Prince RIP

A thought I find myself returning to every time I hear the song: I'm not sure anyone else in the world could pull off the OTT shrieking at the end of 'The Beautiful Ones' and make it sound urgent and cool rather than off-putting and concerning. I try to remember this any time I start thinking what an amazing karaoke song it would be.

that whole Detroit show is pretty incredible btw

Detroit concert on the Parade tour also slays x 100

https://theseconddisc.com/2018/06/one-nite-alone-unreleased-prince-home-recordings-to-be-released-in-september/

This Piano and a Microphone set from 1983 looks pretty sweet

"Cold Coffee & Cocaine" !

"Mary Don't You Weep" is excellent! - https://open.spotify.com/album/5W6s5f9S1Fv3asQZH6lNGM?si=jBO_2gGQSTOlam5i26bDoQ

gave me feelings too early in the morning

i wonder if the piano version of purple rain sounds like the piano version he played in the movie. always wanted to hear a full version of that.

HB prince

np the 1984 birthday concert First Ave MPLS

hahaha aaaaand the whole thing has apparently already leaked (i know parts of it were already circulating - i know i've heard "cold coffee and cocaine" before)

A friend sent me this one and pointed out that it was very likely an influence of D'Angelo's "untitled", or at least it sure sounds like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yxk-aGQaF8

wow, that's a good find!

Is there a new volume of Blast From The Past brewing?

One can hope!

The "Hallway speech" version of 'Computer Blue' cropped up on shuffle play a few days ago and blew my mind all over again - only Prince could create something which is such a blatant masterpiece and have the official version be so brutally edited down. No matter how many examples I hear or see of his overwhelming talent, I still find myself being amazed by old favourites or unofficial things that are new to me. This guy was just music personified, and how it pains me to say was.

https://anildash.com/2018/11/28/every-single-video-prince-ever-made/

Every single video Prince ever made

on SJ, Katherine brought up the April Winchell MP3 collection, which I had forgotten about, but a quick read over reminded me she's still hosting (shh) Prince's Kim Basinger album:
http://www.aprilwinchell.com/images/HWD-Affair_back.jpg

Visit here and ctrl+F basinger: http://www.aprilwinchell.com/audio/

sadly, none of the bonus tracks which are what i'd really like to hear...

I can't tell if the Prince estate and the label are being super cautious or what, but come on:

A 3-disc bundle of the artist's pivotal new millennium pop party dance music, Ultimate Rave brings together CDs of 1999's Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and its 2001 remix Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic alongside a DVD containing the full-length performance version of Prince In Concert: Rave Un2 the Year 2000, Prince's epic 1999 New Year's Eve party, originally captured for on-demand pay-per-view airing during the dawning of Y2K.

Gotta assume the good stuff (vault, expanded remasters) is somewhere in the pipes ...

The triple-disc Purple Rain one looked great on the page, a proper fan's dream package but your Steve Hoffman types were appalled at the brickwalling/'hot' mastering and other terms i don't quite understand. Can't they just do them like they're doing the Beatles ones? So frustrating.

I tell you i'm SO down for a triple-disc 1986 Parade era thing; that Detroit live show that never even came out on VHS.. he was on fire back then. I wonder if they filmed the 3 nights at Wembley?

He has so many professionally filmed shows that he never released, just for his own benefit. I used to order bootleg dvds and they're amazing, that's what I want to see released officially.

Years ago, I went alone to a midnight screening of Purple Rain. Before the movie, a friendly guy around my age came over and starting chatting:

GUY: Do you collect bootlegs?
ME: (genuinely clueless) Uh... what kind of bootlegs?
GUY: ......Prince bootlegs(!)

He gave me his card and went back to his friends, a few rows away; I think he realized he was barking up the wrong tree (or taking a dip in the wrong lake, so to speak).

I'm pretty sure I've heard his version of "Jungle Love" before, but listening this morning I noticed, for the first time, his "somebody bring me a mirror" and "I think I'm going to file my nails," which are trademark Morris Day mannerisms. So ... was Prince adding them to the song because he was tailoring it for Morris Day, or ... did he tell Morris Day to adopt those vain mannerisms?

I'm sure he wrote it specifically for the Time

his Jungle Love is great

Manic Monday on the other hand....the Bangles and their producers really polished that one up

I know he wrote it for the time, but the mirror and file my nails stuff ... was that Prince's idea or was Morris Day already doing that stuff?

Some nice recollections from engineer Peggy McCreary.
She remembers a shitty day with The Time in the studio, no mention of Day filing his nails though...

This is sweet:

Do you remember any material that hasn’t been released?
He came in one time on my birthday. I was like, God, couldn’t he give me my birthday off? Shit! You could always hear him walking through the courtyard because he had those high-heeled boots and he had a certain way of walking. But he was dressed totally different than I had ever seen him: black leather boots, jeans—which he never wore—white t-shirt, and a black leather jacket. We cut a rockabilly song all day long. So we finished up, and I made him a cassette and handed it to him. And he stood there at the door with a little smile on his face and threw the cassette at me and said, “Happy birthday.” And that was my birthday song. I have an unreleased Prince song. To him, that was probably the greatest gift he could have given me—a day in the studio!

I know he wrote it for the time, but the mirror and file my nails stuff ... was that Prince's idea or was Morris Day already doing that stuff?

The whole story how this routine came to be is recounted in the Morris Day episode of "Tales from the Tour Bus". Basically, the line "somebody bring me a mirror" was always in the song, and when The Time was rehearsing it, after Morris sang the line, Jerome (who was their roadie at the time) decided to take a huge mirror off the wall and bring it to Morris, who then proceded to pretty himself up in front of it. Prince was also there, and he thought it was hilarious, so he said they need to do it on their gigs.

he thought it was hilarious

he was right

https://media.giphy.com/media/VybeTkYjB13NK/giphy.gif

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n12/ian-penman/the-question-of-u

Heck of a final paragraph

Great piece all around.

Yeah great piece. And chilling stuff about Amiir.

that's the best thing I've read since he passed

in his death, people have really clung to the myths that articulates a lot of the things that bother me about his post 80s work

I brought up Prince in the metoo thread no one seemed to want to talk about it

paywalled

It's not paywalled, just make sure all your ad-blockers etc are switched off.

Prince/Bowie derangement syndrome kind of underrated among internet-amplified phenomena that permanently broke brains in 16

Piece is great, penman over the last few years has had an astonishing streak of non-hagiographic profiles which (leaving aside ur quibbles about his judgement of individual records, or an occasional lapse into “there I said it”-ism) serve the artists in their full complexity much better than the fawning revisionism

I don't know if - being honest with oneself - you could come up with a 2CD comp oh genuinely great songs out of everything he did post Lovesexy and I'd bet half of those were stuff written in his peak

fucking amazing piece

wins otm

xxposts
I don't know enough his post 80s work but a 1CD comp, easily (and I suppose those who know more about that part of his catalogue could make a 2CD comp).
Most of all, I'm not sure he was the kind of artists interested in their old stuff instead of the latest material.
Especially since he seemed to be perpetually creating.

I don't know if - being honest with oneself - you could come up with a 2CD comp oh genuinely great songs out of everything he did post Lovesexy and I'd bet half of those were stuff written in his peak

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

I am genuinely enjoying Anthology: 1995-2010, which is three hours has some stuff from his peak but nowhere near half.

I don't know, 2016 definitely broke my brain and the Prince/Bowie thing was part of that, but it seemed more like a stand-in for all the shit I wasn't ready to talk about or deal with back then.

I have just read that very interesting article.
I didn't know his seemingly endless creativity (whatever the quality produced) had vanished at some point.

I don't know if - being honest with oneself - you could come up with a 2CD comp oh genuinely great songs out of everything he did post Lovesexy and I'd bet half of those were stuff written in his peak

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

come on my man

Didn’t dig the piece too much, but my wife’s parents were at one of those Rolling Stones shows discussed at the top (...of the main article, not the Walter Benjamin quote).

love symbol, come, gold experience, all great records with v few misses on them, i get so exhausted of this “let’s just all admit that post-‘80s prince wasn’t very good” narrative

i spent a lot of time convincing myself i liked so much prince stuff! i paid money for all those CDS

it's not a narrative, the music keeps me at some distance

i'm probably exaggerating but for myself it felt good to admit i was just talking myself into liking so much of that stuff at the time

i just find something sort of exhausting about them

new jack swing and rap are great but had a bad effect on Prince imo, it thickened up his sound in bad ways those piston pneumatic drums

"black sweat" was a real revelation for me had that weird, thin skeletal thing that i love about him