It's alive enough for people to say this every year.

TrevorAyer said:

well the lack of anything from the estate certainly slows things down .. would be nice to have a new sde to chat about

exactly.The estate isn't exactly giving us alot of interesting news to talk about these days

This type of website is from the Wild West days of the internet. There were many years that would go by that Prince either didn’t produce an album or just wasn’t super active & this site saw a slowdown respectively.

What’s different now? Several factors starting with the consolidation of the internet after the rise of social media, the new platforms where we consume news (like Apple Podcast or YouTube), the reality that Prince is dead & the loss of the capability to have open discourse anymore. I don’t exactly have the answers for those things. It’d be easy to say the org should have a more active social media presence or an active YouTube channel, or a regular podcast (I don’t think people under 35 are into podcast). We can say these things but that wasn’t the nature of the community. I don’t even think an NPGMC as it was done would be as successful as it was because how we use the internet is fundamentally different.

Lastly I’ll say that Prince made art for a mass audience. He was a black kid who came from the rust belt in the 70s & he was able to connect with a spectrum of backgrounds. Those kinda communities don’t exist today online because we’re so entrenched with our isms & schisms that we can’t see past our own noses. A couple years ago I watched a young student from Mexico address a senior group. She was in a gymnasium of about 80 people who looked like Archie & Edith Bunker. She talked about how she’d just spent the last few years in the states having nothing to do with white people whatsoever, like no contact @ all. She was afraid of white people & believed they didn’t want her here. The truth is that there’s a truth about that. But it’s reasonable to expect if I was in Mexico there’s people who’d rather I wasn’t there. It’s not acceptable & can no longer be normalized, but tribing up is just making society worse. Every summer we watch livestreams of black bloc facing off with rednecks & nobody talks about how they are creating each other.

This was always a good community & will always be a good community. But as we age we’re gonna be a community where fans are be it social platforms or websites. But I don’t think the internet is able to foster a broad fan base in current year & that not Ben’s fault. The New Power Generation represented every race, religious people & atheist, country fans & gangster rap fans, juggalos, socialist, constitutionalist, rich & poor people & that’s what made it great.
[Edited 9/17/22 8:32am]