From my beloved 1999 album, (P's best album of his career, in my opinion) the song Let's Pretend We're Married. Ironically, this is a song that I NEVER truly dug. When the album was first released and I got it, on first listen of this song, I was like "Hmmmmm,...nah." The song never grabbed hold of me. Although the melody on the hook is somewhat catchy, (I like the toy bells doubling the melody) it's definately a mood piece to showcase his versatilty in genres for the album. Anyway, obviously P and WB liked it, it was released as a single. But my question is, what do ya'll think P means when he sings on the tag of the chorus "All the hippies sing together"? In 1982, the word "hippie" was definately not in fashion. I always thought it was odd that P used the phrase. EXCEPT for in the song from the same album "All The Critics". It fits there because he's clearly biting off of Jimi Hendrix's cut "If 6 Was 9"

Prince; "all u hippies...u ain't as sharp as me."
Jimi: "businessmen, you can't dress like me."
And then of course Jimi's use of the word "hippies" in the lyrics

"If all the hippies cut off all of their hair..I don't care"
And then of course P's line
"U could cut off all of your hair,...I don't think they'll care..."
P's obvious references to Hendrix's song is clear and that's cool for All the Critcs. But what about in Let's Pretend? I have an opinion on what he means by "All the hippies sing together" by I wonder what ya'll think he means.

Brutha B..whazz' happenin' baby bruh?

Good thread. Hmmm...My take on P's term of the word "hippies" probably meant (in 1982) "squares"..people living in the past..not up on what's happening.

Not to sound racist, but it reminds me of when P used to play "D.M.S.R" live and sing the line: "all the white people clap your hands on the"..and he'd have this stupid look on his face while clapping his hands & missing the beat.

I'm dying to hear your take on "hippies". Nice Jimi analogy..never thought about that.

Again, I must state that this thread is more targeted towards the o.g.'s on this site way moreso than folks that came on board much later. I say this cuz it seems that many orgers on this site have never really been into this album. Not to the point where they will pick up on the shit that I point out from this album. That's usually more akin to folks that were into P when this album was actually released. It's just a different mind state, that's all. I think many on here, when reading my 1999 album related threads, are like "Huh?" or even moreso "who gives a fuck?" And that's cool. It's truly for the o.g.'s that's on here anyways. Ya'll know who u are.
[Edited 9/4/09 4:13am]

SPYZFAN1 said:

Yeah, I touched on that with DMSR in my other 1999 album related thread about white girls. Or was it my other 1999 album thread about the singles released from the 1999 album? Anyway, I think the line "All the hippies sing together" is from a song that P was targeting the song to anyways, a white audience. So like he did in DMSR, where he's actually making fun of whites who can't clap on time, he's doing the same thing, on the sly, but in reverse, on Let's pretend. "All the whites sing together". I think it's safe to say that when most folks think of hippies, they think of white folks from the late 60's with long hair, flashing the peace sign. I think P's use of the word "hippies" was slang for whites. As well as "critics". "All the critics/All the hippies".

SPYZFAN1 said:

What's up, player. Pimp to pimp. Thanx for posting.

P got a lot of press from largely white music writers from Dirty Mind and Controversy. I think he also refered to these writers as "hippies" in the sense that I don't think P believed that they truly "got" what he was doing, musically, or understood where he was coming from. That their opinions of him, were "dated". Thus him calling them "hippies". That's why I said I think it was P'slang for critics AND whites. It carris a double meaning.

I would think that a white hippie would think it more hippie to rhyme dare with underwear, not like those two guyz.

That sounds like what he could he have meant after being a Prince fan for all these years and kinda seeing how his mind thinks.

However, back in 1982, I thought he was referring to white rockers as hippies. Down here in Mississippi, most black people did not listen to rock music so I heard them call rockers hippies all the time, mainly because of the long hair. You have to understand that when the redneck white boys drove by blasting rock music, it was always heavy metal and the heavy metal guys had long hair just like the hippies. Yeah, there were the new wave and punk bands going on but those rednecks kept on driving by with the rebel flags painted in the back window to the point that a lot of people forgot about the new wave scene and pictured white people as listening to heavy metal only. Well, that and country music, which their parents listened to. The South is definately a different experience.

Prince didn't exactly use it as a good term either on "All The Critics Love U In New York". He said....."take a bath hippy".

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread around the world. The word "hippie" derives from word "hipster", and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. These people inherited the countercultural values of the Beat Generation, created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs like cannabis and LSD to explore consciousness.
In 1967, the San Francisco Human Be-In popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. In Mexico, the "jipitecas" formed La Onda Chicana and gathered at "Avándaro", while in New Zealand, nomadic housetruckers practiced alternative lifestyles and promoted sustainable energy at Nambassa. In the United Kingdom, mobile "peace convoys" of New age travellers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge.
Hippie fashion and values had a major effect on culture, influencing music, television, film, literature, and art. Since the 1960s, the hippie counterculture has largely been assimilated by the mainstream. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, and Eastern philosophy and spiritual concepts have reached a wide audience. The hippie legacy can observed in contemporary culture in a myriad of forms—from health food, to music festivals, to contemporary sexual mores, and even to the cyberspace revolution.
Small enclaves of original hippies continue to pursue their lifestyle, mostly in rural locations. And some younger people, called neo-hippies, have adopted hippie ways.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie

Hipster, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular a form of modern jazz called bebop, which became popular around 1940. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: manner of dress, slang terminology, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty, and relaxed sexual codes. Early hipsters were generally white youths adopting many of the ways of urban blacks of the time, but later hipsters often copied the early ones without knowing the black origins of the culture. The term eventually described many members of the Beat Generation.[edit]History

Etymologically, the words "hep" and “hip” derived from the African Wolof tribe’s word “hipi” meaning; “to see”.[1] The word was used in many African communities of the Diaspora since their time of transplantation from their original locale. In the early days of jazz, musicians were using the "hep" variant to describe anybody who was "in the know" about an emerging culture, mostly black, which revolved around jazz. They and their fans were known as "hepcats." By the late 1930s, jazz and its variant Swing, had become popular among squares, the jazz culture became watered down, and "hip" rose in popularity among jazz musicians, to replace "hep." It was mostly the emerging be-bop culture that made the switch from hep to hip. Subsequently, around 1940, the word "hipster" was coined to replace "hepcat," and hipsters were more interested in be-bop and hot jazz than they were in the older Swing music, which by the late 40s was becoming old-fashioned and watered down by squares like Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo. The word hipster was underappreciated and unknown to the mass culture, until the Beat Generation during the 1940s began to frequent African communities for their music and dance. These first youths diverged from mainstream due to their new philosophies of racial diversity and their exploratory sexual nature and drug habits.
The first printed dictionary to list the word hipster is the short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk," published in 1944 with Harry Gibson's first album, "Boogie Woogie In Blue." The entry for "hipsters" defined it as, "characters who like hot jazz." This short glossary of jive expressions was also printed on playbills handed out at Gibson's concerts for a few years. It was not a complete glossary of jive, as it only included jive expressions that were found in the lyrics to his songs. The same year, 1944, Cab Calloway published "The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary of Jive,"which had no listing for Hipster. Since there was an earlier edition of Calloway's Hepster's (obviously a play on Webster's) Dictionary, it appears that "hepster" pre-dates "hipster."
Frank Tirro in his book "Jazz" defines the 1940s hipster:
To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first. He is amoral, anarchistic, gentle, and overcivilized to the point of decadence. He is always ten steps ahead of the game because of his awareness, and example of which might be meeting a girl and rejecting her, because he knows they will date, hold hands, kiss, neck, pet, fornicate, perhaps marry, divorce-so why start the whole thing? He knows the hypocrisy of bureaucracy, the hatred implicit in religions-so what values are left for him?-except to go through life avoiding pain, keep his emotions in check, and after that, "be cool," and look for kicks. He is looking for something that transcends all this bullshit and finds it in jazz.
Marty Jezer, in his book, "The Dark Ages: Life In The U.S. 1945-1960" defines the 1940s hipster:
The hipster world that Kerouac and Ginsberg drifted in and out of from the mid-forties to the early-fifties was an amorphous movement without ideology, more a pose than an attitude; a way of being without attempting to explain why. Hipsters themselves were not about to supply explanations. Their language, limited as it was, was sufficiently obscure to defy translation into everyday speech. Their rejection of the commonplace was so complete that they could barely acknowledge reality. The measure of their withdrawal was their distrust of language. A word like "cool" could mean any of a number of contradictory things--its definition came not from the meaning of the word but from the emotion behind it and the accompanying non-verbal facial or body expressions. When hipsters did put together a coherent sentence, it was always prefaced with the word "like," as if to state at the onset that what would follow was probably an illusion. There was neither a future nor a past, only a present that existed on the existential wings of sound. A Charlie Parker bebop solo--that was the truth. The hipster's worldview was not divided between "free world" and "Communist bloc," and this too set it apart from the then-current orthodoxy. Hipster dualism, instead, transcended geopolitical lines in favor of levels of consciousness. The division was hip and square. Squares sought security and conned themselves into political acquiescence. Hipsters, hip to the bomb, sought the meaning of life and, expecting death, demanded it now. In the wigged-out, flipped-out, zonked-out hipster world, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Truman, McCarthy and Eisenhower shared one thing in common: they were squares. ...the hipster signified the coming together of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the negro.
Another author who describes the 1940s hipster concisely is Paul Douglas Lopes in his book "Rise of a Jazz Art World," and the relevant pages can be found online.[2]
As hipsters became older they invented the then pejorative, Hippy, to refer to the younger hipsters, the affluent young baby boomer's children. This was then embraced as the cultural identity, and thus became cool in its own right.


http://en.wikipedia.org/w...culture%29

Beat culture

In the vernacular of the period, "beat" indicated the culture, the attitude and the literature, while the common usage of "beatnik" was that of a stereotype found in lightweight cartoon drawings and twisted, sometimes violent, media characters. This distinction was clarified by Boston University professor Ray Carney, a leading authority on beat culture, in "The Beat Movement in Film," his notes for a 1995 Whitney Museum exhibition and screening:
Much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program.
It would be a lot easier if we were only looking for movies with "beatniks" in them. San Francisco columnist Herb Caen coined the word (which by sarcastically punning on the recently launched Russian Sputnik was apparently intended to cast doubt on the beatnik's red-white-and-blue-blooded all-Americanness). And the mass media popularized the concept. Dobie Gillis, Life magazine, Charles Kuralt, and a host of other entertainers and journalists reduced Beatness to a set of superficial, silly externals that have stayed with us ever since: goatees, sunglasses, poetry readings, coffeehouses, slouches, and "cool, man, cool" jargon. The only problem is that there never were any beatniks in this sense (except, perhaps, for the media-influenced imitators who came along late in the history of the movement). Beat culture was a state of mind, not a matter of how you dressed or talked or where you lived. In fact, Beat culture was far from monolithic. It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind.
The films and videos that have been selected for the screening list are an attempt to move beyond the cultural clichés and slogans, to look past the Central Casting costumes, props, and jargon that the mass media equated with Beatness, in order to do justice to its spirit.[4]


Since 1958, the terms Beat Generation and beat have been used to describe the anti-materialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in 1948, stretching on into the 1960s. Music historians saw that the beat philosophy of anti-materialism, combined with its fundamental soul-searching ethos, influenced 1960s musicians, such as Bob Dylan, the early Pink Floyd and The Beatles.
At the time that the terms were coined, there was a trend amongst young college students to adopt the stereotype, with men wearing goatees and berets, rolling their own cigarettes and playing bongos. Fashions for women included black leotards and wearing their hair long, straight and unadorned in a rebellion against the middle-class standards which expected women to get permanent treatments for their hair. Marijuana use was associated with the subculture, and during the 1950s, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception further influenced views on drugs.
The beat philosophy was generally counter-cultural, anti-materialistic and stressed the importance of bettering one's inner self over and above material possessions. Some beat writers began to delve into Eastern religions such as Buddhism or Taoism. Politics tended to be liberal; with support for causes such as desegregation (although many of the figures associated with the original Beat movement, particularly William Burroughs, embraced libertarian/conservative ideas). An openness to African-American culture and arts was apparent in literature and music, notably jazz. While Caen and other writers implied a connection with communism, there was no direct connection between the beat philosophy (as expressed by the leading authors of this literary movement) and the philosophy of the communist movement, other than the antipathy that both philosophies shared towards capitalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatnik

I think maybe he was just implying its time to move on, evolve.
Go somewhere with these new social ideas.
[Edited 11/10/07 16:56pm]

vainandy said:

He also said 'its time for a new direction, its time for jazz to die'


.
[Edited 11/10/07 16:59pm]

horatio said:

Player, EXCELLENT post.

horatio said:

Another excellent post.

horatio said:

Again.... Although I was already hip (no pun intended)to most of what u laid down in your various post, I still gotta say it's hella cool that u took the time like u did to break it down.

horatio said:

THAT'S exactly why I posted earlier that I think P didn't think the music press (critics) truly got or had a clue to where P was really coming from, musically. And this was BEFORE the 1999 album was released. I think he felt that the shit he was doing with Dirty Mind and even moreso, on Controversy, was above the rock critics (white, i.e. Hippie) mindset. And also, like I stated earlier, in Let's Pretend, he was asking his target audience regarding THAT song, "to sing together". Like in DMSR, he was slightly mocking. Again, the word "hippy", in P's case, was slang for whites and carried a double meaning.

vainandy said:

Exactly. The line he says "What are u looking at, punk?" That also comes from, I think, and is targeted towards the fans at the Rolling Stones concerts that he opened up for. There is no way in hell P wouldn't have addressed that incident in some form. And again, that was right before he went on his Controversy tour. So, it would be on his very next album. And, trust me, in 81, MANY of the cats that went to a Stones concert, could easily fit the "sterotype" of a hippy. And many looked like they could have used a bath. The dirty, stringy hair, no shirt, etc. This is what P faced in L.A. opening for The Stones when he got booed off. TWICE. The "what are u looking at, punk?" is directed to that incident and to that crowd.

blackguitaristz said:

laughing my white ass off at that quote, I cound´nt have put it together better. When i saw this thread, the first line that went thru my head was the "take a bath, hippie" B have you ever thought of writing a book, I have find your threads amazing, they remind me of the old dayz back in my youth in Ireland, sitting with other music fans and basically trying to figure out what is going on here.

Without doubt 1999 is one the most amazing double albums ever released, I remember it was the first album i bought on CD ( naturally i had it on cassette yrs before), which turned out to be a bummer as it was totally ruined by the omissions and the track sequence. Similiar to the single vinyl version released in the UK. At the time there was virtually no mainstream artist that had released a double album of new material, let alone a double album with only 11 tracks. I think a friend at school pointed out to me that he knew only one artist that was so daring, and that was Mike Oldfield with Tubelar Bells, which at the time had the audacity of being a double album with only 1 track, if my memory serves me correct.

opps i see I have moved of the subject abit, my apologies, but i love reading these posts

Whitnail said:

Thanx Whitnail. Very kind words.

blackguitaristz said:

At that time, I thought he was trying bring back the phrase

Just like he did the bell bottom thang during the Parade era..

I was like, "Oh Lawd!!

But once again Brotha' Black....you are on it!!

funkpill said:

Aaah pill,..damn. Thanx my brutha. What first caught my attention was that P used the word "hippy" in TWO songs. That got me to thinking and that's how I put together on what I'm saying. Now for all I know, Prince could have been talking about Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. But I doubt it.

blackguitaristz said:

I agree

he says something about "purple hippies" on one song.i can't remember which.probably his fans.(irrelevant,i know).also i'm a young'n and 1999 is one of my all time faves.

SoulAlive said:

That's how I've always seen it.

blackguitaristz said: