Vashtix said:

However I am going to have to watch this one though due to it being about Vanity.

Me too when it shows up online

purplegirl00 said:

anangellooksdown said:

purplegirl00 said: After all this time, I believe that what Prince always wanted (but may not have known it) was someone who would let him feel safe being real. I believe that Mayte much more than anyone, then Vanity, were the closest he ever got to this, but I don’t believe he ever really fully had it, or lastingly. [Edited 2/9/18 15:47pm]

nah... Prince did not seem at all like himself when he was with Mayte. In later years, Prince was more in tune with his spirituality like Denise. When he would talk to the concert goers, it was preacher-esque. That was more of his safe zone.

It's funny that you should say that. I have always felt that there was a lot more to Prince spiritually than what most people would think. I've always wondered if he had a woman in life who was on that level with him. Denise got there, but not at the same time that he did.

tmo1965 said:

purplegirl00 said:

nah... Prince did not seem at all like himself when he was with Mayte. In later years, Prince was more in tune with his spirituality like Denise. When he would talk to the concert goers, it was preacher-esque. That was more of his safe zone.

It's funny that you should say that. I have always felt that there was a lot more to Prince spiritually than what most people would think. I've always wondered if he had a woman in life who was on that level with him. Denise got there, but not at the same time that he did.

Let me say I am not dissing Prince nor saying there was competition btwn P&D.

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Denise got there first, while he was still doing th husband thing with M1 and M2 Denise had dedicated her life to Jesus. I always believe her prayers sustained him through much. She had a strong faith in what Jesus could do.

[Edited 2/25/18 5:53am]

tmo1965 said:

It's funny that you should say that. I have always felt that there was a lot more to Prince spiritually than what most people would think. I've always wondered if he had a woman in life who was on that level with him. Denise got there, but not at the same time that he did.

I agree. And it went beyond religion. He was really in tune with spirit. It was magical. He was.

CatB said:

tmo1965 said:

It's funny that you should say that. I have always felt that there was a lot more to Prince spiritually than what most people would think. I've always wondered if he had a woman in life who was on that level with him. Denise got there, but not at the same time that he did.

I agree. And it went beyond religion. He was really in tune with spirit. It was magical. He was.

He appeared to be going deeper by exploring astral travel and use of the third eye.He always seemed to be interested in it but he looked to be getting more involved by 2009 with the artwork for Lotusflow3r.I found it very fascinating.

pinkcashmere23 said:

CatB said:

I agree. And it went beyond religion. He was really in tune with spirit. It was magical. He was.

He appeared to be going deeper by exploring astral travel and use of the third eye.He always seemed to be interested in it but he looked to be getting more involved by 2009 with the artwork for Lotusflow3r.I found it very fascinating.

Yeah. He was in tune with anything "5D" long before most people began to study things like "The Secret", meditation, telepathy, astral travel, lucid dreaming, cosmic connections ... you name it.

It was more than bible studies, he lived all that by nature and seemed to know more than we were aware of (also in his music). He made use of the cosmic laws and I've always felt that his periods of going silent had a lot to do with this.

But yeah, OT...

CatB said:

pinkcashmere23 said:

He appeared to be going deeper by exploring astral travel and use of the third eye.He always seemed to be interested in it but he looked to be getting more involved by 2009 with the artwork for Lotusflow3r.I found it very fascinating.

Yeah. He was in tune with anything "5D" long before most people began to study things like "The Secret", meditation, telepathy, astral travel, lucid dreaming, cosmic connections ... you name it.

It was more than bible studies, he lived all that by nature and seemed to know more than we were aware of (also in his music). He made use of the cosmic laws and I've always felt that his periods of going silent had a lot to do with this.

But yeah, OT...

I noticed he mentioned 5D in a few of the recent songs.Very interesting.Thanks!

pinkcashmere23 said:

CatB said:

Yeah. He was in tune with anything "5D" long before most people began to study things like "The Secret", meditation, telepathy, astral travel, lucid dreaming, cosmic connections ... you name it.

It was more than bible studies, he lived all that by nature and seemed to know more than we were aware of (also in his music). He made use of the cosmic laws and I've always felt that his periods of going silent had a lot to do with this.

But yeah, OT...

I noticed he mentioned 5D in a few of the recent songs.Very interesting.Thanks!

learn something new today

Goddess4Real said:

pinkcashmere23 said:

I noticed he mentioned 5D in a few of the recent songs.Very interesting.Thanks!

learn something new today

Two songs where he mentioned it are Hot Wit U and That Girl Thang.

The Diffuser did a write up about The Beautiful Ones. They even mentioned others who said the song was for them but at his tribute to Denise when she transitioned he finally told the world the song was for Densie oh and the Ebony article too. :

http://diffuser.fm/prince-the-beautiful-ones/

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Common knowledge has long held that "The Beautiful Ones" was written for Prince's former girlfriend Susannah Melvoin. Engineer Susan Rogers, for one, has confirmed it.

The timeline certainly fits: Susannah, the twin sister of Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin, was seeing someone else when she met Prince in May 1983. But even Melvoin has admitted that she isn't completely sure about the genesis of "The Beautiful Ones."

"I can't say that the song was exactly our story, but he wrote it during that time," Melvoin says in Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of 'Purple Rain.'

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Only much later, during a 2015 interview with Ebony magazine, did Prince finally make clear just who the beautiful one really was: Vanity, his one-time protege.

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He dedicated "The Beautiful Ones" to Vanity during the first show of a solo Australia tour, just days after her passing. "Her and I used to love each other deeply," Prince said from on stage in Melbourne. "She loved me for the artist I was; I loved her for the artist she was trying to be."

When he got to "I'm begging down on my knees," one of the song's most tortured lines, Prince ad-libbed "Denise."

Interesting that this article done in 2016 still has The Beautiful Ones as a song for Susannah while Prince confirmed it was written for Vanity:

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Beautiful Ones, The Moment Prince Became a Movie Star

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https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/beautiful-ones-the-moment-prince-became-a-movie-star-20160422

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So maybe that's why his finest movie moment jettisons acting all together and delves purely into the art form he mastered. Watch Prince's performance of "The Beautiful Ones" in Purple Rain,which — in a mere five minutes — embodies everything he did so incredibly: emotion, passion, sensuality, poignancy, combustible sex appeal, can't-take-your-eyes-off-him star power. It's not necessarily the moment Prince became a legend, but it's as good a starting point as any.

The song selected for the movie's cathartic high point doesn't seem coincidental. Purple Rain had plenty of indelible hits — "When Doves Cry," "Let's Go Crazy," "Purple Rain," "I Would Die 4 U" — but it was "The Beautiful Ones," which was never a single, that the album's engineer Susan Rogers believed was closest to Prince's heart. "That song meant a lot to him," she told Rolling Stone in 1989. "It was written for Susannah Melvoin [Prince's onetime girlfriend]. A lot of songs were written about her, but that was the first one."

Prince's obsession with Melvoin would play out on later excellent tracks like Sign O' the Times' "If I Was Your Girlfriend." But in this first film, that pining is dramatized through the fictionalized story of an up-and-coming rocker named "The Kid," who's strung out on Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) Vanity, a beautiful singer who's just come to town. The film is a romantic triangle in which The Kid battles for Apollonia's heart alongside Morris (singer Morris Day), an egotistical ladies' man who fronts a rival band.

Purple Rain received some good reviews at the time — Gene Siskel even put the film in his Top 10 of 1984 — but the cast members unintentionally remind us that they're musicians, not actors. Then, right at the 32-minute mark of the film, The Kid's stilted psychodrama suddenly zooms into hypnotic focus. Naturally, it happens while he's singing a song.

The Kid is immersed in the emotional headspace of his bittersweet song, barely noting the crowd. We occasionally cut back to an impressed Apollonia Vanity , who slowly realizes the song just might be about her, but it's Prince that the camera can't stop observing. He's barely moving, but he's magnetic.

In the song, "The Beautiful Ones" finds the narrator opening with a pleaded ultimatum to his beloved — "What it's gonna be? … Is it him or is it me?" — and then segues from self-doubt ("Don't my kisses please U right?") to abject adoration ("The beautiful ones/Always smash the picture"). But this dreamy ballad, mixing sci-fi keyboards and echo-y percussion, soon begins to grow in intensity as The Kid rises from the piano, his eyes locking onto Apollonia Vanity to offer his love and a coy marriage proposal: "If we got married/Would that be cool?" More so than in any scripted scene in Purple Rain, Prince and Apollonia connect intimately during this performance, even though they're across the room from one another. It's the power of his music and his words that touch her.

And Prince hasn't even gotten started yet. After a series of anguished, falsetto "ba-by ba-by baaaaa-by"s, The Kid explodes, the camera getting a perfect front-row seat and never cutting away. Pointing demonstrably at Morris, himself and then her, he is a man possessed, bellowing, "What's it gonna be, baby?/Do you want him?/Or do you want me?/‘Cuz I want U!" And then Magnoli, brilliantly, cuts to a long-range shot of Apollonia, Vanity in the middle of the club, the camera slowly pushing in to see the full range of emotions on her face: love, confusion, astonishment. Other people are watching the concert, but only she understands what it means.

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Sauntering around the stage, flashing his bare chest to her, The Kid becomes pure sex and youthful confidence, proclaiming; he drops to his knees with the swagger and desperation of the Godfather of Soul himself, wailing, "I'm begging down on my knees/I want U." In that moment — in his sequined jacket, frilly white gloves and flowing blouse — Prince never seemed more vulnerable, more romantic, more undeniably fuckable. When he collapses to the stage as the song concludes, the audience trying to touch him, he's as spent as if he'd just had an orgasm. How could Apollonia Vanity deny him? How could anyone?

The sequence was as straightforward as a concert music video, but Prince elevated it to art through sheer commitment to a song that meant so much to him. Sure, he's lip-synching, but the anguished sentiment was blazingly real. The purity of the performance blows away most of the rest of Purple Rain — it captured a genius' essence in its natural habitat as a musician and singer. He made love feel kinetic, paralyzing and traumatic all at once.

And then the song was over. When The Kid's band walks offstage in the next scene, his guitarist (played by actual Prince bandmate Wendy Melvoin) admires, "Can't do it any better than that." Prince didn't have a lot of those moments in his film career. But he made this one count.

The public record does need to be corrected on that - people around him in the 80's have said he wouldn't explain his lyrics so they were left guessing and it's inevitable that they would get it wrong some of the time.

I'm still taken by Jill Jones's comment in the Purple Rain sessions book that people are completely missing the point of songwriting to say a song is about any one specific person, Prince knew what he was doing and his music shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic readings.

jaawwnn said:

The public record does need to be corrected on that - people around him in the 80's have said he wouldn't explain his lyrics so they were left guessing and it's inevitable that they would get it wrong some of the time.

I'm still taken by Jill Jones's comment in the Purple Rain sessions book that people are completely missing the point of songwriting to say a song is about any one specific person, Prince knew what he was doing and his music shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic readings.

Jill has said certain songs were inspired by her so IDK but I agree Prince was deep and things are not simplistic.; the lyrics /music can be inspired and certain things/persons a source of inspiration.

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I think The Beautiful Ones is, as he explained, inspired due to Vanity leaving and also fit the movie. We all know the songs written as The Beautiful Ones and anothe popular one at that time were about someone who left. THE ONLY one who left was Vanity at that time. Prince himself said (my paraphrase) Vanity had just left. The article says The Beautiful Ones performance in Purple Rain made Prince a Movie Star.

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No offense to Jill but Prince was inspired by Vanity's leaving so Inspiration caused by Denie K. Matthews was a good thing.-

jaawwnn said:

The public record does need to be corrected on that - people around him in the 80's have said he wouldn't explain his lyrics so they were left guessing and it's inevitable that they would get it wrong some of the time.

I'm still taken by Jill Jones's comment in the Purple Rain sessions book that people are completely missing the point of songwriting to say a song is about any one specific person, Prince knew what he was doing and his music shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic readings.

^

Just curious, do you feel the same way about all the songs said to be inspired by Susannah Melvoin? I also wonder if Jill feels the same about Always In my Hair being inspired by her, as she went into great details about that song being about her in that same Complete Studio Session book that you refer to.

luvgirl said:

jaawwnn said:

The public record does need to be corrected on that - people around him in the 80's have said he wouldn't explain his lyrics so they were left guessing and it's inevitable that they would get it wrong some of the time.

I'm still taken by Jill Jones's comment in the Purple Rain sessions book that people are completely missing the point of songwriting to say a song is about any one specific person, Prince knew what he was doing and his music shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic readings.

^

Just curious, do you feel the same way about all the songs said to be inspired by Susannah Melvoin? I also wonder if Jill feels the same about Always In my Hair being inspired by her, as she went into great details about that song being about her in that same Complete Studio Session book that you refer to.

Yeah absolutely I do.

Favorite Prince Songs and Why we Love them-The Beatiful Ones:

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/04/22/our-favorite-prince-songs-and-why-we-love-them/?utm_term=.0138bcb6fa8b

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“The Beautiful Ones”

I played “The Beautiful Ones” on repeat yesterday after I heard the news. “Purple Rain” came out the year I was born, and my parents were huge Prince fans, which meant that I resisted his music for as long as I could. But I discovered this song in my early teens and it still commands my full attention every time I listen to it. I love the slow build of it. It starts as a ballad with impossibly cool lyrics: “If we got married, would that be cool?” At the height of the song, Prince is literally screaming, “Do you want him? Or do you want me? Cause I want you” as synthesizers surge in the background. It ends just as quietly as it started — Prince has said everything he needed to say. I don’t think any song captures longing quite like it. — Bethonie Butler

jaawwnn said:

The public record does need to be corrected on that - people around him in the 80's have said he wouldn't explain his lyrics so they were left guessing and it's inevitable that they would get it wrong some of the time.

I'm still taken by Jill Jones's comment in the Purple Rain sessions book that people are completely missing the point of songwriting to say a song is about any one specific person, Prince knew what he was doing and his music shouldn't be reduced to such simplistic readings.

That is well and good but Prince himself said of the Beautiful Ones "she knows about this one" so he did know what he was doing and it was for a specific person and he more than anyone else knew what he was doing with his songs.

jaawwnn said:

I guess I just find it disappointing if his music must be made one dimensional, 'this is a song about "x", no other readings are allowed.' How sad. How... unartistic. In all honesty I take most things he said in ALL interviews with a pinch of salt and a knowledge that he frequently made up stuff or denied things in anger at other people talking about his art, this happened time after time. Having said that, don't get me wrong, if I had to choose a single person for this song to be about I'd go with Vanity, I'd just resent the question.

I understand your feelings on his lyrics and I think he did say things just to keep his image intact. However in the interview when he spoke of The Beautiful Ones is an interview he did not want piblished for public consumption as he requested for it to be pulled. He only publicly mentioned Vanity knowing about The Beautiful Ones being for her because she had just transitioned and he was paying tribute.

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I think the reason artists do not say much about the origins of songs or their musings is due to them wanting people to interpret as they wish; to take their art with you and make it your own as it becomes its own entity for each individual person.

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I hope knowing this song was about a specific person does not deter or discount you from liking the song if it was one you truly enjoyed.

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