prince

but yeah I agree that in general he's better when he's doing less

Am I crazy or has Prince benn listening to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=CXCiS2FpmIc&feature=related

eh he's done some good minimalist stuff since the 90s - Black Sweat, for ex.

― dead clown handjob (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, February 26, 2010 5:44 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

black sweat....and....black sweat...and..um...black sweat ; )

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

i can't listen to this at work but it's probably for the best.

it's funny, i just listened to mplsound again and thought it wasn't that bad (if you have no expectations except for dad-prince).

oh what the fuck

like I could put up with the verse and I could put up with the chorus, but not both together in the same song; that is exactly the wrong thing to do, dude

i should do a poll, this song versus his vikings playoff song, which sounded like the work of a slightly deranged lutheran church choir director

at least the Vikings playoff song was awesome in its insanity; this is boring, mild-mannered shit that thinks it's shit-hot

replace lutheran w/ witness and you just about summarized prince 2010

j.k. but yeah that's the only song i've heard in years i thought was GOOD good not just "hey this is pretty good for prince now, i guess"

title tracks of musicology and 3121 were pretty good and stripped down imho. there was some other track on musicology that I liked but I'm blanking on it at the moment... but yeah his hit-to-miss ratio is pretty sad.

its weird how humorless his recorded output has become. dude was funny as hell when I saw him um... 10 years ago

I mean, when even the people who defended The Rainbow Children are like "yo this is hot trash" it's time to reconsider your artistic vision

Hey, I really like The Rainbow Children!

I do, too! This is bullshit tho

Prince has been churning out the doo doo for a good long time now. Last thing I really liked by him was that "P=Funk" track. He's creatively bankrupt IMHO.

How Prince managed to lose it this badly makes a pretty great case for contracts, editorial guidance, et al.

I mean - he's always crammed as much as he could get away with into his songs and it usually worked. Probably because they were songs. Stuff like this new track just makes my eyes glaze over.

uh, this is a song, it's just not a very good one

I mean - he's always crammed as much as he could get away with into his songs and it usually worked. Probably because they were songs. Stuff like this new track just makes my eyes glaze over.

― François de Roobabe (Capitaine Jay Vee), Friday, February 26, 2010 6:41 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i disagree what is "crammed in" to, say "Kiss" or "When Doves Cry"?

both those songs are prince at his best....a peculiar, brittle minimal digital funk.

The problem with that statement is that Prince at his best is not only "Kiss", "Alphabet St", "Housequake" and "When Doves Cry"; it's also "1999", "I Wanna Be Ur Lover", "Mountains" and "Gett Off".

i think we may have different tastes in prince....

still i don't see those songs as being particularly busy or overstuffed like recent stuff

(though full disclosure: last album i heard was the one my wife got free when she went to a concert...it seemed just "fine" in the same way i guess like a new mark knophler solo album would seem to a dire straits fan)

OK, I'm 36 seconds in and it's already been like 10 different songs, WTF? So the intro stuff, and then when the big power chords and organ and I'm like, "Is he doing, like, a Boston album?" Then the other guitar groove kicks in and I'm thinking, "OK, ok, this could be like an updated version of 'Dirty Mind'-era shit," but then it started sucking. Does it get better? Do I click "Play" again?

answers to your last questions are "no" and "no"

Too late.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Oh, god, the guitar solo. That is the worst guitar tone I've ever heard on a Prince song. AND NOW ACOUSTIC GUITAR OH JESUS MAKE IT STOP.

Thank you, Prince, for pooping in my ears today. It made me appreciate good music even more.

just for reference, here's prince's vikings song

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/prince-vikings-song-audio_n_432433.html

at least with that, I had a desire to play it 7 times in a row (largely because I couldn't believe wtf it was I was hearing)

i disagree what is "crammed in" to, say "Kiss" or "When Doves Cry"?

but the extended version of "kiss" is just as wacky and overstuffed as nu-prince. "when doves cry" has gospel vocals, neo-classical keyboard breaks, guitar solos, etc, but it's a great song and all that stuff elevates it even more.

ok y'all i give...i guess i just thought saying lots of classic prince jams were minimal was like ac/dc has loud guitars but i retract my statement (also i'm not the hugest prince fan to begin with)

Prince used to be able to make minimal maximal.

and maximal minimal?

I don't know what's sadder, the fact that this song exists or the fact that lots of people on the "Tell us what you think" link are praising it.

Prince's diehard fans are pretty diehard.

if I could hack that link and replace it with a copy of T-99's "Anesthesia", I would

I guess I'm a pretty diehard fan - I will even tell you a couple of things on "Planet Earth" are worth your time - but even I couldn't defend this. Or that Vikings tune.

this new song sounds like hes just recording for recordings sake even more than usual, but i kinda like it just to see how bad hes really gotten. i wish he would stop doing these 'message' type songs where he thinks hes making some really important point. the structure is sort of like two 3 chains of golds packed into one.

oh god. I'm really doing myself a favor by avoiding this, aren't I?

I will even tell you a couple of things on "Planet Earth" are worth your time

this seems to be the pattern more often than not with his post-90s material - there will be one or two tracks that are clever/engaging/remind you why he was so great, and then the rest is just crap. the weirdest thing to me is that his ear for production and composition just seems to have gotten steadily shittier and shittier. like he doesn't actually know what a good guitar or drum sound is anymore, he just has too many hi-tech toys that he's busy fooling around with. dude's aesthetic standards are shot.

I think this minimal=good, maximal=bad division is bogus. Prince has done a lot of great maximal songs, like "Mountains", "Alphabet St.", "Sexy MF", "Gett Off", "Joint 2 Joint", "Gold", the 12 inch mix of "I Wish U Heaven", "Pink Cashmere", "Paisley Park", etc. And some of his minimal stuff is pretty boring, like half of Batman and Come. This new song is bad, but that's just because he wrote a bad song, not because every maximal thing he does is awful and every minimal thing good.

you have a strange definition of "maximal"

not that that's in any way surprising

I mean, Alphabet St...? WTF that song has one drum loop, some chicken scratch guitar, slap bass, a guitar solo, a bunch of vocals and a few synth horn stabs. and structurally it has one verse that repeats throughout the entire song.

this song is like an ipod shuffle type song

but its entertainingly bad/funny in a oh god can he really have gotten this bad sort of way

almost endearingly bad

"he doesn't actually know what a good guitar or drum sound is anymore, he just has too many hi-tech toys that he's busy fooling around with. dude's aesthetic standards are shot."

otm

oddly this level of crap almost makes me love prince even more

never going to see him live anymore though

I mean, Alphabet St...? WTF that song has one drum loop, some chicken scratch guitar, slap bass, a guitar solo, a bunch of vocals and a few synth horn stabs. and structurally it has one verse that repeats throughout the entire song.

― mark roflr (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, February 26, 2010 2:29 PM Bookmark

I was thinking just a moment ago that "Alphabet St." is maximalist in the way that Basement Jaxx are. There are tons of weird details tucked away into corners that don't hugely announce themselves and aren't necessarily going on all at the same time, but add up to dozens of different elements appearing over the course of the song.

WTF is Prince using MS Songsmith now?

lolllllllllllllllll

This song isn't bad imo but it is extremely silly.

if it is maximalist, his old stuff is not maximalist in the "sounds like 12 jacked up high school bands' top song on myspace thrown in a blender"

It's kind of like he finally got around to reading all those reviews of Midnite Vultures 10 years ago that said it was aping Prince & he decided to ape Midnite Vultures in turn.

but every track of midnite vultures, for 15 seconds at a time.

well obv i get the anti-vax thing from these lyrics. but which part is anti-trans?

As bird stated earlier, the song was recorded well before he became a JW. Likely around 1994. He converted around 2001. Also it stole its premise from Brave New World and likely didn't reflect any strong opinion of his own. Were anti-vax or anti-trans positions even on his radar at that time? Probably not.

or he's always been much more conservative than we thought

i don't know, a guy like prince, all you can is "it's complicated"

he wasn't always a JW, but he always loved god, he was always a Christian, and in those days, everything he learned about God was that God hated queerness. and something in him loved queerness, loved lesbians especially. "vagina was half boy and half girl/best of both worlds"... i mean, that's a gross way of looking at lesbians, but there's a _fascination_ there, at least. his closest collaborators were wendy and lisa, the work he did with them was the best of his career, and then he fired them for, well, being lesbian, mostly. he loved women, loved being around women, and he abused women. abused everyone around him, but especially women. he sings about wanting to be alone, and at the same time he kind of hated being alone. he sings about not taking pills and he took them, took them to deal with chronic pain, pain that stemmed in large part from his spending all those years walking around in high heels, and they killed him.

life gets complicated. sometimes. i mean, you look at little richard... with prince it was always a two-step, prince was never openly _queer_, he just had a, uh, sexuality. but little richard, him and queerness and god... it was complicated. little richard hated himself, and that's really sad to me. he shouldn't have had to go through all of that. it doesn't excuse anything. it's just what happened.

that's an even-handed and generous reading of prince imo.

i've cooled on him since his death tbqf

yah great post Kate

Excellent post Kate.

Also, just in case it wasn't known, Prince was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, so he was probably surrounded by very social conservative brands of Christianity his entire life. And IIRC the Star-Tribune published an epic oral history after Prince's death where Wendy Melvoin mentioned that during one attempt at reconciliation (well after Prince had converted to JW), he asked her to renounce her sexuality and convert as well - pretty bad, but it's probably something I would've predicted given what was publicly known about his faith. It was a bittersweet remembrance though - Wendy knew the path he had taken and what it meant in terms of their friendship, that things would remain a mess, but she forgave him.

Thanks to Kate and bird for the nuances

https://polishedsolid.substack.com/p/my-2023-prince-year-in-review

The person who does this Substack just had a Prince conference this weekend in NY and am seeing lots of folks speaking highly of it online