Damn Prince, Bowie, Phife Dawg, Merle Haggard, George Martin, Glen Frey, Vanity, Maurice White, Paul Kantner, Frank Sinatra Jr This has not been a good year for people in the music business
This is hard for me to process. For a white kid living in the suburbs while everyone listened to rap or classic rock, hearing the opening notes to Controversy felt like I finally found some music I could like.
Great description of Prince's music from Trouser Press, 1988. "Prince's impact on the direction and sound of '80s pop music can't be overstated. By the mid-'70s, race segregation had become nearly as rigid a musical barrier as it was at the outset of rock'n'roll in the '50s, but Prince's brilliant stylistic cross-fertilization has been a major agent in its slow dissolution. He continually demonstrates a phenomenal grasp of forms, styles and production techniques, and has the ability to create stunning syntheses of them. True, he's shown a lyrical penchant for excessive and/or tasteless sexuality, but he's also responsible for some of the most playful, open and un-hung-up sexiness in pop music. Prince is the biggest figure in '80s pop music whom musicians at opposite ends of the rock and soul spectrum will admit liking and paying attention to."
Here's a compilation of Prince, Michael Jackson, and James Brown performing. Not the best quality but the clips of Prince are really amazing. The dude could flat out dance and had some incredible moves.
.@JustinBieber Takes Offense at Prince 'Greatest Living Performer' Remark https://t.co/2C96grWVpA pic.twitter.com/ZamMJidgOK— TheWrap (@TheWrap) April 22, 2016 Oh dear.
I grew up in the 1980's, where the greatest Pop icons were Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince. Bring a guy, I pretended to ignore the three of them. Instead, I listened to Van Halen, Bon Jovi, etc. Deep inside me, I was a Prince fan. His music was very different from anybody else. He was a mixture of funk, R&B, rock and Pop. In 2003, I was blessed to be at his concert in Hong Kong. He played perhaps non-stop for about 2 hours.... i really forgot. I meant the concert was literally a medley of his songs. It was perhaps weird that he almost never said a single word throughout the concert. Occasionally, he would scream out "Hong Kong". There were only two words that he ever spoke throughout the concert. I later found out that he headed straight to a night club after the concert and played a mini-concert for I don't know who. He was amazing.
There are countless stories about Prince playing after-shows that lasted as long or longer than the actual concerts.
Maybe it's a color thing. I don't know any Black guys who ignored Prince or MJ. None. Dude's got the music, he does. Madonna deserved to be ignored. Bon Jovi? They should have started and ended with Dead Or Alive, because that's all they were good for.
I forgot these threads get them. It didn't matter how hard the person thought they were, Prince and MJ were still in the rotation. They're both still debated in barber shops.
This. Elton John and David Bowie both did stints on Soul Train. Nobody cared what they had going on in their personal lives- Fame and Bennie made folks dance.
We are old then. I was around 7th and 8th Grade when Purple Rain came out. Prince laying naked in bathtub and crawling on the floor were my first images of him. That did not appeal to a 13 years old boy who just reached puberty. I also could not stand David Lee Roth with his hairy chest and bare butt pants. So I was not exactly a Van Halen fan. As for MJ, the girls liked MJ. So the guys disliked him and made fun of his high pitch voice. At home, I listened to MJ, Prince, Boy George, Duran Duran, Wham! etc, but not in front of my guy friends. I really like Raspberry Beret.... Prince's follow-up album to "Purple Rain" turned me into the fan.
One of a kind. A singular talent. The reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix on the guitar. Tremendous song writer. Just his gifts to other artists would place a writer in the Song Writer Hall of Fame.
The most scorching 3-minute solo I've ever seen. NY Times did an oral history of it yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/arts/music/prince-guitar-rock-hall-of-fame.html RIP