Prince RIP

i can't even process this yet.

Any cause of death confirmed? He was too young and didn't seem sick. OD?

Dinnerboat I guess I know who you are <3

Prince was the only irl superhero to me

He also, especially w the revolution, evoked this feeling in me of a WORLD THAT COULD BE and that basically WAS, all you had to do was invoke it

I never got to see him play

Feeling a weird sense of pride at being a Prince fan right now

I was lucky to see Prince live several times, in several different settings. I saw him in clubs, arenas, middle of the night surprise shows, sets where he played all the hits, sets where he played none, sets where he cursed, sets where he cleaned up songs, sets where he barely sang and never touched his guitar. I took my wife to see him when she was very pregnant with our first daughter, and she (my in utero daughter) was not digging it. Some of those shows were up there with the best I ever saw, and some down with the worse. And I wish he was still here in all his hit or miss genius glory. Some of my favorite music of all time, all the time.

I barely know what else to say, but I mostly feel like posting Questlovle's story about rollerskating with Prince. He was one of a kind. All of a kind.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/06/18/questlove_on_roller_skating_with_prince_an_excerpt_from_his_new_book_mo.html

he was on my bucket list to see live :(

i bought 1999 the week it came out and he ruled my 80's from that moment on. i can't believe he was 24 when that record came out. how is that possible? he seemed immortal/ageless even then.

Any cause of death confirmed? He was too young and didn't seem sick. OD?

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Thursday, April 21, 2016 5:

He was taken off his plane sick just a little bit ago and said he had the flu.

evoked this feeling in me of a WORLD THAT COULD BE and that basically WAS, all you had to do was invoke it

a unique factor I always appreciated about this longed-for world that Prince both explicitly and implicitly invoked - a social utopia transcending race, class, gender etc. - was that it was based on sexual pleasure. There were pop stars in the past who preached about leftist politics, about peace and love, about racial equality, whatever, but for Prince the unifying factor that cut across all lines was sex/pleasure. In Prince's world it was something everybody wanted and that everyone could have, and it would make everything all right.

xp

I saw him in Dec. 1984 on the Purple Rain world tour at Richfield Coliseum outside of Cleveland. It was, up to that point, far and away the best show I had ever seen. As a bonus, my sister and I got to miss school the next day because there was a horrible blizzard during and after the concert. On the next school day, I wore my concert shirt and got called a "faggot" and a "pussy" all day long by the shithead burnouts that comprised my high school, but I didn't care, because fuck you, I saw the greatest musician on earth at the greatest concert ever. And he probably fucked your girlfriends after the show.

He was my white whale of concerts. Never came to Philly when I was old enough to see him. I curse myself for not going to Baltimore. I've got a broken heart again.

i really hope he didn't pull some steve jobs christian science type of shit and be like 'i trust in my own body to heal me, namaste' :(

i never saw him either. my wife did. he did like 20 concerts in a row in london and i missed every one.

A friend of mine who was actually irl friends with Michael Jackson (!) just said on Facebook that MJ once described Prince to him as "really weird, but the most talented motherf'er you'll ever meet."

a unique factor I always appreciated about this longed-for world that Prince both explicitly and implicitly invoked - a social utopia transcending race, class, gender etc. - was that it was based on sexual pleasure. There were pop stars in the past who preached about leftist politics, about peace and love, about racial equality, whatever, but for Prince the unifying factor that cut across all lines was sex/pleasure. In Prince's world it was something everybody wanted and that everyone could have, and it would make everything all right.

xp

people call me rude
I wish we all were nude
I wish there were no black or white
I wish there were no rules

WRECKA STOWE

only major performer (besides, uh, Bowie) I haven't seen live

This isn't possible.

I saw him a second time on the Musicology tour at the MCI Center in DC. That was the "in-the-round" show with the band including John Blackwell, Candy Dulfer and Maceo Parker and it was fucking amazing.

a world of neverending happiness, you can always see the sun, day or night. farewell sweet prince!

This world has officially stopped making any sense at all. RIP

Christ

I only got to see him once (my wife saw him a whole bunch of times, including after-hours shows that she always raved about and I am sorry I missed) on the Rainbow Children tour - not the greatest tour, although he still had Maceo with him which was awesome, and he was very funny and unpredictable, such a showman.

Never got to see him either. I almost went to Paisley Park after the last D'Angelo show at First Ave, but he didn't show anyway. I went to Bunker's a few times to see Dr. Mambo's Combo (all ex-Prince players) play, and always hoped he would make an appearance (there is precedent).

Saw him twice, the first time he played a guitar solo that actually made me cry, not the song, the solo, that's how fucking great he was. That was in Glasgow. The second was at the O2 in London where I was like 5 miles from the stage and he was 5 foot 2 inches tall, so I cursed the O2. Can't fucking believe it tbh.

i really hope he didn't pull some steve jobs christian science type of shit and be like 'i trust in my own body to heal me, namaste' :(

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Thursday, April 21, 2016 12:53 PM (51 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally speculative, I know, but I'd wager that's exactly what it was. I'm comfortable with blaming the Jehovah's Witnesses for the death of great grandmother and, absent any actual facts, I'm comfortable with blaming them for what was possibly the preventable death of Prince.

i never ever expected to be able to see him live.
having grown up in the late 70s/early 80s, my 2 musical heroes were bowie (#1), and prince (#2).
so i just assumed i would never get the chance.
then the "21 nights" thing happened.
now, bh was not a fan, so, i had no idea how to approach the situation when the dates were announced.
then as the nights ticked by, i got an email from geoff t/age of chance (KISS), about going to see prince together.
i delicately approached the topic as a trip to london while she was left at home with baby etc was not an easy option.
amazingly she said 'just bloody do it .. '
having left it so late, the only seats we got were up in the heavens,
but damn ... what a night.
there i was, with the bass player from my all time noise/sample/guitar band who had covered prince, while prince was on the stage doing his thing..
after bowie died i could not listen to his stuff as it was all too closely associated to bh,
however, prince was all for me, so, f*ck it, tonight, this weekend, i am going to rip the roof off this funker.

i have no more heroes alive now.

;_;

His glamour was accessible somehow. Listening to his music always made (makes) me feel a little Prince-like.

xpost — Jon not Jon: From where?

My mom always maintained that Prince must be gay. I never did, but as my fandom grew even more intense during my early teen years, I like to think that there was something about the palpable queerness of Prince's music that might have eased my coming-out process somewhat.

this is true for me too, he made it easier for me to be queer.

WRECKA STOWE

http://www.thecurrent.org/listen

everybody should bump the fukk outta this…

the very first music records I ever owned were 45s that were thrown out/given away by DJs at bar mitzvah parties. Prince's "Delirious/Horny Toad" was one of three, I was totally hooked by those synth sounds, parents were confused.

xp

My thoughts just turned to a roommate/friend from almost 10 years ago, amazing guy whose parents met at a Prince concert circa 1985. His folks had a brief fling that lasted only a few weeks, but during which she inadvertently became pregnant with my future roomie and close friend. I should give him a call; he owes his very life to Prince.

i'm thinking about the relationship i have to artists i love, their work. w/ something like can or roxy music i love it but i didn't grow up to it, it wasn't part of the narrative of my youth or whatever and so when holger czukay or bryan ferry die i'll be sad and i'll play the records alot but eventually i'll move on and i'll be able to listen to the records in roughly the same state of mind i was able to prior. w/ the stones i grew up w/ much of it and heard it all my life but they weren't mine really, they were my mom's, and when that moment comes it'll be like an uncle passing, a drunk uncle i guess, and there will be sadness but some wistfulness and i'll move on, i'll sing 'dead flowers' at karaoke and a few years down the line when i hear 'moonlight mile' i won't have nervous breakdown or anything. when bowie passed it felt like an incredibly important teacher from my life had passed, i was almost surprised to discover how central he had been in my life and i took comfort in commiserating w/ the many many ppl across many generations that had been touched by his music as well, i liked hearing the stories of how his work and his being had changed ppl's lives and though i was sad and shocked i felt mainly grateful. madonna is the only musical act (and really it's only musical acts i get this way w/, you live w/ music in a way you don't w/ books or films or whatever, it can serve so many purposes whether you listen deliberately to it or just have it on in the background while you study or clean or live basically, it has an incredible social aspect but also is extremely effective when it's only you and your headphones isolated from the rest of the world, you can dance to it, you can fuck to it, you can fall asleep to it) that has meant something close to me in importance as prince in terms of breadth and depth, when she dies i'll be devastated, as if my best friend had died. prince though, i'm trying to understand it, trying to face his death and it isn't like a friend died or a parent or teacher or obv just someone who made a lot of records i liked. it's like i stepped outside and suddenly the sun wasn't there anymore. his death feels apocalyptic. it makes no sense. i want to curl up in a ball on the floor and scream. it makes no sense.

not easy to post any of the mans classic tracks via youtube.

this is probably a first for a big name death.

WRECKA STOWE

ha yes

I idly watched a bunch of Under the Cherry Moon recently which makes no sense and is a mess but in a charming way

xp the first album i bought was 1999. a lot of that was 9 year old me being thrifty - i can get two lps worth of material for just this much more - but i still thank the fates for it nonetheless.

dinnerboat, i was jumping to the conclusion that you are the fellow cartoonist who just posted about a montreal prince show on fb (i am j0n L3wi5)

balls otm again

Just found out. Feel like I've been hit by a tonne of bricks. RIP.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEeH8GBRz3O/?taken-by=thuggerthugger1

Shakey thank you for that lovely unpacking of the world prince pointed to

It was pleasure in sex but also in sound

balls otm. I'm trying to think of any other musicians from the past like forty years that had the highs and staying power and overall impact of Prince or Bowie and I'm coming up short. In terms of '80s music specifically and impact on me specifically, I think only Cocteau Twins come close. Stay with us, Liz.

firing up itunes for the first time in the longest just to shoot through discog
Come is such a beautiful profane spectacular response to death

Ulysses you should come to the signing at desert island tonight I wish to prince hug u

this is a hard listen rn (recent live piano version of Purple Rain): https://soundcloud.com/anildash/let-me-guide-u#t=0:00

i'm working a show with Mazz Swift tonight, i cannot imagine but we will be hugging there

I saw one of those 2007 London shows and for real Prince was the single best thing I have ever seen on a stage. Kind of numb even thinking about this - like has any one musician ever seemed as full of life as Prince?

Fucking hell. Here's the long version of Purple Rain, from the first gig Wendy and Lisa performed with the band, at First Ave in Minneapolis. The moment when he can't quite bring himself to start the first verse is staggering:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58229402/Prince-%20Purple%20Rain%20Live%201983.mp4

Half the radio stations I just scanned were playing purple rain, but I don't think I'm ready for that.

^this. Let Wally be

when I interviewed the Revolution a few years back they spoke about how much they wanted to hear again the unreleased stuff they'd played on. they'd had people at Paisley Park feeding them tracks over the years, etc, but they'd speak with such spirit about the stuff they'd cut that was never heard again and had never slipped out.

i wouldnt be surprised if prince encouraged or made it easy for leaks to slip out to help his legend etc, at least in the 80s. later on, i think he made it harder for that to happen (or recording on hard drives made it tougher, not sure) when he was off warners. not really sure what he wanted to do with all that stuff later in life, but he didnt destroy it, he didnt have it specified not to release it (like stevie wonder iirc), though ofc he didnt write any instructions either.

thing is, there's already hundreds if not thousands of tracks that have leaked since the 90s. Demos don't need to be remastered much at all. The estate could do a subscription service and kill it.

i wouldnt be surprised if prince encouraged or made it easy for leaks to slip out to help his legend etc.

Despite Prince's open disapproval towards bootlegs of his work, he paradoxically made it easy for his stuff to get leaked out. It would take too long to find it again, but there was an article published after he died where quite a few of his associates discussed how careless Prince could be with unreleased recordings. The consistent reason for this is because he always wanted to "test" out his work, meaning he gave away a LOT of copies for people to listen to, presumably to give back their input, and he would rarely retrieve these copies or ask for them back. One common practice was taking an unreleased recording to a club and giving it to a DJ to play, just to see how the crowd would react to it. (It was implied he more or less debuted quite a few intended singles this way.) And again he frequently wouldn't ask for these back or leave copies behind in cars and other places like a toddler leaving behind his candy wrappers.

(It's possible in the case of club tests, he did get the disc or tape back and then proceeded to leave it lying around somewhere.)

He definitely gave 12”s to First Avenue DJs in Minneapolis.

Contrarian opinion: whatever's in the vault should stay in there. Don't need more Price outtakes imo.

is this where I get to haul out my extremely unpopular, yet absolutely correct, opinion that consent to publish survives the grave and the absence of same means the stuff shouldn't be published no matter how much people want to hear it, will say it saved their lives, improved world literature, etc? no? ok never mind

Oh, I'm aware of it! My opinion about Prince's outtakes has nothing to do with the value I find in Kafka and Woolf's diaries or whatever.

If the biography he started was never published I would be ok with it (it was touching in part but too much late prince thinking. if he wrote it in 89 it'd have been better. he was also just not a guy who knew how to spill the tea). Id be sore if the unreleased songs remained where they are.

The best poor control of his vault story I read was that he would leave demo tapes lying around in his car when he'd taken it to get cleaned.

I decided to skip the staged reading at the DC go-go music museum tonight of “The Night Prince was Killed” by local dc activist & music fan Kymone Freeman.

Re adding strings to tracks
Are they just talking about using some of the Clare Fischer arrangements that Prince commissioned but didn’t use? Clare Fischer recorded tons of strings/orchestral stuff for him and a lot of it he chose not to include in the released mixes. If they are talking about making some alt mixes that use those recordings, I absolutely want that to be part of a parade box.

There was a boot called charade back in the 80s that had the parade tracks without strings and Christopher Tracy's parade was still little girl Wendy's parade. Worth seeking out. Id hope those would make it into the parade box set if/when it gets released.

He used samples of Fischer's strings all over "Batman" and some other stuff from that era.

xpost i think the version of that I have is just called Parade Demos and it's got some exciting shit like the truly bizarre 'Others Here With Us' and the original of 'Old Friends 4 Sale'

My friend told me that he went to college with Clare Fischer's son Brent and he could pretty much always tell when some new Prince tapes recordings came in to be transcribed because Brent would be walking around campus wearing dark sunglasses looking like he had pulled an all-nighter.

https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/clare-and-brent-fischer-keep-it-in-the-family

https://theiconicprince.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/brent-fischer-recollections-working-with-prince/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc-JbACCgeM

There's a heartbreaking story about that - after Prince died, one of the producers discussed that episode in an interview. He said everyone at Henson thought Prince was going to cancel on them due to a personal tragedy. He wouldn't say in the interview what that was, but going by the timeline, it was clear he meant Prince's son, Amiir, who had just died six days after he was born. But to their surprise, Prince assured them he was committed to doing the show and not to worry. The interview's out there somewhere, but basically when he came in, he realized being on set with the Muppets was kind of therapeutic for Prince - he was clearly happy to be there, there was no indication he was difficult or anything, but you got the sense it was a little somber because everyone knew what he was going through.

The whole episode, which didn't air until the fall in 1997. (The air dates were kind of screwed up because ABC decided to drop the show before the first season ended. The Disney Channel kept it alive, but there was kind of a bumpy transition as that happened - for example, several episodes from the first season didn't even air until after the calendar for that season had passed. The Prince episode was produced as the first episode of the second season but I have no idea if they were actually able to broadcast everything in order.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkHnfCj-dqU

(I just noticed the opening credit on that video says February 17, 1997, but according to Wikipedia, it didn't actually air until September 13, 1997.)