Do you have any links to support this? Plenty of music lovers never got into Prince, and plenty never will even now that he'd dead and about to be really popular again for a while. Do you have a link to support any of this? Prince is a bigger deal to me because he wrote the songs, played the instruments on the recordings, plays them live and has written for other people. Mike doesn't do any of that, so the question of whether he made music at all is valid. We can say that he sang on a lot of hits and entertained a lot of people at his shows. You're underrating the J5 and Off The Wall and Thriller, too, as musical works. There IS a small part of Prince's following that wears black turtlenecks and hangs out at Starbucks. Maybe that's what you mean by "music lover". Did you even think before typing this? So now you know Dylan is no McCartney, and certainly no Bacharach. You're welcome.
More than half of the props I give MJ is due to the J5, and Quincy wasn't the driving force there. Agreed that he doesn't have the solo career he had without Quincy, tho. Its been said that Prince is a combo of four guys- Hendrix, Little Richard, Sly Stone and James Brown. He doesn't emulate any of them to the max, but I can see influences of all but Sly. I have no doubt that Prince had the J5's stuff memorized down pat, too.
I am not into music as much as you and some here. Though Prince is talented and I liked his songs, I never bought a single or album. But beyond the music, he also pushed gender and sexuality boundaries, in a similar way that Madonna did on the female side, in an era when AIDS was still not openly talked about, and homosexuality was to be kept hidden for the most part.
Prince pushed the envelope with the symbol, no doubt, but you had David Bowie and Elton John before him. And FWIW, I'd be surprised to find out that Prince had actually gone the distance and had sex with another dude. I kinda don't see Madonna as being particularly groundbreaking in that regard. A certain demo of White females fools around like that all the time, some even after they're married. And her whole schtick was based on theater and dance, where gender has always been kinda fluid. I'd almost say she got big despite that. Whoever produced and put together her "sound" should get credit for a bunch of club stuff.
Good point about Madonna and theater/dance. The movie Truth or Dare makes it clear that music isn't the main thing compared to the dancing. Please don't ask me how I know that...
I don't disagree, though I always had Bowie associated with Freddy (time, the song "Under Pressure") and by the time the 80s came around, he was already established, and he was English. Prince was none of that, and came from the wholesome midwest, so along with the symbol, coming along as rap, and Gangsta Rap at that was starting to explode, he broke all kinds of stereotypes (to me, it does not matter if he had sex with another man, but I also agree he probably did not) that the media was making. I don't mean she was groundbreaking, but she pushed the envelope. Remember that "Papa Don't Preach" was about abortion, and it was a number 1 song in 1986. And she was sexually provocative. Not in the same way as Prince, but they both seemed flippant about preconceived gender and sexuality roles. And in neither case I'm talking about music. Madonna was certainly more theater than Prince (think the Pepsi ad), but they both were popular music stars pushing the envelope. And that is why Prince, beyond his music, is consequential in my eyes.
LMAO! You're thinking of this guy. But this guy below was known before Freddie, IIRC I get that, and you do have a point. Fair enough here as well.
I think your timeline is a bit off. Bowie was big a full decade or more before Under Pressure. Way bigger than Queen who IIRC got big in the late 70s. Many of the indie bands of the 80s cite Bowie and Lou Reed as huge influences. Every couple of years Bowie changed his look & sound. Prince was a chameleon in the same way and couldn't easily be pinned down. This one may be apocryphal, but some years ago Eric Clapton was asked how it felt to be the world's greatest living guitarist. He replied "I don't know. Ask Prince."
Daniel Berrigan, pacifist priest, dies at 94 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/n...on®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0 The United States was tearing itself apart over civil rights and the war in Southeast Asia when Father Berrigan emerged in the 1960s as an intellectual star of the Roman Catholic “new left,” articulating a view that racism and poverty, militarism and capitalist greed were interconnected pieces of the same big problem: an unjust society. It was an essentially religious position, based on a stringent reading of the Scriptures that some called pure and others radical. But it would have explosive political consequences as Father Berrigan; his brother Philip, a Josephite priest; and their allies took their case to the streets with rising disregard for the law or their personal fortunes. A defining point was the burning of Selective Service draft records in Catonsville, Md., and the subsequent trial of the so-called Catonsville Nine, a sequence of events that inspired an escalation of protests across the country; there were marches, sit-ins, the public burning of draft cards and other acts of civil disobedience.
Berrigan said this after Catonsville: We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor.
He was also Jimmy Page Seriously, somebody sent me this video and the guitar work is fantastic. Few could cover this song and come up with an effort worthy of the original and yet unique. Prince, not surprisingly, does. In addition to Page, I can hear some Hendrix in this version, and yet it's distinctively Prince.
Margot Honecker, the widow of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, died on Friday in Chile, where she had been residing for over two decades, local television station TVN and CNN Chile said. Margot Honecker was a former East German politician, who was an influentual member of the East German communist party and the East German regime until 1989. From 1963 until 1989, she was "Minister of People's Education" of the GDR. Big deal around here. She was responsible for thousands of children being taken away from their families e.g. when the parents planned to escape from East Germany.
Well, trying to rescue this thread from David Bowie and Prince... Nat Hentoff Given that Hentoff started wrting in the aftermath of the McCarthy/blacklisting era, wrote through the turbulence of Viet Nam and the civil rights moments, and then remained a trenchant commentator of political correctness and liberal thought suppression during the Clinton and Obama presidencies, his writing will be missed as professional journalism is torn down by Trump and his Trumpettes. http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/nyregion/nat-hentoff-dead.html?_r=0
Legendary writer for the Village Voice. His take on the role of journalists in society is sorely needed today: It was here that I was able to practice, since 1958, what I learned from my non-chic mentors. And I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice. I was in my twenties when I learned my most important lesson from Izzy Stone: "If you're in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told." http://www.villagevoice.com/news/na...oice-journalist-and-critic-dies-at-91-9543103
Ron Daniels One of the most charismatic, caring, committed street workers I ever knew. He was the driving force of DC's needle exchange program for almost 20 years now. I first met him in 2001, 2002 maybe, and we spent the weekend riding around doing needle exchanges. It was his days off, supposedly, but he felt that addicts were going to shoot up on Saturdays and Sundays, so that's when he worked, too. He told me that he'd worked "just a couple of hours" the previous Christmas and Thanksgiving days, but other than that, he'd worked every day for the past three years. https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...d296534b31e_story.html?utm_term=.c05a0af4eff9 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR2006112700687.html?tid=a_inl
Harold Hayes, last survivor of an amazing, secret WWII trek behind enemy lines. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/...a-crash.html&eventName=Watching-article-click Harold Hayes, the last surviving member of a band of airborne American medics and nurses who crashed-landed in Nazi-occupied Albania in 1943 and survived German attacks, blizzards and horrific privations on a 600-mile trek to their rescue on the Adriatic coast, died on Sunday in Medford, Ore. He was 94.... The survival of the 30 noncombatants was a long-held secret of World War II: the story of 13 female nurses, 13 male medics and the four-man crew of a medical evacuation plane who were stranded behind enemy lines for nine weeks, hiding in villages and caves in wintry mountains, afflicted with lice and dysentery, often near starvation and hunted by German patrols.... An hour into the flight, the plane became lost in a huge storm over the Adriatic Sea. Its compass and communications failed. Blown 100 miles off course, it crossed the coast of Albania and was intercepted by German fighters and attacked by antiaircraft guns. It plunged to a belly landing in a marsh 25 miles inland. Willis Shumway, 23, the crew chief, was the only casualty, with a knee injury that left him unable to walk. The disoriented Americans had no idea where they were. Fearing a fuel explosion, they scrambled out of the plane and encountered their first bit of luck. Striding out of a woods was a band of rugged-looking men with rifles and daggers. One spoke a little English. He was Hasan Gina, an anti-German partisan leader. He told the Americans they were in Albania. Later, they would learn that they were 150 miles east of Bari, on the wrong side of the Adriatic, surrounded by German forces that had occupied Albania for months, and were caught in a civil war between rival partisan groups. Many of the Albanians who helped them were later executed by Enver Hoxha, dictatorial piece of shit extraordinaire.
Killing People 'Pained' Enver Hoxha, Widow Says Late Albanian dictator's 95-year-old widow, Nexhmije Hoxha - giving her farewell interview - said her husband was a sensitive soul who regretted executing people. - See more at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/widow-of-albanian-dictator-gives-an-on-air-farewell-02-09-2016#sthash.Y8YN0Ofg.dpuf See...he didn't really mean it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4166046/Actor-John-Hurt-dies-cancer-aged-77.html Sir John Hurt, the two-time Oscar nominated star of the Elephant Man, has died aged 77 after battling cancer. The four-time married, Derbyshire-born star has been an enigmatic and much-beloved presence on the screen for more than six decades. The Harry Potter actor had recently battled pancreatic cancer but in October 2015 was given the all clear. Also the War Doctor in Doctor Who. RIP.
I like John Hurt, but this really isn't what I had in mind for this thread. His passing has been noted in the thread for "celebrities" over in the music, movies and TV forum.
Ralph Edwards passed November 16, 2005, Los Angeles, CA. He was the MC for the long running TV show "Truth or Consequences" so I suppose he was a consequential person! I'm not sure if he was beloved or not.