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The Rainbow Children

Prince - The Rainbow Children Audio CD

A fair review of the Prince "The Rainbow Children" Audio CD. Please note that the below review is the views of the authors, and authors only. You can get a complete list of all Prince reviews here, or go back to the Prince tabs.

Band: Prince
Title: The Rainbow Children
Rating:

Release Date: 2001-11-20
Media: Audio CD

Tracks: 1: Rainbow Children 2: Muse 2 the Pharoah 3: Digital Garden 4: The Work Pt.1 5: Everywhere 6: The Sensual Everafter 7: Mellow 8: 1+1+1 is 3 9: Deconstruction 10: Wedding Feast 11: She Loves Me 4 Me 12: Family Name 13: The Everlasting Now 14: Last December

AWESOME!
If you want a Microwaved POP STAR Prince is not for you. The Rainbow Children is a Great album, it's not supposed to be Purple Rain or 1999 or Sign O the Times or any of his other albums none of them are the same. I don't like overly religious themes but this CD is very creatively and cleverly done it requires thought which a lot of music lacks these days. .

Wonderful musically, but the lyrics are abominably bigoted
But I'm still a big fan of his, and I enjoy most of this album, despite the problems I have with the lyrics. Before I begin, I'd like to warn people that I make some fairly harsh accusations of Prince in this review. I also do a bit of soapboxing, but that's because I have a deep-seated hatred of prejudice, and the aforementioned lyrics have their share of that. So, here I go. . . I wonder what would happen if Prince found this review. . .
A concept album about Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm sure you're waiting with bated breath for me to yell out, "Ha! You fell for it! Sucker!", but that's the honest truth. Prince is a Jehovah's Witness himself now, by the way. What a freakish coinkydink! And while I can't see anyone who's not a Jehovah's Witness relating to the lyrics on this album, I really like the music. Basically, it's Prince reclaiming his roots in funk, jazz, and R&B, which turns out to be a great combination. My advice is that, unless you are a Jehovah's Witness, you tune out to the lyrics entirely and focus on the music. Thankfully there are a lot of instrumental breaks on the title track - most of its length is given to extreme jamming, and let me tell you, those are some impressive solos. And the funk is far from stale - Prince put a lot of effort into making "The Work, pt. 1", "Digital Garden" (with a weird Eastern-tinged synthesizer part), "1+1+1 is 3", and "The Everlasting Now" as funky, danceable, and musically challenging as he possibly could. He also pulls out all the stops on the ballads, such as the jazz-tinged "Muse 2 the Pharaoh" and the melodic-to-the-max "Everywhere" and "Mellow". Even segues such as the quirky "Wedding Feast" are considerably more imaginative than the ones on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, O)+>, or the Gold Experience. I'll grant that "She Loves Me 4 Me" is trite and treacly, but that's just one song out of fourteen. Now, the lyrics. . . not a fan of those. Sometimes they border on racist - on "Family Name", you'll note how Prince implies that every race but the white people can be considered "rainbow children" deserving of the highest blessing, or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for racial equality, but I'm also white, so this offends me. I mean, yeah, white people have caused a lot of problems in this world, but there have been some good ones - Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates (one of the greatest philanthropists in history, you know) and Winston Churchill certainly come to mind, and easily belong with heroes and heroines like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. , and Nelson Mandela (not to mention Ghandi, Buddha, and yes, Jesus - I'm not very religious, but I won't deny the guy had an amazing message that I try my best to live by). I'm not trying to make excuses for the horrible things white people have done - and they have done horrible things - but you can't write all of them off as evil just because some of them are. The irony is that I'm totally down with the song's restless jazz-funk groove, and the guitar trickery Prince pulls out at the end is amazing as it always is. The most disgraceful part of the lyrics, though, is when, during the title track, he trivializes the Holocaust. May I go throw up now? Eleven million people died in the Holocaust, Prince. You wanna know why? Because that sick-minded freak who, far and away, is the nadir of humanity (I honestly don't think his name isn't even worthy of mention - I seriously treat it like a grave obscenity) was under the totally false impression that his twisted little beliefs were the only correct ones, and all of those who believed in anything else were to be put to death. I wonder if he put any thought at all into that lyric, or if he just spat it out to cause a bit of controversy. Let's take every lyric of that song out, because it's also an appallingly sexist creation, and let's focus on the instrumental soloing instead, because I love the soloing. I just hate the lyrics, that's all. Thankfully, lyrics are easy for me to block out. I won't completely overlook them - this would've gotten a much higher score if Prince had eschewed them entirely, in fact - but Prince has talent to burn, and he puts all of it into the music of this album. And there is one track that has solid music and lyrics: the moving ballad "Last December", with a shockingly forceful end that is even more extreme than the coda to "Purple Rain", and a guitar solo that rivals that classic. It helps that the lyrics are about uniting, rather than dividing. That's a good thing for people like me, who believe in equality for all people. So, here's what you've gotta do with this one. Forget the hideous lyrics ever existed, block out all of the racist and sexist undertones, and focus on the music. Because the arranging and performing on this one are fantastic. The lyrics, however, are not. I think Prince went a bit too far into making this the "controversial new album", as the sticker on the cover proclaims it. That's annoying, and it's also annoying that Prince goes out of his way to shock people just for the sake of being shocking, because as I've said before, he's got a lot of talent and I think it's a big waste of it. I have no objections to him getting his sex-god on, even though I don't think he's got any mojo (seriously, he weighs ten pounds and he's, like, two feet tall), but I've got a lot of objections to this, and Prince is one of my favorite artists. I honestly don't think Jesus is a fan of racism, sexism, homophobia, or religious intolerance. But hey, the music is through the roof. And I'm repeating myself. Okay, I'm done now.

The worst of his two bad albums!
He has had mostly ingeniously excellent albums and a few (NPG era) mediocre ones full of uncomposed "boom boom" filler with one or two hits on them, but few were actually bad, as in throw-away bad. Prince is my favorite artist, even hero, of all time. Now 'Graffiti Bridge' was pretty bad in a retro way (lyrics include: "there is joy in repetition"), and includes a hodgepodge of old and new stuff, all lame. *This* album, 'Rainbow Children', like Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' or 'Final Cut' and especially Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs' has an overall story/theme that is however the equivalent of tacky glitter snow falling around white unicorns, for which this is the soundtrack. It's his only truly strange album. I only went online to look it up was to see why he made it, assuming it was a forgivable paid soundtrack for a movie or something (yet one of his best booty shaking songs is 'Bat Dance' for a Batman movie). My current theory is that in protest he made a blatantly tacky and unprofitable album to technically fulfill an unfair contract? Sure, there's a couple normal instead of insipid songs, but none are hit quality, so are not keepers for my Prince playlist. He did a sort of mythical story per song in the double disk 'Sign of the Times' ("Starfish and Cofee. . . "). That was "good" weird, and happy as hell, in the way an adult can enjoy a cardboard page children's book, or an episode of the Simpsons. But what is the epic, mythical story that structures *this* album? It's similar to 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy': some bad guys build a "digital god" and then the "Rainbow Children" destroy it and dance around some magic tree. Even such a story could be profound, but like a joke, it needs good delivery. This flops so badly it made me cringe. He even uses a cheap sounding vocoder (voice changer box) to make his spoken narration of the story sound like a cartoon Dr. Evil. Only one song is actually sort of funny instead of tortured: 'Family Name'; so if you are a huge Prince collector/fan and want the only actually cool song on this disk, get this song from iTunes (or lately Amazon). It's funny since it has a Steven Hawkings sounding computer voice saying goofy stuff, then the song becomes classic Prince singing/jamming. Surgically extracted from this gum stuck to your shoe album, on its own it's a keeper, but still not of hit or even novelty quality.

Prince sigue siendo el genio de minneapolis
Prince con este album me sorprendio por el talento que manera de sonar y sobre todo se nota que todo los arreglos tiene su toque personal
para los fanaticos de prince deben tener este disco en su colecci�n.

Prince's Overwelming Musical Feast Of A Comeback
Mainly it serves as the reintroduction recording of Prince after eight years as TAFKAP but it's also the birth of a new band,titled after the album featuring musicians such as jazz reedsman Najee and Larry Graham. 'The Rainbow Children' is a CD that does an awful lot. It was also labeled as Prince most controversial recording-apparently one of many. What is the album?Basically 'The Rainbow Children' is a jazz-funk fusion styled spiritual epic designed to illustrate Prince's conversion to Jehovah's Witness. The story is told by the same basic deep voiced narrator who opened up "1999" twenty years earlier. This recording showcases Prince's musical rebirth with an entirely new direction,one that in a lot of ways picked up where recordings like 'Sign O The Times' and 'Lovesexy' left off. The opening title song features a chorus of sings along with Prince illustrating the CD's themes on a very old fashion,minimal jazzy-soul tune. The majority of the songs here are very stripped down to focus attention on the highly religious lyrics-namely the ballads "Muse To The Pharoh","Everywhere","She Loves Me For Me" and the unusually sexy "Mellow". As for some of the more uptempo numbers "Digital Garden","The Sensual Everafter" and "Last December" all feature a number of dynamic percussive arrangements and are highly dramatic in effect. What impress me most of course are the four funk tunes-all of which are more basic and stripped down as well,featuring a strong rhythm section and great tempos. Larry Graham permeates "The Work" while "1+1+1 Is 3" gets even deeper into the groove. "Family Name" goes even deeper-a racially charged tune musically sharing some lineage with Stevie Wonder's "Black Man",but done more subversively and told by what sounds like a trio of robots. Then it launces into the celebratory "The Everlasting Now",one of the finest songs on the CD that keeps the rhythm flowing from end to end. Taken together "The Rainbow Children" is a very complicated and eccentric piece of music with a lot of unexpected twists and turns. It features a smaller group of musicians then Prince's other bands and it shares a lot more in common with jazz,gospel and psychedelic funk then any of Prince's previous music. None of the songs are particularly single worthy (same as with 'Lovesexy for the most part) but once you turn this music on it is so captivating you won't want to turn it off,even if your not a Jehovah's Witness. And for that this is another impressive triumph in a long line of them for Prince.

You can see a complete list of all Prince discography, or go back to the Prince tabs. There is also a good guide on how to read guitar tabs here.