Prince RIP

Only Prince book I have (and will finally read next week) is Matos on SOTT. Are there other good ones?

Oh wait, bio I am talking about is another one, by Matt Thorne, that seems to have come out recently.

I find it hard to picture Prince getting into kind of fist fight... I'll bet he looked like a well-dressed Scrappy Doo.

I'll bet he was one of these tough little guys, like Little Jimmy Dickens, who went right for the sensitive spot.

the only Prince bio I have is Pers Neilson's "Prince: The First Decade", which seems p exhaustive in cataloguing what was recorded/performed when & where and for some insights from various collaborators but it is not particularly well written and (of course) features some opinions I disagree with

Those per Nilsen books are now impossible to find and I have been unable to scare them up in pdf either. Dance Music Sex Romance : the First Ten Years is the one I really want to read.

Matos SOTT is awesome.

the Alan Light book is also well reported

^this

I found the Alan Light book kind of bland, like an especially long Mojo piece. Just realized that I have the Hahn book right here, though. A friend lent it to me months ago, actually, saying that it was somewhat salacious and second-hand, but probably the best we'll get about a person like Prince.

Maybe you knew more of the details already when you read the Alan Light book. I thought it created a pretty compelling narrative with lots of good quotes from and character sketches of the various parties involved.

so it's bland and well reported?

It's not written with any particular style or grace, no: it's, as you said, an excellent long piece of reporting.

Dance Music Sex Romance : the First Ten Years is the one I really want to read.

yup that's the one I have. just looked on Amazon and uh $500?!? wtf it's not that good.

so it's bland and well reported?

Yeah, there's nothing bad about it, I was just hoping for a little more life in it.

I have and love the Nilsen and Matos but that Matt Thorne one starts off ok then goes off on some strange personal taste tangents (i.e. He really loves some terrible Prince music and knocks some of the straight up acknowledged great stuff) and never recovers.

It's not written with any particular style or grace, no

So, it's a book by Alan Light, a writer who was born to be a VH1 commenting head?

There is also the late 80s book by Barney hoskyns, Imp of the Perverse, and a book by a guy named Ronin Ro, and the Toure book, and an academic book called Prince: The Making of a Pop Culture Phenomenon.

I understand the Toure book is recommended by a wide array of notables, from ?uestlove to ilxor tylerw.

also A Pop Life by Dave Hill, think this came out late 80s

Ronin Ro is a great, well-respected writer

ha did i recommend the toure book? i'd say it was half good half not so good ...

Oh yeah, exactly. Oh no, I have an (admittedly resistable) urge to buy Prince's "Emancipation" set!

i found the matos book kind of like zero-degree contempo rock criticism, complete with the long personal-history framing. i couldn't even finish it. :(

i've yet to read a full book on prince, but i've started a few, and none of them have been any good. :(

Well, if you don't mind bland, competent reporting, without the rockcrit trappings then....

xxp, i guess i did say "recommended!"
anyway, yeah, i wonder who will write the definitive prince bio ...

omplete with the long personal-history framing

I think you're remembering this incorrectly. The personal history he limits to a few paragraphs at the beginning and end. The rest is basic explication du texte.

it's a few pages IIRC. anyway, the explication du texte seemed kind of boilerplate to me.

i would have really liked to have read prince's memoir :(

I'd bet any amount - and i say this grudgingly and with a sad heart - that memoir would've been a giant, self censored yet self aggrandizing mess. Remember -- this was Prince. There wouldn't be any Miles Davis-type warts n' all autobio coming out of him.

yeah, probably the whole jehovah's witness thing means he would've been pretty circumspect about it all.

a memoir by prince ca. 1988, on the other hand....

good show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L7t4q9xFA4

I'm sure his memoir would be just as crystal clear as one by any other scrawny, song-oozing, self-mystifying Minnesotan.

xpost Yeah both those Montreux 2009 shows are very good. The first one (early show) has a guitar solo on "Empty Room" that blows away the "While My Guitar..." one IMHO. Transcendent shit.

THIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onx3sbNRbIY&spfreload=5

goddamn

That "While My Guitar..." solo has turned until the musical equivalent of the "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of The MTM Show.

I'm glad that "get away from my plants"/Prince magically appearing story is out there. A friend who was on a gig with the trombone player quoted in the RS article relayed the story to me a few years ago. Also talked about getting called in to do horn parts late at night and not being allowed to leave with any recordings, so Prince essentially left them alone in the studio overnight to arrange and record all their parts.

Hmmm I'm 80% of the way through Lotusflow3r and I have to l say I'm quite enjoying it! It's retrogressive as hell but pretty sweet.

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/files/img/as/prince-slug.jpg

holy shit, he really could play anything. wow.

His band on those Montreux videos, jesus

So much horsepower for muso phantasy

I saw him tour The Rainbow Children, and when I look at the crazy setlist it's like I was never there:

Rainbow Children
Muse 2 the Pharaoh
Xenophobia
A Case of You (Joni Mitchell cover)
Mellow
1+1+1 Is 3
Love Rollercoaster (Ohio Players cover)
The Other Side of the Pillow
Strange Relationship
Sing a Simple Song (Sly & The Family Stone cover)
La, La, La Means I Love U
Didn't Cha Know? (Erykah Badu cover) (Rhonda Smith lead vocals)
When You Were Mine
Avalanche
Family Name
Take Me With U
Raspberry Beret
The Everlasting Now
Piano set:
Adore
Under the Cherry Moon
Venus de Milo
One Nite Alone
Free
Starfish and Coffee
Sometimes It Snows in April
Eye Love U, But Eye Don't Trust U Anymore
How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore
Anna Stesia

Encore:
Anna Stesia
(reprise "Rise Up" (The Greatest Romance Ever Sold)

fuck man, i really wish i coulda heard him do anna stesia live

you can! on the one nite alone live set

which iirc is out of print :\

huh I have that too, wonder how much that's going for

I'm sure his memoir would be just as crystal clear as one by any other scrawny, song-oozing, self-mystifying Minnesotan.

That Matt Thorne book does indeed take a turn for the worse pretty quickly. Also it's much harder to follow than that one well reported book upthread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98TJ6fGJH6Y

for those anna stesia fans

Thanks.

Tell you one thing I learned in the past few weeks: that Alan Leeds is a great interview subject, but I have a limited taste for his brother Eric's saxophone stylistics.

the matt thorne book seemed to descend quickly into the writings of a complaining 'i know best' obsessive (ie highly personal observations and disgruntlement but not much real insight of interest as the opinions are so personal, like a very long post on prince.org), though i could be wrong as i didnt read it cover to cover.

DMSR isnt the best written, but was for a long time the most thorough and looked at his work in an in depth way that few writers did beforehand. people werent taking princes music that seriously. per nielsens documentary book was great at the time too.

the best book overall though i think is a pop life but it ends in the late 80s. examines prince the man, the music, the image, race, sex, etc.