A Review of Jim Walsh’s
Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s
Originally published in the Minneapolis StarTribune
on January 22nd, 2017
By Jim Walsh
University of Minnesota Press, 200 pages, $16.95
Minneapolis native Prince was perhaps the last American pop
musician who could legitimately be compared to such prime movers as Elvis
Presley or James Brown or Jimi Hendrix. Arriving almost fully formed as a
teenage recording artist in the late 1970s, he drew upon a particularly vibrant
circle of musical scenes, absorbing the exuberance of disco, the edginess of
punk rock and new wave, the fervor of Michael Jackson, and the pyrotechnic
thrills of Van Halen and heavy metal, transforming it all into a body of work
that was as accomplished as it was ambitious. He flashed through the 1980s in a
delirious purple dream, besting himself so often and so brilliantly that he
quickly became his only competition, thrusting himself into the 1990s as
virtually the only musician left standing, which is the position Jim Walsh’s
new book Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s finds him in.
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Walsh covered Prince for the St. Paul Pioneer Press between
1994 and 2002, and this book collects all of his articles about the little
purple guy as he attempts to continue surging forward. Adding very few
editorial comments to this collection of clips—and presumably making no
revisions, capturing both writer and subject, who were the same age, in
journalistic amber—Walsh eschews hindsight perspective and delivers the reader
right into the drama of each moment, making it possible to experience Prince’s development
during these years with a sense of urgent suspense. His maniacal energy and
challenging diversity suddenly beginning to lose traction in a cultural landscape
that would rather be sedated by Seattle’s stultifying borecore or L.A.’s mellow
stoner rap, Prince struggled to maintain purpose and relevance in the 1990s,
and Walsh documents his wavering trajectory in observant and sometimes painful
detail. At the book’s outset Prince had recently changed his name to an
unpronounceable symbol, and it’s telling that for almost the whole era that
this book documents Walsh refers to him as “the former Prince.” Nearly every
new step seems to herald a return to Prince’s golden age, with Walsh cheering
him on (and occasionally lecturing him), but as the decade slacks toward
millennium it gradually becomes clear that Prince won’t be reinstating his
purple reign in time to celebrate 1999.
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| Jim Walsh |
Following Prince as he tries to recapture his astonishing
prime, Walsh’s Gold Experience is in fact a chronicle of the artist’s silver
age, and as such it serves more as a record of the journalist’s emotional journey
than as a vital document of a crucial time. With his hero going astray again and
again, Walsh struggles with acceptance as he’s forced to compare this
fluctuating luminary to the dimmest bulbs of the era. It’s astonishing to see
Walsh refer to the monochromatic Beck as “state of the art” in comparison to
anything that Prince could do, but that’s just how far pop musicianship had
descended into dreary incompetence, leaving little room for a true polymath to shine.
Vividly capturing the hope and heartbreak of this waning musical epoch, Walsh’s
Gold Experience paints a poignant portrait of the artist formerly known as
Prince.
—David Wiley
