I like that period a lot but most of those albums have some pretty low lows. TGE is the only one of those albums to dodge any major bullets (if you can get past P Control), maybe The Truth. But...

C&D: some really great stuff is often overlooked here but putting it side by side with ATWIAD makes absolutely no sense, because only one of those records had "I Rock Therefore I Am", lol -- game over. And "Right The Wrong." Those aren't the only dicey tracks, either, but "Rock" is especially embarassing.

Emancipation: What kind of math are you doing where you turn one album into three, lol? But either way, only one of those discs (if treated as an album in itself) is solid from top to bottom (disc 2 all day!), discs 1 and 3 are really touch and go. As a whole, it's a super spotty, bloated record, you could ditch about half of the stuff on disc 1 and another half of the stuff on disc 3 and not miss anything. This was the segue into a big part of what doomed late 90s and onward Prince: his album production. The drum programming especially is just lifeless and it drains a lot of the best moments of any real vitality.

The Truth: Definitely overlooked. Animal Kingdom is a harsh listen - when "Purple and Gold" dropped I had Animal Kingdom flashbacks, lol. I don't think song for song it's top-tier Prince but it's really, really good Prince, and a tighter, more coherent album than most other releases from this period.

NPS: There's no way this can be counted in an album streak. Folks clowned Push It Up and Freaks on This Side like crazy when this was released and they've aged terribly. It has some good stuff but most of it is middling at best. When the most interesting song on the album is a hidden/bonus track... I really like "When You Love Somebody" though, the instrumentation on that is really interesting and has a great change-up near the end that reminds me of "In This Bed I Scream."

With Emancipation and NPS in there, you really can't call this period an *album* streak. I'd say it's a productive period for him with a lot of highs but it's maddeningly inconsistent and often poorly executed.

The closest post-TGE run to a streak, imo, would be Rainbow Children/One Night Alone/Musicology. I'd probably overlook the NPGMC releases in that run because they were released in such a limited fashion, and even though there's some more invigorated work there, especially the instrumental stuff, they never felt like *albums* to me. But that works in that period's favor, in a way: Rainbow Children, One Night, and Musicology is a pretty solid three-album run.

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~