Question: Does when you became a fan, affect your taste's/expectations in Prince's music?

Background-

My younger brother became a huge Prince fan around 1995. So when he 1st got into Prince, Prince was , had his gun microphone, Pussy Control had just come out, etc.

Now, when Prince incoporates rap/hip hop in his sound my brother likes it because he grew up always knowing Prince mixing hip hop. His Prince is Prince circa 1995.

My older brother, on the other hand, has been into Prince since 1981 his Prince is old school Controversy era Prince so when Prince started incorporating hip hop into his sound,in the late 80's / early 90's, my older brother didn't like it. My older brother likes some rap, but he thought that Prince was "above" doing hip hop, and so forth.

What do you think?

If you became a fan later, Diamonds and Pearls era for example, do you you dig Prince's newer stuff more than someone who has been diehard since the late 70's / early 80's?

Is this an age thing? A generation gap?

If you have no love for hip hop, do you automatically not like when Prince incorporates it into his music?

Curious to see what you folks think.....
[Edited 10/11/05 6:39am]

interesting question.

i think i originally got into prince because he was a synthesis of a lot of musi i grew up on and listened to as a kid - the beatles and jimi hendrix primarily. when i heard 'purple rain' for the first time, it was like the music i was used to, done really well by someone in the present day - only he was putting his own stamp on it as well. also, i was into a lot of the 'gender bender' new wave groups of the '80s like culture club and eurythmics, and it seemed like he had a foot in that scene, too. so because of what i was already a fan of, i became a prince fan.

i'm sure through listening to his stuff over the years, i've gotten into other artists and genres. it's certainly worked that way with other artists i like. i was just telling someone recently that, thanks to listening to sinead, i've opened my ears to big band music and reggae because she's done cover albums in both styles. i'm sure prince has done that for me over the years as well.

i became a fan right around the gold era or so, but i didn't know about the album till much later; dm is what introduced me to p. i had to learn about everything he'd done to that point from the ground up in the 5 years after i discovered 'im. it didn't really affect me because i was learning about the older stuff, as well as the new.

I don't think it did with me. I loved "I Wanna Be Your Lover" when it 1st came out, but my favorite Prince era is 1994-1999. Of course, I look back on the "Purple Rain" years with a great deal of fondness as well.

Hmm...well let's see, I remember my mother taking me to see Purple Rain, and after that she bought the record (you know i wish i kept the poster that came with it! ) anyway I loved both, funny enough i did not put together at the time that it was the same guy who sang "I wanna be your Lover" till years later..
anyway ultimately i was a big MJ fan for most of the eighties and was later reintroduced to Prince by a boyfriend, Prince eventually won out.....that was in 1989.....Parade was the 2nd full lenghth album that i had heard and then i proceeded to go backwards, not in order....the third album was Controversy....the album that really did it was Dirty Mind.....In the ninties I got to expierience waiting anxiously for the "next" album to come out and see the changes and interesting sounds....I have to say my least favorite period is after Caos & Disorder until he finally came out with TRC and News....and now i am very curious to see what happens next!

Most definately. I first got into Prince in 1979 during the disco era, which I was a huge fan of. When disco died, instead of going in the direction of rock, I went in the direction of the closest thing to disco at the time which was funk. Funk at this time, was fast paced and for the dance floor just like disco had been.

My favorites at the time were groups like Rick James, Cameo, The Barkays, and Zapp. Prince's funk was just as hard and strong as theirs but it had one thing that set him apart and gave him a style all his own...the synthesizers. Prince had gotten rid of traditional instruments such as horns and seemed to be headed straight for the future. All the other groups sounded great with horns but synthesizers are what made a Prince song recognizable on the radio before you heard him sing a single note. He definately had a style of his own that set him apart from the others. When he started moving further and further away from the synthesizers and started using more traditional instruments such as horns, his music lost that special something that set him apart in the first place. It would be like if Roger and Zapp got rid of the talk box which made them famous.

Many people that were into Prince during the early era, dropped him when he went in another direction. Others, like myself, continued to hang on but were very reluctant to adapt to these changes. When someone has lived through a particular era, partied through it, and seen it firsthand, it's very different than someone that is just coming aboard after all these changes have already taken place. The ones that just came aboard after the changes are experiencing something new without living through all the stuff that happened before it. There might even be something in the newer stuff that attracted them to it in the first place so naturally, they wouldn't care for the older stuff anyway.

I've noticed the exact same thing happen again in the 1990s. Tons of fans that came aboard in 1985 became pissed with Prince's direction in the 1990s and then they got a little taste of how the older fans felt in 1985. Prince just keeps on picking up fans from the funk world, from the rock world, and now from the younger hip hop world. When you get all these folks together with different tastes, there are going to be arguements because the majority of the world is not as diverse in their tastes as Prince is.

I've noticed the exact same thing happen again in the 1990s. Tons of fans that came aboard in 1985 became pissed with Prince's direction in the 1990s and then they got a little taste of how the older fans felt in 1985. Prince just keeps on picking up fans from the funk world, from the rock world, and now from the younger hip hop world. When you get all these folks together with different tastes, there are going to be arguements because the majority of the world is not as diverse in their tastes as Prince is.[/quote]

All these different people with their different tastes like Prince, that is a testament to how brilliant one can be.....to bring all these different people together who otherwise would NOT have been.....THAT reason is the main reason why I am a FAM.....

whats interesting to me is that he is able to please all the constituents live...just not on record.

I don't think so. While I became a fan during the "Come/Gold"-era I learnt to appreciate the 80s albums far much more than the newer output around the time of "Emancipation" and such. I liked Prince's hip-hop moments at the time, but now I do understand why they seemed so contrived to a lot of folks. I don't really want to listen to his hip-hop escapedes these days, it just doesn't work.

Having said that I really like his few experiments with dance/techno music which seems to fit his style of making music anyway. You know, I'm with vainandy with the notion that Prince should have never drifted too much into the midtempo stuff. He kinda lost his drive with the 90s, especially during the latter part.

vainandy said:

I totally agree with that. It wasn't only the fact that he used synthesizers, but the way he was using them.
For instance, he used the Moog Polymoog not to emulate horns, but more to substitute the horns in the arrangements. Also the clever mix of drumcomputers and 'real' drums made his music unique.

There are records from the Meters or the Bar-Kays from the late seventies and early eighties I can't listen to. They also used synthesizers a lot in that period, but it's less interesting to listen to than the music they made in the early seventies. People thought synthesizers could substitute traditional instruments rather than exploring the possibilities of the synth for making 'new' sounds and use them as an addition to the existing instruments.

Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone and Herbie Hancock were the first to integrate synthesizers succesfully into funk. Prince was the right man on the right time to take over the torch of 'funk soldier'.

vainandy said:

Excellent post vainandy!

christopheries said: