Prince
Around The World In A Day

While fiddling on Debaser, I noticed that there's no review for this great album. I'll try to take care of it; let me preface this by saying I am an absolute fan of Prince, I have passionately listened to his entire discography, and I've seen him live several times, even taking quite a few long train rides in foreign countries. I'm saying this to warn you that I may not be very objective, but I'm still rather informed about the facts.

Prince released "Around the World in a Day" the year following his sensational success with "Purple Rain," and the States were in a frenzy, hoping to find in the new album the ingredients of the previous success (blaring guitars, sentimental ballads, and sensual funky-rock), but instead, they found themselves holding an object that reshuffles and overturns all the ingredients. Prince brings out a psychedelic pop (which we'll rarely see again in the future), a sophistication in both content and compositional complexity that baffles everyone. The album is a commercial flop, and the first signs of Prince's future troubled relationship with the mainstream start to become visible. In my opinion, however, it's beautiful, and it's precisely in its eccentricity that its experimental and exploratory value lies.

The album opens with the title track, slow, acoustic, Arabian-like, a disorienting and fascinating setting, especially compared to the opening of the previous album ("Let's Go Crazy"): Prince is keen to make it clear right away that we're on a different planet here. The piece is a refined intellectual play, but in its psychedelic tail ("all the little baby, sing around the world") Prince's physicality peeks through again ("I think I wanna dance..."), live, he really dances up a storm! "Paisley Park" is an initial manifesto of the album, a psychedelic rock ballad somewhat reminiscent of the '60s (it's said that our man is equally inspired by the Beatles and James Brown, not bad when you consider it was '85 and crossover didn't exist). Very nice, a sweet childish melody. At this point, Prince takes another tangent, sliding into a long, highly refined instrumental introduction excellent for the ballad "Condition of the Heart", the track is a bit long (almost 7 min.) but it's so sweet, talking about the pains of unrequited love with anything but banal images (it's worth noting that around this time he composed "Nothing Compares to You"). Worth noting: still no trace of sex and transgressions.

"Raspberry Beret": what to say, it's absolutely among my favorite tracks in his entire discography. A psychedelic pop ballad, beatles-like melody, the song flows perfectly through its transitions and in hundreds of listens, it never gets boring, it has the strength of pop's great classics (I dare say: Beatles!) even if this wasn't decreed by success like other of his tracks ("Purple Rain", "Kiss"). On the contrary, at this point, a piece falls ("Tamborine") which is one of the few I truly can't appreciate, it's an eccentric and hysterical funky, where the slightly frayed Prince peeks through again (like "cat tight at the door," as we say around here); the piece slots in after such a dreamy start that it's like an alarm, which indeed introduces a rather different side B. "America" is a good funky rock, energetic and with a political text (he tries sometimes..) which is a bit confused as his lyrics regarding these topics often are. Let's move on: "Pop Life", beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, highly original. A piece no one but Prince could have written; moreover, Prince comes out with a truly intelligent and brilliant text, laying bare the distortions of a "Pop" life.

"The Ladder": an epic religious ballad with quasi-biblical parables; this piece, in my opinion, has the emotional power of "Purple Rain", but as it's not speaking about love but faith, it loses the great public's appeal. The ending, as often happens in his albums, flips the whole record on its head. In fact, after we almost forgot the perverse and sexual Prince of previous albums, he returns to shock the sanctimonious with all his erotic power in this electric blues: "Tentation"; where, after a brazen display of sins, he finds time in the psychedelic tail, to dialogue with God himself, challenge him, be punished, ask for forgiveness, and be absolved, until his journey to who knows where ("I have to go now, and I don't know when I return... goodbye..."). Prince will indeed return, shooting a trilogy of albums in the second half of the '80s that will shake modern black music and establish Prince as one of the greatest pop music composers.

This was my first review, I hope I wasn't too wordy or pompous, but my passion for music and for Prince is great, and so I let myself get carried away a bit. I'll end with a point I want to make because it's something I care about a lot (the power of the mainstream), and it's a topic that's talked about very little, assuming that nothing can be done about it. Surely a site like this is an excellent contribution to the free circulation of ideas.

I agree with those who wrote on Debaser that Prince is subject to a remarkable removal. It's true! This gives us an idea of how powerful record labels are. Regardless of the character's strengths and weaknesses, his unpredictability and artistic freedom are not liked by the market, and when he then engaged in open warfare with the mainstream, it was his commercial tomb, suffice it to recount these facts (which almost none of the insiders unfortunately recounts): Prince released several albums on the internet (jazz funky etc. like "Chocolate Invasion", "Slaughterhouse", "News" and, initially, also "The Rainbow Children"). Albums neither better nor worse than previous or subsequent ones, just new testimonies of his artistic moment. These albums were completely ignored, not reviewed, they didn't exist on the radio, television, or newspapers! Only when he started publishing with the majors again ("The Rainbow Children", a year later, "Musicology", "3121"), and his (lost) battle was over did all the journalists wake up, screaming about the "return" of the genius (never gone away) and compactly reviewing each release as Prince's "best" album in 10 years! This, in my opinion, is evidence of how the entire journalistic system is manipulated by economic powers (and this clearly doesn't apply just to Prince), and here my rant ends, sorry.

Thank you, I hope you appreciate the effort, and goodbye to everyone.

Emiliano