prince

His James Brown rooted and updated moves were/are always fun to watch plus the extra little hopping and running around stuff here

Cave17 Matt C should be checking these videos out also

Matos, what do you think?

oh dear lord. this is fantastic.

I love how he goes through his moves, knowing they're already mastered, and keeps a more critical eye on the band. what a fun loving task master!

......aaaaand they're gone

got to see 5 of them, haha. oh well. hopefully someone capped 'em while they were up

Damn, I only got to watch "When Doves Cry". I hope these can make their way onto Dailymotion or something.

new song to debut friday on The Current radio:

http://www.startribune.com/blogs/85053272.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUss

.....and it's awful:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/the_current/features/2010/02/prince-cause-and-effect/index.shtml

man he has so completely and totally lost it.

bad wrong false prince

wow yeah that is bad

WTF is Prince using MS Songsmith now?

i want to say "nothing can ever erase the work he did in the 80s" but i somehow wonder if this song is actually capable of erasing the master tape to "if i was your girlfriend"

With the amount of stuff going on in the background it sounds like he recorded over the top of something. In case anyone is wondering what the reverse bit at ~3:30 is, it's Prince saying "contracts just make you smaller".

the problem with all of prince's stuff from the 90s on is that i think he fundamentally misunderstands what made him great at one time.

he's a great minimalist that thinks he's a maximalist.

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

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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi9nlmMA12Y

A good bit of pre-1999 concert footage is out there, but it's usually in-house video feeds or video shot from a distance, so professional multi-camera videos like this are kind of startling for me to see for the massive jump in production quality. I really hope they do an early Prince box set soon, especially of the Dirty Mind era - for whatever reason I gravitated more towards that stuff when I was binging Prince the week after he died. Just amazing to see them as this hungry little band that was still trying to make a career of their music. (And tbf, at least one of them ended up with a regular day job despite their talents.)

According to IMDb, this was his first national TV appearance. I think he did American Bandstand shortly afterwards, and a little over a year later he was co-musical guest (with Todd Rundgren!) on the notorious episode of SNL where Charles Rocket said "Fuck" on-air (supposedly Rocket said he only did so because we thought it was okay since --he believed-- Prince had already just done so in his performance of "Partyup").

I have an incredible pro-shot single-cam video (torrent) of:

PRINCE LIVE DIRTY MIND TOUR
NEW YORK
THE RITZ
MARCH 21 1981

but have never seen any other early stuff out there

Wolfgang's Vault has a whole show from the end of the Controversy tour - they may have taken down the complete show and left up a selection of clips, but other channels have uploaded a copy of the complete show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdUPjdEciqA

Also, from the tail end of the Dirty Mind tour (basically the European leg), this show from Théâtre Le Palace, Paris, France (June 4, 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w2THFyyy24

assless chaps or GTFO ;)

Should mention, the first show is from January 30, 1982 at the Capitol Theatre.

Prince on American Bandstand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krEXzOEsP9I

DICK CLARK MADE HIM WEAR PANTS

The further we get from it the more 80s Prince feels like a miracle, an impossible thing

Here's the "Partyup" from SNL, which is actually live, unlike the Midnight Special and Bandstand performances.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/TdDTtEYLRZd42znK/?mibextid=oFDknk

ah here's the Ritz show, assless chaps start at 17:44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x1P84W5fa8

Technically, all chaps are assless

pedantry

That guitar solo at 42:30 is worth a few minutes of your time.

wow at that Ritz video!

holy shit i don't think wow quite covers it but yes wow at that ritz video!