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i cant talk about it
To be fair, warning2all was referencing the title track, and not the album, which makes his assessment 100% accurate.
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I agree. The reason why I was narked about the fact the threads were being deleted wasn't because I couldn't go or anything, it was simply because it made me feel alienated. Like I wasn't part of a community anymore. I'm not really bothered about it right now, I'm over it. It's all been and gone and is in the past, but I do think that the charities actions werent nessecarily the right ones.
If you had the power to put words into Prince’s mouth, you could hardly improve on the ones he speaks at the outset of this intimate fundraiser for the charity Autism Rocks. “What we’re going to do right now is play 14 hits in a row.” He raises his eyebrows, as if amazed by his own generosity. “Fourteen!”
Opening with Purple Rain, he winds up exceeding that number by some distance. Crowd-pleasing is too mild a word for this show. Prince doesn’t just please the crowd; he lovebombs it.
Some superstars seem diminished in small venues, like a blockbuster viewed on an aeroplane seatback screen, but Prince is even more impressive close-up. Dressed in shimmery silver and strings of beads (imagine if Jimi Hendrix had played a galactic priest in an episode of Star Trek), he moves with playful, faultless grace. You could spend the whole two hours just watching his face as he mugs, gurns, smirks and winks, as if finding his own virtuosity hilarious. He has that rare confidence of someone who knows in his bones that he’s the best at what he does, a confidence that passes through arrogance and arrives at a state of sheer joy.
The tight line-up – female trio 3rdeyegirl, a keyboardist and dynamic backing singer Liv Warfield — makes for a lean, hard show with thrilling new funk-rock arrangements. Let’s Go Crazy is as crunchy and riff-driven as AC/DC, the famously minimal Kiss acquires a bassline, and When Doves Cry is pared down to voice and drums, with Prince conducting the crowd in a chant to replace the chorus’s keyboard riff. Other songs are squeezed into giddy medleys or merely teased. After a couple of bars of the notorious Darling Nikki he stops and says with mock outrage: “Do you know what happens if I play that song?” Prince’s sense of humour is perhaps his only underrated quality.
The two encores roam into solo-heavy recent material but only a fool would begrudge him a little muso fun after being hosed with hits for 90 minutes. Prince seems to be enjoying himself so much that, without the midnight curfew, you suspect he’d just keep on going. Throughout the show, the affluent donors in the crowd, including Noel Gallagher and Alan Carr, look dazed with delight, too stunned to play it cool. After a wonderful version of Nothing Compares 2 U, Prince grins and asks: “Was that all right?”
Yes, that was more than all right.
