HitnRun: 4Ever (2016)
Disc One
1. 1999
2. Little Red Corvette
3. When Doves Cry
4. Let's Go Crazy
5. Raspberry Beret
6. I Wanna Be Your Lover
7. Soft and Wet
8. Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad
9. Uptown
10. When You Were Mine
11.Head
12.Gotta Stop (Messin' About)
13.Controversy
14.Let's Work
15.Delirious
16.I Would Die 4 U
17.Take Me With U
18.Paisley Park
19.Pop Life
20.Purple Rain
Disc Two
1. Kiss
2. Sign o' the Times
3. Alphabet St.
4. Batdance
5. Thieves in the Temple
6. Cream
7. Mountains
8. Girls & Boys
9. If I Was Your Girlfriend
10.U Got the Look
11.I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man
12.Glamslam
13.Moonbeam Levels
14.Diamonds and Pearls
15.Gett Off
16.Sexy M.F.
17.My Name is Prince
18.7
19.Peach
20.Nothing Compares 2 U
The first in what will likely be a long and uneven line of posthumous Prince collections. A double album bursting with material from the Warner Brothers era – the only era, it seems, deemed worthy of inclusion. And that’s the catch: everything here stops at 1992. One suspects it’s a contractual limitation, but it also paints an incomplete portrait. Prince didn’t stop creating relevant, interesting, and often dazzling music after leaving Warner’s, though this set would have you believe otherwise.
What’s most jarring is the decision to feature several tracks in their edited, radio-friendly versions. For anyone familiar with the full-length album takes, these truncated cuts feel oddly malnourished. A man known for stretching boundaries is here hemmed in by someone else’s scissors. It’s like being offered a full banquet, only to receive hors d'oeuvres.
Two less familiar tracks round out the set – the long-bootlegged but officially unreleased Moonbeam Levels and the relatively obscure Gotta Stop (Messin’ About), previously available only as a single. Both are fine inclusions, though neither particularly revelatory. Certainly not lost masterpieces, but worthwhile nonetheless.
Despite its limitations, HitNRun: 4Ever is a fine retrospective of the Warner years. No, it doesn’t improve upon previous compilations – The Hits/The B-Sides still reigns supreme – but it serves as a generous (if slightly sanitized) introduction to the work that made Prince a pop culture monolith. Two and a half hours of music that defined a generation, even if it doesn't quite tell the whole story.
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