Prince will not be understood or appreciated in our lifetimes. Whether he'll be understood in any other lifetime or by any carbon-based lifeform is anyone's guess, too, but the man's got only himself to blame for that. Prince (yes, that's his real name) is a diminutive Minneapolis-born black gentleman who dances like James Brown, plays guitar like Jimi Hendrix, sings like Eddie Kendricks, dresses like Brooks Brothers' and Divine's illegitimate love child, allegedly plays some mean hoops, definitely plays some mean ladies, and probably has more raw musical talent that 99% of the people reviewed on this website.

The man has gone from being a teenage phenom, the heir apparent to Stevie Wonder's one-man-bandism, to a freakadelic sex-and-punk-funk alien freak, to a bizarre and self-indulgent superstar on par with Michael Jackson, to a bizarre and self-indulgent weirdo far beyond Michael Jackson's worst nightmare, to a cult-artist who looks like the paragon of normal human behavior compared to the Takishi Miike blood-spattered horrorshow that is Michael Jackson in the 00's. All the while, the man's been a regular material generating machine, right or wrong, churning out new albums with the regularity of a new fall television season and with about as good of a batting average.

Apparently, despite all the rich fop trappings, Prince lives and breathes for his Paisley Park home studio, locking himself away for days with nothing but his synthesizers and digital recorders for company. He'd be considered a typical studio recluse weirdo except for the fact that he plays some of the most entertaining, energetic, and tight live shows ever put forth in the name of pop music, pulling on an extroverted stage persona that is not one Tina Yothers similar to the spineless lilting violet one he puts on for interviews or normal everyday activity.

Seeing Prince in concert is like watching the history of black music unfold before your very eyes - one second he's two-stepping and mashed-potatoing to a bouncy, elastic disco groove, the next he's crooning a bloody-heart ballad with all the mushy grandeur of a Marvin Gaye performance, then he's turning aerial backflips on his knockoff Tele, channeling Eddie Hazel by way of Ernie Isley by way of Eddie Van Halen. The thing is, part of what makes Prince Prince is that whatever he plays, it sounds like him.

The man has a definite style, even when he's incorporating outside influences into his cosmic funk soup he still manages to follow his Prince Credo and make a song liquid, funky, and somewhat obscene.

The main problem with Prince's career is that he did all of his groundbreaking surprisingly early on - his For You, Prince, and Dirty Mind albums demolished more soul and R&B stereotypes than any album since Stand! It's no surprise that these were also the records he wrote, performed, and produced almost exclusively by himself.

In his earliest incarnation, Prince was a teenaged studio wiz with little or no stage experience, but audience demand forced him to band together with some old pals and local musicians to form the Revolution, his crack backing band that was to follow him through the late-80's. The Revolution, like most of Prince's bands, was an awesome force to behold live, a bullet-tight funk unit full of interesting players, many of whom could have (and most, in fact, did) spun off into notable solo careers.

His success was somewhat long in coming, but it was massive - Prince, along with Michael Jackson, Madonna, and maybe Bruce Springsteen, were the pop artists of the mid-80s, at least in the United States. Like Jackson, Prince helped break black artists onto the hitherto negrophobic MTV, like Madonna he made a (poorly advised, it turns out) attempt to break into acting, and like Bruce Springsteen he...umm...also has a functioning penis. But I think Prince's is tattooed with paisley squiggles and peace signs and shit.

Prince had been stalking major success for more than 6 years by the time Purple Rain made him the biggest thing since naked boobies, but it wasn't long before 'normal people' put two and two together and realised Prince wasn't, and never was gonna be, a populist, kid-friendly, mother-approved, desexualized, Pepsi-shilling pop-product-machine like Michael Jackson.

He was bizarre, given to lyrics about dirty sex with his sister and nuclear armageddon, moved like a runwaymodelsexmachineonavaselinefloor, and generally seemed like a horny little bastard that you wouldn't leave your kids with. Hell, Tipper Gore's PMRC record censorship witch hunt machine was dreamt up after the ol' Tipster found her junior-high school aged daughter listening to Prince's 'Darling Nikki', a song which mentions 'masturbating with a magazine'. Pretty shocking to former Deadhead Tipper, who apparently never listened to all the Grateful Dead songs about VD-infected prostitutes ('Scarlet Magnolias'), backstage groupies ('Sugar Magnolias'), or men so desperate for pussy they're forced to murder a jewelry store clerk ('Dupree's Diamond Blues').

Anyway, before 1986 was up, the backlash was on, and Prince had to release his biggest artistic statement yet (Sign O the Times) just to keep the torches and pitchforks at bay.

While his public persona had its ups and downs, Prince's control over his artistic direction never seemed to waver. He retained a lot of his loner personality since then, and has never let his grip slip so much as to allow his band to steal much of the spotlight away from the main attraction (as soon as Revolution members Wendy and Lisa's onstage lesbian act got to be a bit too popular in the mid-80's, Prince showed them the door).

As far back as the mid-80's, and definitely as of the 1990's, Prince's golden touch has been sporadic at best. His second and third films tanked faster than a new Tara Reid/Rob Schneider courtroom melodrama, and the white retard jock contingent of his fanbase crawled back under their respective rocks and discovered Bon Jovi. His string of massive hit chart singles didn't quite dry up, though, and he had considerable sucesses through 1991's Diamonds and Pearls, but as the man changed his name to an ornate flower hanger (aka , pronounced as 'W.Axl Rose') in 1993 people began to fall off the bandwagon in earnest. His ongoing feud with Warner Brothers distracted him and caused him to denounce his past, going so far as to declare Prince 'dead' on the 1995 contractual obligation album Come.

Many of his other efforts around this time felt like obligations or toss offs as well. Though he had finished open warfare with WB as of 1997's three-CD Emancipation, by the late 90's, Prince was nothing more than a cult artist. He was married, looked great, his band (the New Power Generation) was spectacular, but his success never quite returned. He became a Jehovah's Witness a few years back (indicating that, yes, sometimes he does open the door to his house), and has reformed his previously perverso Madonna/Whore worldview somewhat, and caught a bit of fire with the success of his Musicology tour and (though somewhat sneakily) album in 2004.

He's now busily sorting through stacks of archive releases to shill on a regular basis through his website, and releasing a forgettable new album every two years or so, but his live shows are still required attendance for anyone who cares anything about dance, music, sex, or romance.

I want to make it clear here that while I'm going to probably slam 80% of Prince's albums as being not up to his standard, especially 90's and afterwards, I still consider the man to be an awesome talent and some of his work to be the best of the last 25 years. He just hasn't ever had anyone to bounce his ideas off of and therefore considers just about any old thing to be suitable for release.

I'd also like it if he shut up and played his guitar a little more...his soloing on the performance of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' at the Rock and Roll Half of Fame ceremony a couple of years back has to rank as one of my favorite pieces of axe-work I've seen recently.

Once a poster-boy example of the New Age, Prince is now oddly in the position of representing one of the few remaining links with old-school musicianship in pop music. You can be sure that whatever Prince is singing, good or bad, came out of him without too much interference from samplers, ProTools, or other such studio crutches. And that's what's scary about him, too

Interesting read...

Alright, now I KNOW I'm being Punk'd!
[Edited 1/25/09 19:31pm]

mrwiggles said:

who wrote that article?

ReginaCarman said:

The one and only Capn Marvel. You'll definitely find some of it disgusting but he is hilarious.

http://www.capnmusic.org/princepub.htm