THE PRINCE IS DEAD, BOYS

You all know about Prince.

As a blogger I’m obligated to say a few things about this.

1. I should say up front I’ve never really been a fan of Prince in the literal sense. To be clear, I do like a lot of his music, and I have the utmost respect for him as a songwriter, musician, artist and general force of nature.

But I only ever owned a few of his albums, and none are from 1990 on. Prince was one of those artists that was so ubiquitous on the radio and MTV that it didn’t seem necessary to buy copies of his albums – I could hear him all the time anyway.

2. That said, this is my favorite Prince album.


Even though it was a major hit, I remember a lot of people put it down at the time – partly because it came across as a cheesy movie marketing gimmick, and partly because Prince turned the Batman and The Joker into a weird hybrid alter-ego that had nothing to do with the movie, which just seemed really egotistical even by Prince standards.

And yet the whole thing really is a weird kind of genius – the album and the videos are basically Prince deconstructing the whole Batman/Joker mythos and rebuilding it in his own image. io9 has a great write-up of what Tim Burton’s film would have been like if he’d gone with Prince’s storyline. I have to say, I'd go see that.

3. It’s always interested me that Prince was simultaneously heralded as a brilliant guitarist (which he was) and underrated to the point that he rarely made it onto any given list of the greatest guitar players. I suppose it was partly because most of the “great” guitar players are only really known for playing guitar, whereas Prince played lots of other instruments as well.

4. One of the benchmarks of any major pop star who writes his/her own songs is the extent to which people cover them. Famously, Prince has written hits for Sinead O’Connor and The Bangles. Lesser known covers include The Goo Goo Dolls doing “I Could Never Take The Place Of You Man” (with The Incredible Lance Diamond) and the Hindu Love Gods (Warren Zevon and ¾ of REM) doing “Raspberry Beret” (which I would link to if it existed on YouTube, which it doesn’t – see Item 7).

5. This sticker here?



Prince is basically responsible for that. It was his song “Darling Nikki” that set off Tipper Gore to start the PMRC and instigate a Senate investigation into “porn-rock” that eventually led to the music industry adopting that sticker.

Mind you, I’m not blaming Prince for that – I blame Tipper. But it goes to show how much Prince pushed at mainstream music’s boundaries. You know yr pushing hard enough when the Powers The Be who consider it their responsibility to set those boundaries decide to push back.

6. I know a guy who was in Minneapolis when the punk scene was raging in the early 80s. And to this day he resents that Prince made it big and got national attention and put Minneapolis on the pop culture map when there were more deserving local bands like Husker Du and The Replacements who should have been getting all the glory.

Of course eventually both bands got credit for being essential and influential. And both Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg have written touching tributes about Prince. So there’s maybe a lesson here about how being precious about yr little music scene only goes so far.

7. Anyway, it’s all been said elsewhere, but I have to respect a guy who did everything on his own terms and broke just about every rule he was supposed to play by to be a success at the time. Who else could change his name to an unpronounceable symbol and get away with it? Even his crusade against digital music (to include YouTube), while quixotic, was based on the well-intentioned argument that the artists should have control over how their music is shared and how much they’re compensated for that. 

8. This has nothing to do with Prince, but I thought I’d mention that he wasn’t the only influential music artist to die at age 57 that day.

Richard Lyons, one of the founders of Negativland, also passed away. 

Take me away,

This is dF