I ask this question, because many colleges have a course on Beatle's music, which goes toward college credits.

I mean, I am pretty sure at this point Prince's body of work is bigger than the Beatles, but I'm not 100% on that.

And I imagine in the Beatles class they teach about song formation and composition of the Beatles songs. And Beatles fans, please don't jump down my throat on this one, but couldn't it be said that many Beatles songs follow specific formulas? Even the "experimental" ones?

Sure, Prince's follow formulas, too, but it seems Prince (especially being only one man and not 4) expands his formulas in all kinds of directions.

What I'm getting at is... couldn't Prince's music one day be studied like the Beatles or Mozart?

Or can no one these days admit it because he wears make-up and 98% of the world is too macho to accept that?

YUP.


He's a perfect storm of subjects to study.


He was influenced by mutiple genres, and not only became a hybrid of them , he was also one hell of an innovator.

he pushed the envelope on what it meant to be a R&B musician, a Rock Musician, etc. etc.--He simply worked outside of boundaries and created his own. In today's "anything goes" music scene where mashing together genres (often very clumsily) is all the rage, the fact that Prince once operated like this flawlessly in a world of rigid styles is lost to many. But Prince was one hell of an innovator.

To top that off, he's written the perfect ballad (If I was Ur Girlfriend), the perfect Rock Anthem (Purple Rain), and on and on and on. He's unrivaled.

And further more, he's an excellent multi-instrument musician, a guitar player who astounds guitar players. A drummer, a bass player, a whiz on piano, and on and on. He's simply in a class all his own.

The idea that he wouldn't be studied in future generations is laughable. Prince left his mark in the music industry for years and years to come before the age of 30.


He's stunning, actually.


And I'm haven't even touched on how pioneered and challenged the music industries current contract/distribution methods.

spelling/clarification edit
[Edited 10/30/08 23:03pm]

Pretty much anything can be studied or used as a topic for scholars. So Berniejobs, since you seem to be interested in a course about pop music, why don't you follow one? Most follow pop's history chronologically, cover song structure and are actually, well, fun!

Imago said:

I know I am repeating some not-so-loved orger, but I do agree with this statement of his:

If Prince was an innovator, tell me, what did he innovate?

I'm not talking about pushing the envelope, but innovation.

No not at college.

His Music\Legacy\Genius will have full courses at University's all around the globe. In the future (50 to 100 years from now) he will be fully appreciated for what he represented and seen as a supernova amongst the dim lights of the time...he will be discussed alongside Beethoven, Mozart and the Beatles and those who appear now to have more respect will have been long long forgotten, the Madonna's, the Jacksons the timberfakes etc etc etc. He may actually be remembered as the only popular musician who can sit with the classics.

Imago said:

and he did it all while remaining the prettyman's...huh. It really is too much to comprehend...he even dressed his peoples....DRESSED HIS PEOPLES!!
[Edited 10/31/08 4:54am]

He already is.

There is a college, in Holland I think, where they study pop music and Prince is a favorite there. Actually there have been many written studies by teachers of that college (or is it university), among which a study of Anna Stesia which is considered an immortal and very original masterpiece in pop music.

About the question "what did Prince innovate?", well he innovated funk by adding to it layer upon layer of incredibly bold solutions, harmonically most of all. His records from 1999 to Lovesexy are the richest pop records ever released as far as harmonic depth goes. Only Frank Zappa is pretty much on the same level harmonically, but lacks Prince's genius for melody. This harmonical depth was almost lost in the 90s and 2000s though.

He also showed people you can be a pop musician and have the technical capabilities of a great jazz musician. He was the bridge between "real" musicians and electronic musicians, since he's both a great performer like James Brown and a man who creates music alone in his home with all kinds of electronic machines like Beck and 100000s of web musicians nowadays.

prince was innovator no doubt aboy it.innovatie was his aprouch to music.

drum tracks were always in the background of the song.

prince was one of the first to introduce rhythm track of the song to the forefront

prince's aprouch to make stripped down arangmants is also very innovative for example kiss and when doves cry are songs without bass lines.

and if you ask me the way prince produced when doves cry sepecialy the drum
machine it have become the blue print of modern music and you can hear that in songs by neptuns,timberland

I could easily believe so.

twistee said:

Yep, in music class.

If they can teach/analyze Keanu Reeves acting, they can do the same for Prince's music.

if tupac can b studied, y not prince?

I agree with most of what is being said, however I hate to burst your bubble, but if you think mj and madonna will be forgotten, you are only fooling yourself.

I think there should be a course for all three artists
[Edited 10/31/08 13:03pm]

alphastreet said:

Really, why a course on those 2?

We are talking about a MUSIC course not a freak/singer/entertainer course...MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC as I said long forgotten alongside all the other 'singers'.

littleman said:

Harmonically? Listen to the beach boys. Don't get me wrong, Prince multilayered vocals are marvelous, incredibly well done, perhaps even brilliant, but just not innovative. It has been done before Prince was even born. He might have pushed the envelope a bit, but that is hard to prove!



Huh? You can't name any other musician that fronted a band like a great performer? Really? There are tons, so no, Prince can't claim that.

The only thing that comes close is his signature 'written, arranged, performed, produced by Prince'. And he was the first artist to do so, if it wasn't for Stevie Wonder. Sure, he pushed the envelope, he's just not the first in anything. I really believed Prince to be the innovative genius, but as much as he might be a genius, he isn't innovative. He took from what was around and before him.

His innovation i think was his own unique mix of funk rock & R&B, yes others have done it, but everybody’s flavor is different and his flavor was pretty dam good, they call it the Minneapolis sound, which was unique enough to give it a name.

Another thing unique to Prince, mostly in the 80's was the grooves! Grooves that seemed to come out of him effortlessly; think most of "1999"'s sound with those long extended parts just so he can show off how clever and funky his simple grooves are. A-U-T O' matic.
In the mid 80’s he would always find a place to let those grooves play out and just groove for a good long time,... "Erotic City" is a good example, the lyrics very minimal over long extended funky grooves that don’t come so easy to him or anybody else for that matter, …im a big time music fan from classical to jazz to classic rock and looking high and low nobody has ever been so groovealicious, some came and tried to copy but all have paled in comparison.
[Edited 10/31/08 16:28pm]

Sander said:

But I'm not talking about vocal harmonics. I'm talking about harmony in general, his use of dissonances and modal chords. It was never done before him in popular music. It was done in jazz and classical music, but if you look at it that way then everything outside the rhythmic realm was already done in classical music, except for some harmonic solutions in free jazz.

Anyway you can't nail one big thing where he was innovative, but it was his whole pack of ideas and approaches which were incredibly innovative. Innovation is only an original mixture of already done things.
For instance take his use of the drum in When Doves Cry: the drum fills up the space where the bass usually is. This is innovation, nothing like that was ever heard before and if you listen to that song today it still goes beyond definition.



Well that depends on your view of popular music. I think there is no other musician who comes close to his technical prowess in popular music, mostly because it's very easy to play it and there are very few pop musicians who are also very gifted instrumentalists. There certainly aren't any who are both incredible composers and great instrumentalists. Hendrix for instance can't touch Prince as a composer, although he's a better guitarist obviously.



All geniuses do that. When Einstein came up with his first relativity theory, he took his start from the works of Minkowsky and Maxwell. In the general relativity theory, he used ideas which were already explored by mathematicians in the 1800s (non-euclidean geometries for instance), but nobody had thought to apply them to physics.

That's what geniuses do. There's a quote by I don't know who which comes useful here:
"Talent hits a target nobody else can hit, genius hits a target nobody else can see".
[Edited 11/1/08 9:06am]

In a word.....

YES.

Nope.

prince is innovator because like phil spector created his sound
called "wall of sound"
prince created his own wall of sounds by producing his songs in a very unconvetional way where drum track is upfront insted of being in the backing of the track.

that way prince layed a foundation for a lot of today music and music producers.
many people don't realise this yet but someday it all be crystal clear

He will be, if he isn't it will be a tragedy.


To me he is a perfect package.

Quote:
But I'm not talking about vocal harmonics. I'm talking about harmony in general, his use of dissonances and modal chords. It was never done before him in popular music. It was done in jazz and classical music, but if you look at it that way then everything outside the rhythmic realm was already done in classical music, except for some harmonic solutions in free jazz.

Reaction:
I partially agree with you on that view. Princes songs in the eighties often would sound betrayingly 'simple' on the surface, but when you digged deeper he was using all kind of strange dissonaces, chord changes etc that were more commingly used by classical/jazz/avantgarde musicians and maybe someone like Frank Zappa, but not common among 'pop musicians'.

But i disagree with you when it comes to the subject of harmonic 'depth', Prince was at his best and most innovative when he wasnt using layer upon layer (like he did on the symbol album), but when he stripped down his music to the most essential elements, twisting and turning certain parts of the arrangement (ommitting bass lines, using synths in the role of guitars, throwing very short and busy jazz-rock like bridges in the mix etc) and creating something new and fresh with it. Think about songs like Automatic, When doves cry, Paisley Park, Tambourine, Kiss, New Position, Sign of the Times and If i was your girlfriend.

Another striking aspect of his music, especially in the mid-and late eighties was that he sorta was offering the listener 'the skeletons' and the listener could make up the rest of the arrangement in his or her mind. You could especially witness that on the Sign of the Times album, but even the more 'elaborate' music on Parade had a certain sketchiness, that made it possible for you as listener to 'complete' the listening experience in your own mind.

A third and final aspect, a very influential one, IMO is that he really did take care of how his music SOUNDED. In a lot of pop-music from the eighties the focus was on the melodies and trying to reach a certain catchieness with nose, but the instrumentation was often ignored, leading to nowadays very dated and cheesy sounding drums, synths etc.
Prince tried to make the instrumentation sound interesting and creative too. First with his intruigingly programmed linn drums, later by playing around with psychedelic elements, orchestra (the Clare Fisher collaboration) and jazz-elements (Lovesexy, The Black album) and in general, by the sound of the synths and the often layered vocal harmonies.
Prince was really creative and caring when it came to every aspect of the music he delivered, not only the melodies and vocals, and showed you can make surprising choices in your arrangements, with becoming TOO experimental for its own good.
This 'smart pop' doctrine you can hear echoing in the music of people as diverse as Karl Wallinger (World Party), The Neptunes, Timbaland, Beck, Nelly Furtado, to name a few.

An Innovator??


I read a quote about Prince, to the effect that "he was the first person to use the studio as an instrument", what does this mean?

yes innovator

At my university we were studying his impact on popular music and culture back in 1999-2000.

Well, there are no Prince courses as I'm aware of, haha, but he is being studied, as previous comments have pointed out... It always depends on students' and teachers' interests.

I haven't taken any music classes, but I have written/talked about him on a couple of occasions since he is more than PERFECT for so many subjects. Music, film, internet, gender, ethnicity, identity, and so on... A lot of the things he does and has done are more complicated, interesting and smarter than he's probably aware of.

We were once talking about how just our names control and label us. Prince's "name-change" and symbol came automatically to mind. Even if he maybe only did it because of Warner Bros you can make it into something much bigger and interesting...
It's just really grateful to have Prince as a subject

I doubt it.