Yet another great/positive article on Prince, this time in The Independent on Sunday (29 July). I'm not going to type out the whole article (double page spread in a supplement) but will pull out a few good quotes:

"He appropriated the whiteness of pop and rock when he should have been R&B, and then went all black and funky once we had taken the whiteness for granted."

"Wherever Prince came from , he remained a black man in a white world. His sexual ambiguity can be seen as a diversionary tactic; it's not sex that is the key ingredient in Prince's persona, it's race. But to a mainstream pop audience, sex sells and race doesn't, especially in America."

"All other black US artists who succeeded in white pop or rock music rather than racially demarcated R&B - Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Rick James, Michael Jackson - sought to destroy themselves through the sexual, spiritual or chemical consequences of their fame. The surprise is not that Prince is weird or embattled as he sometimes appears to be, but rather that he has survived relatively intact: 30 years into his career he's still there, still near the top of his game, and we're still interested."

and finally a sidebar quote on Planet Earth:

"Not quite back to his best, but proof that he's still doing it. And if some tracks sound like back catalogue, so much the better. As 46th albums go, this is pretty damn good."

The whole article's online - it's a fun read.

http://arts.independent.c...807103.ece

Cool article. It is great that after 30 years Prince still causes so many column inches.

kudos Prince.

good read, they still think he's mixed race tho. on point observations about race and music too.