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>Prince - Welcome to America
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I had pretty low expectations for this: it's not an especially great period and all the press made it sound like it was a politically-geared record, and P and intentional political commentary generally do not make for good lyrics. So I expected some grooves ranging from bad to mediocre, maybe two or three stronger ones, but all of them weighed down by cringey pseudo-woke one-liners.

I was right. This is mostly skippable.

I will say the music itself is better than I expected. If these were instrumentals, I might go back to them more. Hot Summer's actually kind of cool. 1000 Light Years From Here, too, but all I could think was that Stevie wrote that lyric forty years earlier and it came off more memorably. (Also, is that a blatant rip of the "Make my funk the p-funk" chant on the title track?)

"When She Comes" was good but he'd kind of mined that musical space a lot in the '00s...

Worst track: 1010 (Rin Tin Tin), wtf was that?

Any theories as to why Prince was often so bad at covers ?(Stand Up and Be Strong is a Soul Asylum tune ... it's not even straight-up bad, it might even grow on me, but whenever he reached for a cover he seemed to lose imagination and try to go as straight alt-rock as possible... although I think one of the press pieces on this they suggested it was unfinished)

I'll go back a few times but this has all of the tact of the Rainbow Children (i.e. very little) with much less of the musical inspiration (RC is still probably my fav post-TGE Prince album, I think, although he had more winners than people remember).

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~