Prince RIP

I'll miss her in an end-of-an-era sense.

This is where I'm at. Without derailing this thread, I will say that, even now, I can't shake the feeling that Madonna's celebrity has always outstripped her actual importance to popular music. And I don't even really mean that as a criticism. Comparing her to Bowie would've been tough -- comparing her to Prince feels completely pointless.

the interview chris rock did with prince in 1996 is worth a look on youtube. he asks some stuff i think a lot of journalists didnt or werent brave enough to (or just didnt care enough to ask).

This is where I'm at. Without derailing this thread, I will say that, even now, I can't shake the feeling that Madonna's celebrity has always outstripped her actual importance to popular music.

not the thread for it, so when she dies we can debate the barminess of this position

I find her musically totally inconsequential so I can see that. Her impact seems more along the lines of glass-ceiling-shattered for women in pop, and doesn't have much to do with her actual material, ability, musicianship, songwriting etc., she's more like a media figure than a musician and as such is the template for where pop music went

If you want to argue that her celebrity has often outstripped her considerable songwriting and musicianship, fine.

The question of importance or influence has never mattered to me (and her influence has been considerable too).

her first few albums are classic 80s pop. i mean, physical attraction, borderline, into the groove, theyre pretty unimpeachable really.

not to me. they sound like music by and for 7yo girls.

how bout a prehumous madonna appreciation/celebration/reminiscence thread since she will never die

I don't know why I still own them tbh, altho my daughter seemed to perk up the last time I put them on. I find her voice really thin and grating on those records.

xp

they sound like music by and for 7yo girls.

― Οὖτις, Monday, May 23, 201

It's 2016 and you wrote this as criticsm

This is ignoring her deep roots in Italodisco and hi-NRG and punk NYC, all of which are obv influences on her early work.

eh punk in the fashion sense and not much more. italodisco def, hi-NRG yes, also two genres I'm not too fond of. her voice on those early records sounds like, idk, air escaping from a balloon or something.

(fwiw I don't rate 7yo boys' taste in music as any better, it's just bad in a different way. Any adult who hangs out w 7yos for any period of time is not going to find their cultural obsessions interesting for very long)

this is all for another thread anyway, let us not sully Prince's RIP threads w digressions on far inferior pop figures

xp

normally I'd keep my Madge opinions to myself since I don't bother reading threads about her, but this is the Prince RIP thread

eh punk in the fashion sense and not much more

there's another sense?

*rimshot*

i wish all music for 7 year olds sounded like those records

if you like R&B of the time, disco, italo, nile rogers, etc, i cant see how you could hate those records.

ANYWAY

i made a chronological playlist of all the warner singles (edited versions only). it is obv the best singles comp ever, and ends on dinner with delores, which ends with the line 'and thats the end' which is so perfect im inclined to think prince knew thats how his WB run of singles would go.

I love chic and nile rogers and disco, def do not like early 80s R&B, a fallow period for the genre imo. R&B in between the rise of disco/death of funk in the early 80s and the full incorporation of hip hop at some point in the mid-90s is a barren wasteland for the most part. I mean there's things I like here and there (mostly out of LA) but it's a grim sonic palette to my ears.

I feel like I like the roots of italo more than actual italo, I have a ZYX boot mix that I like a lot, and everyone loves Moroder.

xp

Prince and his acolytes obviously an idiosyncratic bright spot in 80s R&B

the era of Evelyn King, Change, Rene & Angela, Rick James, Gap Band, and Luther Vandross (among others) was a fallow period?

OK.

mostly

hey in a universe where madonna's success has nothing to do with her material and ability, i'm sure it was

There are some Gap Band and Rick James jams. You Dropped the Bomb on Me, Mary Jane - those old school funk guys still eked out some dancefloor fillers.

xp

if you wanna say mid-late 80s R&B was a fallow per iod, i suppose that would be somewhat understandable, if only as its not that unusual an opinion, but early 80s? cmon.

what you want a cutoff date? I'd say end of '82 maybe. P-Funk sound was still looming large over the first couple years of the 80s, and that was a good thing.

I think Madonna's perfectly plain voice is her greatest attribute. As my wife has pointed out, it made it really easy for her to sing along when she was growing up. Hard to sing along with Prince. Or with Bowie, really, without reverting to charicature.

I will not deny that 1984-1986 was not great on the R&B chart. However:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_R%26B_singles_of_1983_%28U.S.%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_R%26B_singles_of_1982_%28U.S.%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_number-one_R%26B_singles_of_1982_%28U.S.%29

may have been easy to sing along but imo early madonna karaoke is kind of impossible

I've done Madonna at karaoke and watched others -- shit's hard!

Her voice on "Holiday," "Into the Groove," "Open Your Heart," "Live to Tell," and "Like a Prayer" is a force of nature.

actually, going through a heavy phase of just this era of funk, so that would include all the above mentioned names, also Zapp, Slave, Free Life, Raydio, Heatwave -- I look at this era as the bands who took the torch from P-Funk, and until hop hop came along, they were basically the cutting edge of R&B and funk. To my ears, Prince actually doesn't fit in much with those guys, he was his own thing (and none of them really attempted a new wave or pop crossover like he did).

But yeah, tons of great stuff, and (as usual) the more you look, the more you find

Early 80s R&B and post-disco are pretty much my favourite type of dance music... And both Madonna and Prince were influenced by it a lot, in their own ways. And Madonna is just as much as auteur as Michael Jackson was; neither played and instrument or was a muso in the way Prince was, but they definitely had a clear vision of what they wanted their music to be like (plus both co-wrote most of their big hits), so I dunno, if you're still think Madonna's lacking in "ability", I'm not sure if pop music is for you?

also, the fucking grooves on some of those early records, eg physical attraction, MAN.

(several x-posts)

I'll go one better: MJ wrote most of his big hits and was a helluva producer by the late '80s.

in the mid-80s R&B's sound, along with vocal styles in general, seem like they get thinner and weaker to my ears - maybe there's something of an MJ/Madonna effect there, neither of their voices have much low-end or huskiness to them, their ranges are totally child-like and easy for kids to sing along too, and they were huge figures shaping the genre at the time. But it's not something I like listening to.

xp

omg you guys have outed me as hating both Madonna and MJ congratulations, off to the "overrated" thread with them

how I wish Prince had outlived them both (I fully expected him to)

madonna had quite a bit of huskiness. e.g. live to tell. love done live here anymore. i like her voice. it sounds untrained. but its not thin like a britney.

I knew about your MJ odium already believe me

I think electronic sounds started getting a lot more popular right around 81-82 or 83, and by '84, nobody wanted to sound like a 70s funk/disco band anymore. Hip hop and electro overhauled R&B (and soon, everything else) as far as production. Aesthetic became a lot more minimal and mechanical, and if you're looking at vocal styles, absolutely people like MJ and Prince helped usher in an era of androgyny -- heck, soon Prince was having hits where there wasn't even a bass guitar in the track. Madonna's early, cutesy style did have an immediate impact in pop (but not R&B really)

...not really sure what her long term impact is tho. I tend to agree w the notion what she "stood for" has mattered more than her music (which isn't to say that will matter less over time)

Aesthetic became a lot more minimal and mechanical

^^^ this obviously, but things got audibly *thinner* as well, booming low end became an anomaly instead of the norm

Could be, I'd be curious to survey a few pop hit tracks to compare bass db. The onset of digital recording had a lot to do w how things sounded back then too, where all of sudden, an unimagined crispness and hi-fidelity might have influenced tracks to be finely detailed and clean, where analog recording was a lot more about achieving a big, fat, well-balanced (and essentially "live") sound.

madonna was massively influential just not on the kind of stuff that gets overdiscussed on ILM

...if you listened to top 40 radio in the 1980s/early 1990s....

surely there are some Suzie Q fans here

Stacey Q?

ha yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hxhCRNoxA

thank you, Brad.