A friend recently gave me a new book called 'Geekchic' which is all about the rise to power of geeks through history, by listing the various people, inventions, icons, etc that help to define what we know as 'geeks'.

There is an entry for Prince and here it is:

In a world where people are increasingly afraid of their own shadows, Prince rules because he does exactly what he wants to do.

Consider that:

a. He wrote, sang, played and produced all the songs on his first five albums.

b. In the early 1980s, when people didn't do these things, he ran around the stage in red bikini underwear, ate out his guitar, humped the bed and still got every woman in the stadium to "wish he were mine".

c. He filmed and delivered Purple Rain with no outside involvement. The studio wasn't even aware that it was good enough to release until an assistant phoned them in the middle of a San Diego screening, telling them they had struck gold.

d. A studio virtuoso, he apparently has more than 800 full-length albums catalogued and waiting to be released.

e. He only does press when it suits him, and on his terms. Although he is a total exhibitionist on stage, he is pathologically shy and soft-spoken in private.

f. When he found out how the record industry worked, he wrote Slave on his cheek, changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and went straight to the internet, where he continued to sell tons of records and stoke his fan base, again with no major label intervention.

g. Once he made his point, he took his name back, got into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame and launched a "good-bye" comeback tour that supposedly was going to retire his old catalogue (the second time he's made that decisiosn) and then threw a blank-cover CD in with the price of a ticket, ensuring that Musicology, his first album for a new label, would enter the top 10 for weeks.

h He's 5'2" (without his heels), but is still the sexiest person alive. What can you say other than that he's got the look and the magic. Paul Brownfield, trying to dissect his appeal in the Los Angeles Times after Prince had taken the city by storm in the spring of 2004, says it best. Calling him an unfathomable aphrodisiac in human form, Brownfield goes on to say, "Dismissing Prince as a geek is tantamout to not understanding what woment want".

800 albums? I don't think so! Prince would have had to record a song a day for 22 years to get that figure!

hi metal

I love it.

metalorange said:

Thanks for posting that Metal. good reading.


I know what you mean- it's way closer to about albums than 800! Sheesh!

JimmyNothing said:

I always thought it was around 80 unreleased albums?!?! I swear i got that from sumthing i watched or a book

Thanks for sharing that!

red drawerz? dude must've seen an imposter of some sort, then.

metalorange said:

Good thread Metal! And I have to agree with you, concerning the 800 albums. Maybe if they each had 2 songs on them huh?