prince

As much as I love Prince, he's always been a wildly uneven political commentator, moreso after he became a Jehovah's Witness (which happened not long after Emancipation). His discography has tons of dubious lyrics and plenty of critics flagged them in their original reviews. It's a credit to his tremendous gifts that the musical elements of his work was usually more than enough to overshadow his lyrical deficiencies.

i can see how you could project an anti-trans reading on that but it seems like a stretch. how do we know that's what he meant?

he was a jehovah's witness for one

i'm sure he had some fucked up views, i just don't get that from the lyrics in this song

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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGm-2UTjacY

Late to the above convo but the New Orleans show from that tour from that era bootlegged as jack u off is INCREDIBLE

The way they were doing Annie Christian live holy shit

Oh my god. The fact that we’re not going to be able to see this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/magazine/prince-netflix-ezra-edelman-documentary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.gVHo.5X-AaTOPSm7l&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

Was just rushing here to post that. God, I hope this sees the light of day.

I hope so, too.

Best hope is probably a leak, sadly.

Awwwww, I want to see all 9 hours....

9 hours is about 7 hours too long. What could possibly fill that ridiculous amount of time

Based on the article? Quite a fucking lot!

(And the comparison point is right there with the director's previous work on the OJ: Made in America documentary, which IIRC is seven hours long and went deep.)

How long was that Beatles thing I still haven't watched?

OJ Made In America was incredible, Edelman is the only one who we could hope to do this right, or at least provide all the shades of grey that are needed to even slightly understand the (mortal, flawed, human) Prince. i hope this project gets released but it is a real day ruiner knowing that it probably won’t

Excellent article and makes me want to experience it so bad, especially how they describe the effect of seeing an accumulation of his brief “mask off” moments. And what must be incredible performances juxtaposed with newly complicating emotion instilled in the viewer. We need so much more of this kind of narrative to change the narrative. If anything, demystifying artists makes the great art even more mystifying to me.

^OTM!

One of the things I think about a lot is how challenging it is to be a creative artist these days and get your work seen by the public
The battery of lawyers Vera Drew needed to release "The People's Joker"
Coyote v. Acme
Youtube videos where you can't say Stalin's name
They used to say, you know, "If you can't say 'Fuck' you can't say 'Fuck the Government'"
And these days, you can't say Stalin or "fuck", or you get age-restricted and demonetized
I try not to think too hard about it.

Maaaan I hope this comes out someday, somehow

A few people are all "Well hopefully it'll leak, in fact it should be leaked" and I'm all "Yeah and Edelman would immediately get sued out of existence by Netflix AND that one half of the estate. Put yourself in his shoes." This story is as much as can be done right now.

That may have been the best Prince article I've ever read.

yeah it’s really well written

yeah people who are all like "oh this should get leaked" don't necessarily understand the repercussions of that stuff