he created) on September 26, 1995. The album is considered by some fans to be the Purple Rain of the 1990s, due to the rock and roll feel, accessibility of the tracks, and Prince's own admission that the song, "Gold" would be the next "Purple Rain".

Prince wanted to release The Gold Experience under the symbolic moniker in 1994, alongside Come, which was marketed as a "Prince" album of "old" material. Both albums contained material from Prince's musical production called Glam Slam Ulysses. The plan was to show the superior quality of the newer material as opposed to the older "Prince" material. Plans were thwarted by Warner Bros., which felt the market would be over-saturated with Prince material, and withheld the album. Prince was prompted to protest by appearing in public with the word "slave" written on his face and stating The Gold Experience's release date would be "never".

Some songs originally intended for the album, such as "Interactive" and "Days of Wild", were removed by the time of the album's release. It has been alleged by some that "Days of Wild" was nixed by Warner Brothers at the request of some of the larger retail chains, because of its lyrical content. By the time the album actually was released in 1995, Prince's interest in it had passed, and he was working on songs for his 3-CD opus, Emancipation, which could be partially responsible for the album's lack of commercial success. Despite that, The Gold Experience garnered Prince his best reviews in nearly a decade.

The Gold Experience produced three singles, each with an accompanying music video: "I Hate U", "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World", and "Gold". Additionally, a video for "Dolphin" was released prior to the release of the album. The singles enjoyed success on the R&B and pop charts, with the exception of "Gold". "P Control" was also intended to be released as a single, but was canceled because it did not receive enough airplay. It was, however, performed at the 1995 VH1 Fashion Rocks Awards.

The song "Billy Jack Bitch" was speculated by many sources to have been written about a Minneapolis Star Tribune gossip columnist known as "CJ". Prince denied the song was about the columnist when CJ herself interviewed him.

Released in 1995, this is the first album by the artist formerly known as Prince, but now known by an unpronouncable glyph, a conceit (conceptually at least) designed to free himself from his record label, Warner Brothers, who had refused to release it the previous year, during a period when Prince's already prolific output had begun to overheat.
Despite this, Prince promoted it heavily on tour and in television appearances, including the TV special 'The Beautiful Experience' which seemed to treat his last album as Prince, 1994's 'Come' and this album as simultaneous. Ironically, by the time Warner Brothers relented and released it the following year, Prince had moved on, leaving it to garner the best reviews he'd had since 1987's 'Sign of the Times' but sell so badly it was soon deleted (it has only recently been re-added to the Warners catalogue).
Guitar-heavy and driven by his best band line-up since The Revolution, this is a tour de force of Prince's familiar lyrical style but backed by densely-layered futuristic arrangements which merge R&B, rock and hip-hop in ways that evolve his own career-wide capacity for just this.

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