Disclaimer, I used to be a die hard Prince fan back in the 80's & 90's and would collect all his albums and bootlegged material, in addition to moderating a very active fan forum for 7 or so years. In the 90's he was pretty vocal about wanting to get out of his contract with Warner Brothers and frequently complained how they screwed him over by owning his master recordings as well as the rights to his birth name. So this comes as a bit of a surprise to hear that he has signed back with them some 17+ years later: Log In On one hand I kind of want to be excited about this, but at the same time, he is notorious for delaying and screwing up album releases. We've gotten burned a number of times over the years with pet projects he would bail on and lose interest in - in some cases never releasing them. In one instance, he took pre-orders for a three disc set of unreleased music called "The Crystal Ball" but didn't bother to tell anyone upfront that the actual album wouldn't be released until over a year later. By that time, his distribution company had lost many people's orders, not to mention people's orders being lost because they had since moved or relocated. To make matters worse, on a whim he decided to release it in stores anyhow, even though it was initially slated to be mail order only. And the icing on the cake was that the store version arrived before many people's pre-ordered copies arrived, along with an extra 4th CD that the pre-ordered versions didn't even get. In another fiasco, he created an online music club, asking fans to pay $100 in advance for at least 4 new albums that would be released over the course of the year. He ended up shipping only one "EP" length album that was pretty lousy, then hastily threw together a 3 disc live album from some of his recent concerts and shipped that out to complete his obligations. After a big enough uproar, he put out one final download only album called "Xpectation", which consisted of 10 instrumentals with titles all starting with the letter "X". Surprisingly the album was good, better than anything else released that year, but it was still a smart alec response to his fans legitimate concerns. The other main concern is that Prince, who has since converted to Jehova's Witness and won't perform any of his more risque songs, will end up censoring all his previous work when it is remastered and re-released. If he does this, that will more or less be the final nail in the coffin with many of his long time fans, and I highly suspect it will cause these re-releases to sell very poorly once the word gets out. We'll wait and see.
Aaah...I can talk Prince...up until about 1992/93. Like you, I was diehard and even bought his B sides as a kid/teen. However, I drew the line at the whole symbol thing. Though many of us get it now, it was originally executed badly so I checked out and began listening to this new thing called grunge . As far as the anniversary broo-ha-ha goes, I'm glad that he's still with us and not broke mentally or fiscally (though I could use a few stacks myself,lol). It will be interesting to see how this turns out on the business end. His UK marketing campaign where he gave away CDs with newspaper subscriptions was mentioned as being an excellent idea in my promotions class, which surprised the heck out of me. I used to work with one person who paid $375 for a symbol jacket she never received.
I remained a Prince fan up until Musicology but I'm not interested in new Prince who appeared on The New Girl and said he watches it religiously. I liked young, hungry crazy Prince and I hung in there as a fan until 2004, but he's become boring to me. He's lost his edge.
I liked a few of his songs, but I wasn't a diehard fan. I guess it was because I wasn't born until 1988, so I didn't get to hear a lot of his stuff. I had no idea he became a Jehova's Witness. That's very interesting. Anyway, it's good that fans will get the chance to get more of his songs at a good quality.
