The July 23, 2002, Village Voice compares Prince's fight with the music industry to Wacko's. http://www.villagevoice.c...kelley.php

thanx for the article...a little more insight into what's going on behind the scenes.
[This message was edited Wed Jul 17 15:46:24 PDT 2002 by mrchristian]

Hey Mike! Just come out and say it:

Prince is your idol.

All for not. Try, try with all your might. For Prince you will never be.

'nuff said.

Good article.
I like the reference to MJ as "bleached out brother."

Yep. Even in his struggles with the recording industry, Prince outclasses Michael Jackson once again.
MJ is just a Prince wannabe.

This whole MJ thing is pissing me right off. You know why? Because ultimately the guy is just a dickhead egomaniac who is trying to get attention. I hope it doesn't spoil the efforts Prince has made with his independance and his TRUE desire to be free and allow the art to flow.
Unfortunately, when MJ gets involved in a project, the whole thing just gets ruined. Do u get what I mean? I don't want Prince being associated with this freak.


MJ should just disappear or at least just come clean and be true to himself without worrying about everything having to be the biggest and best. What a total loser.

And i dig MJ, but he should just die.

What is twisted about these articles is how, for example with that charity single, everybody is buying the story that MJ blocked it bcause of the producers connotations with the porn industry whilst as well MJ, as the producer, as Sony have denied that.
What is also strange is how somebody who opened a lot of opportunities for blacks and who always stood up 4 the people of his race r now marking him bcause of something that could very well b a vitiligo problem. Or mayb u think one enjoys staying out of the sun 24/7.
The 10yr old charges of child molestation, which r very fishy at best, keep beeing repeated on every possible occasion, while other, much more obvious offenders, never get bashed about it.
If u start insulting prince fans, why don't u do it around here, there r enough of them. Is it such a shame 2 like the mans music? As 4 MJ 2 b a prince wannabee...r u saying he was secretly hoping his record company would screw him over so he 2 could write slave on his face, and start an online service where he can charge all 500 fans he has left 25$/demo-album? get a grip...

shygirl said:

Actually,Prince went about it the wrong way,too.He wrote "slave" on his face,submitted weak albums just to fulfill his contract,and did the same childish name-calling that MJ is now doing.Both of these guys behave like whiny drama queens when they don't get their way!

SpcMs said:

oh a MJ fan taking up for MJ on a Prince fansite...how brave you must be.


On this issue MJ is full of shit...also, I'm so tired of MJ running to the blk community and crying racism when he's not happy...but every other time seens to run from the blk community. I don't support MJ on this issue. I'd rather support Courtney Love and other artist who truly have a fight with their record companies. Invincible...sucked...I've heard that from so many ppl...Mj has to just face it...he made a "bad" cd...so from Sony's point of view, why keep promoting a "bad" product. Even the "Rock My World" video was no more than Smooth Criminal with Chris Tucker.

The sad thing is that I'm a Jackson fan...more so of the group than just MJ.

And I would agree that Prince didn't handle his issue with Warner bros any better in some cases but damn, I didn't feel like he was manipulating his fans.


Lastly...aren't The Jacksons supposed to release a cd soon.

Rhondab said:[quote]

SpcMs said:

Fishy at best?! Come on man! Any allegations of child abuse are serious, even if they involve your rather pathetic idol. The only thing fishy is paying someone to shut up and keep the thing out of court. Turning an abused kid into a prostitute. Must have been great for the kid's state of mind.


Look at that quote you use. Now does that apply to P or MJ?
[This message was edited Thu Jul 18 7:02:42 PDT 2002 by vivid]

SpcMs said:What is twisted about these articles is how, for example with that charity single, everybody is buying the story that MJ blocked it because of the producers connotations with the porn industry whilst as well MJ, as the producer, as Sony have denied that.

No one cares if MJ or Sony or McDonalds blocked the release of the single - the point of the story is MJ worked with a known porn producer. MJ should know better. It shows poor judgement on his part.

The 10yr old charges of child molestation, which r very fishy at best, keep beeing repeated on every possible occasion, while other, much more obvious offenders, never get bashed about it.

MJ brought up the subject of child molestation during his various attacks on Sony. If he wants discussion to end on this subject then he shouldn't bring it up himself. According to MJ the child molestation charges are a direct result of his outselling Elvis & The Beatles.

ok ok ok ! hold on.


however freaky michael is, is not the issue here . he is an artist that has given alot to music / black music and "the industry" for 4 decades.


you cannot deny having danced to and enjoyed his music. c'mon...

personally i think prince and michael have a mutual admiration. have you ever heard prince do mj numbers? even if he says things like "this is how it's supposed to be"

thats a compliment in itself.

if never heard a bad word about mj from prince.

agreed mj is looking after his interests but so was prince.

so what? wouldn't you.
[This message was edited Thu Jul 18 9:24:49 PDT 2002 by pm1]

DAMN. my pervy avatar got rejected.
[This message was edited Thu Jul 18 9:25:27 PDT 2002 by pm1]

Both MJ and Prince have done some goofy shit in relation to their "issues" with the recording industry and labels...Prince, however, has the benefit of having bounced back a little from his own behavior, in the form of:

An amazing concert tour that got raves from critics...

An album(TRC) that was praised by more critics overall than any other one CD he's released in at least 7 years...

A regular stream of acknowledgment and props given to him by artists who are popular now..

And with the Celebration that overwhelmingly had fans singing even more praises for his musical talents...

Unfortunately for MJ, he hasn't had any of that yet, nor has enough time passed for it to have happened...

As well as this...Prince's goofiness was often so obscure in its meaning, that only in retrospect could most people see what it was he was trying to say...so at the time, the talk in the media was more about how "weird" Prince is for writing "slave" on his cheek and changing his name to a symbol than anything...as where with MJ the talk in the media is only about his being hypocritical and delusional for not realizing "Invincible" pretty much sucked...

An amazing concert tour that got raves from critics...

where can i get one of these raves?

Prince had, and has, legitmate beef with the music industry. It wasn't just about not getting his way, as WB and many others think. An artist should own his masters. It is his creativity, not the record company's. And anyone who saw Prince on the ONA tour or at the Celebration knows that WB or any other record company isn't responsible for Prince's brilliant talent.
And Prince didn't enlist jokes like Al Sharpton to try and prop up his cause. And Prince surely didn't resort to MJ's retardedness.
Like I said before, Prince outclasses Michael Jackson once again. Prince is definitely more talented than MJ, and it shows.

ok ok...
damn i wasn't even going to respond 2 this but damn you guys are really in an uproar over this.
now i have been doing some research on the situation of the mj/sony feud and this is my conclusion.
now before i get into this i just want you to know i am a mj fan, not as much as i used to be, but nevertheless when he releases something i go and get it just to see what he's gonna come with

first of all Invincible sucked.
i know that statement is subjective but i bought it the first day it came out. and i don't even listen to it anymore. and i only listened to it twice.
but there aome things that are weird about sonys claim.
now the album came out and was number 1 in like 5 countries(could be wrong but at least 3)
and one listen to the album you knew there are defintly some bonafide hits on there.
so why would you spend like $25 million on a album that sold about 2 million in two and not want to promote it.
wouldn't you want to recoupe some of the money you dished out on the album.
that's why michael is calling for an audit.
because something just seems wron about that.
the song "butterflies" charted without any promotion or single so it was a minor hit that could have been bigger had a video been accompanied with it. and that is the truth . so it all seems alittle weird to me.
true michael could have made a better album with all of the speculated money that was spent on it. but there were some cuts there that could have been hits like the song with santana.
now about him running to the bacl community now that he is in trouble.
you know michael is alot smarter than alot people give him credit for. so he knew who would be his target audience on this. and once you yell racism you have the ears of any minority. i think michael is trying to use this for his personal problems with sony. witch is weird because he only has 1 album left with them. or is that just a scapegoat for the fact that he is on the verge of losing alot of what he invested in sony because of one album that didn't sell that bad. but in michael jackson stadards it flopped.
really, we will never hear the full story and i think there is some scandal on both sides.
but i think michael has really messed up with this one because now the perception is he is REALLY crazy whereas before it was he is crazy.

i dunno it all seems dumb.

larksanders said:

To be fair, I think Sony spent $25 million on promoting the album as well. I'm not saying that Sony isn't in the wrong, but if only 2 million albums can be sold after that amount of money is spent, and if MJ is not willing to tour or do any long term promotion then why keep on promoting the album?

well really they stopped promotion in march which was only 5 months after the release. and it had sold 2 millions copies in two months in the us alone that is not international sales which i think is around the 5 mil total.
so to say that they spent all of that money on promotion is weird because they said they spent 25 million on the album brfore it even came out. before they started to promote and before a video was shot.
so i think the whole thing (michael and sony) is kind of shady.
because any other record company would have still done some more promotion or had the artist fund the video contigent upon a sales surge.

It just hit me that Prince is now [through npgmc] releasing more cd's in ONE year than MJ has released over the past decade.

Anyway. I haven't taken that much notice of what MJ is up to right now but I do remember some article saying that he called Mariah's ex husband "the devil". Stuff like that.

Seems he's fighting the battle with a little less dignity than Prince did.

Prince just played his cards with WB and let the public in on his discomfort with the whole situation, yes. But not on such a low level as MJ is doing right now.

Besides, with Prince the whole deal was way more interesting since he wanted to release more music than they could or would allow him.

He had "the gold experience" dangling right in the middle of that dispute.

'come' dropped. he released 'exodus', he worked on Mayte's album.

All were pointing a big fat middle finger at WB, but it was done with wit and a bit of style. And fcuz with a huge dose of Prince kitsh.

But at least he just recorded songs about it which he released and didn't have to resort to calling the warner execs "devils"

[altho he did make a lot of comments about Clive in the context of 'fake hair' ]

And later on it was "emancipation" -altho not the best effort he ever delivered, it still was 36 new songs only a few months after the release of 'chaos & disorder'.

Anyway, at that time all were laughing and scolding Prince. Calling him a pretentious freak. Ridiculing his name change and all. But look at what's happening now. Artists get dropped by the dozens if their record sales aren't as good as the last album.

Now they suddenly realise that this is what Prince was on about. MJ being the biggest wanker to discover this only now since he's been in the bussiness long enough and even owns half the shit other artists created.


If he gets out of his contract what's he gonna do?

Take his band on the road and perform the kind of
shows Prince does?

Somehow I don't see him pulling off that kind of action.

If this whole deal is about ownership and getting paid, I think his point is even weaker since he owns all the rights to so many of the Beatles songs and Sly songs and all.

Maybe he should make a point by returning all of those to their rightful owners and THEN start his rally.

And even complaining about the promotion of his product or the pay he gets. Damn. That campagn they ran for his HISTORY album was rediculous. Those enormous statues of him. Those preposterous videos and those awful promo materials that would hit you at least 20 times a day during that period.

I still believe that all of that promotion was always just to push a product that wouldn't sell itself.

People were dumb enough to buy into it but it seems they are smarting up now. Or perhaps the new generation of music buyers just doesn't give a fuck about MJ anymore, like they do about Prince.

But again. if you're gonna fight this battle and want people to be interested in it, you have to have something to offer them.

And I just don't feel like MJ has a whole lot left in him these days.


Oh well, at least you know Liz will sign up for the good cause and help him [that is, IF there's free champagne to be had]








[This message was edited Sun Jul 21 6:53:21 PDT 2002 by IstenSzek]
[This message was edited Sun Jul 21 7:01:35 PDT 2002 by IstenSzek]

Rhondab said:

"Why keep promoting such a "bad" product ??"

Because it sold 5 million units in two months... and nobody can do that... I'm not saying I like the LP, but a good promotion should have made it sell about 20 million by now !! Sony was not willing to do work... they're full of shit too... why spending so much money for the recording and trying to ruin it afterwards ??


[This message was edited Mon Jul 22 2:25:38 PDT 2002 by doriel1979]

[This message was edited Mon Jul 22 2:23:04 PDT 2002 by doriel1979]

Compare the cost of producing the last MJ album and the last Prince album (1 Nite Only)... Eye think Prince spent about 5 bucks to make his!
The irony is really a.. a beautiful experience! Now Eye want 2 see a full fledged commercial release of 1 Nite Only and see if it outsells "Invisible"

kmc

LarkSanders...

first of all Invincible sucked.

and soon after...

one listen to the album you knew there are defintly some bonafide hits on there.

I'm not sure about the congruency here with these too statements.

well as a whole the album sucked.
but there are some albums that are really bad but you know there is a potential that there are songs on there that are hits. of course with the right promotion and video and all.
that's all i was stating.
i hate just about everything they play on the radio but those are... you know...hits.

Excerpt from the article:

"Michael," said an industry insider, "is more politically savvy than people give him credit [for being]." Prince, he noted, "merely wrote 'slave' over himself in his struggle with Warner Music, and didn't reach out." True, but Prince also didn't try to disguise his self-interest behind black unity. He made race an issue to some degree, but he didn't exploit black consciousness. Jackson has reached out to the black community, as evidenced by the enthusiastic but gullible crowds who filled the room to see the bleached-out brother last week. Given that he has shown no real regard for black concerns over the past 20 years, though, some blacks question his sincerity in returning to the fold in hard times.

In the final analysis, this coalition has backfired on the Gloved One. It has revived the child molestation allegations, and unearthed unsavory tidbits like the fact that the 9-11 charity video he accuses Sony of sabotaging was spiked by his own people on learning it was produced by a gay pornographer. Eerily, Sharpton's embrace of Michael Jackson and the attendant media frenzy harken back to the heady days of another media circus: the Tawana Brawley case, in which an incendiary accusation and a plethora of cameras followed Sharpton and legal eagles Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. This time the legal team is Michael Hardy, Lewis Myers, and Johnnie Cochran, and it is déjà vu all over again.

Wellbeyond said:

I agree with u Wellbeyond, both of them went about this the wrong way...

I don't feel, however, that the labels should go unpunished. This may be the year that the artist's rights r laid out and actually enforced.

Beyond the drama, the staged protests and the press releases...if nothing else, at least some noise was made, and now everyone is aware just how mean and unfair record executives have been and still r.

I fear we have not heard the last of this.

"Why keep promoting such a "bad" product ??"

Because it sold 5 million units in two months... and nobody can do that... I'm not saying I like the LP, but a good promotion should have made it sell about 20 million by now !! Sony was not willing to do work... they're full of shit too... why spending so much money for the recording and trying to ruin it afterwards ??
***

These days many acts sell 5 million in two months. But the problem is that those sales mostly repressent the "curiosity factor" -- people who bought the album because of loyalty, habit or plain curiosity as to what Michael could have done with all the time, expensive producers and money he spent to make the album.

Despite the promotion dollars spent, the public did not respond beyond the initial sales and word on the street was that the album wasn't very good or was just a rehash of a sound from 10 years ago. Sony decided not to throw good money after bad in promoting it further, but rather to take its losses and move on to something/someone else.

Michael appears to believe that, if they'd just spent more on promotional stunts, the album would have been successful based solely on the fact that Michael's name was on it, but fails to realize that his "box office draw" ranking has dropped off considerably. Most of the album buying target audience was only 3 - 7 years old the last time he was on the charts, so they think of him as more of a nostalgia act. He's not willing to tour or do promotion of his own, probably because he really hasn't had to since the days of Off The Wall, and is having a hard time accepting his diminished appeal.

I think Prince has been down this same road. Initially he railed against his label regarding promotion and the amount of material they would allow him to release. His sales fell off and he pointed a lot of fingers and stamped his feet quite a bit. But i think Prince has made his peace with the fact that he is no longer a chart topper and is OK with that as long as he can play what, when and where he wants and will happily play to smaller crowds as long as they're diggin' on what he's doing.

It remains to be seen is Michael can accept his diminshed appeal or if his driving need to be the King of Pop and his ego will prevent him from picking up the pieces and moving on.