I realized today that most of his music sounds very current,LETS GO CRAZY is a perfect example,if it came out today it could still be a hit and its almost 30 years old. I can only name a few that sound old,like the FOR U album and the unreleased track No call U.

the whole 1999 album through headphones is amazing

dreamshaman32 said:

that reminds me,Delicious sounds 80s. Wasnt it used in a Tom Cruise or Cheech and chong movie? and Prince's music sounds better on headphones 4 sum reason.

i dunno - we were pushing she's always in my hair, extended Erotic City and KISS - burning up the highway last night... groove slipped right into our frame.. lol

1st off, I love being able to tell what year periods music was released.

I love 60's 70's 80's music:jazz, disco, rock, soul

To me the minneapolis sound is ageless that's Jessie Johnson and other sounds too, including music from Janet Jackson:Control

I heard Sheila E's 2 Sexy(Glamorous Life B side) for the 1st time this week and I've been rocking it in the car with the windows down all week.

There is a lot of Prince music (especially from 1999 & Purple Rain) that is so electric that I don't think we've caught up too the time frame yet.

I can go back to his first album and say it hasn't 'aged'
Even though we can feel the time it was made, if your familiar with sounds from the late 70's

songs like Let's Work, Do Me Baby,
Lady Cab Driver, Let's Pretend We're Married, How Come U Don't Call Me
the Beautiful Ones, Computer Blue, When Doves Cry, I Would Die 4 U, Purple Rain, Erotic City, Another Lonely Christmas, God
Condition of the Heart, America, Tamborine She's Always In My Hair, Girl
music from Parade, Dream Factory, Sign o the Times has a very mature and still maturing timeless feel to them, world music fusion almost.

dance4me3121 said:

I don't think songs like No Call U feel aged to me because Prince has always and still does incorporate that 50's rock n roll vibe.

Which is what No Call U, She's Always in My Hair & the Beautiful Ones(the piano mainly) Let's Go Crazy, Guitar, Horny Toad, Jack U Off, Play in the Sunshine, Girl o My Dreams are built on

I have never understood the word "aged" and have always thought it was a rediculous term since all music by all artists sound like the decade it was recorded in. Every decade had a complete style change in music (sometimes twice in one decade) until the 1990s came along. There hasn't been a style change at all (in R&B) since the early to mid 1990s and the stuff today sounds just like the stuff during that era. That's probably why people like to say something sounds "dated" or "aged" since it sounds nothing like the music of the 1990s or 2000s. They have become so used to today's sound that they forget how long today's sound has been in style and don't realize that it's not natural for a style to stay around this long unless record labels and radio stations are manipulating it to stay in style. I never used terms like "aged" or "dated" because that would be just accepting that today's sound is going to stay the same forever and that it is natural for it to stay the same. I rebel against today's sound and will continue to until a style change comes.

To answer your question, all of Prince's stuff sounds "aged" compared to today's music except for some of the stuff that he recorded in the 1990s and today that has rap and shit hop elements in it. If his songs are funky in even the slightest way, then they are "aged" because funk doesn't exist anymore. "Aged" is a good thing, not a bad thing. If a song doesn't sound "aged", then it sounds like shit.

OldFriends you are right about:
Guitar, Horny Toad, Jack U Off, Play in the Sunshine, Girl o My Dreams

but what does Lets go Crazy,
Shes always in my hair and the Beautiful ones got to do with 50's rock

All of it. That's how time works.

1980-1988 sounds fresh and timeless to me.

thedance said:

Exactly. Anything up through Lovesexy is still, overall, fresh and pungent like a good cheese. You go and listen to something like NewPowerSoul (and I am okay with that album in general), or the stuff from NPGMC 2001, etc...it sounds dated. It's "trendy". Of course he also started to get this flat, dry sound to his music around NPS and beyond. Rave was a bit "wetter" in some regards, but overall his music was still dry and flat like a cracker. And we all know when crackers are left out too long, they go stale.

People go back to the 80's over and over because he was MAKING the trends, he was blazing new ground. Then he started just being part of the music scene when the 90's hit. (That's not to dismiss his treasures like TGE, Come, Exodus, Chaos). In the 80's, we had never heard something like "Erotic City", or "Pop Life", or especially "When Doves Cry"....and it's not even because or the lack of bass. It was just DIFFERENT. That different still stands out today.

thebanishedone said:

Sorry, I thought I explained
I didn't
Let's Go Crazy She's Alwasy in MY Hair & the Beautiful Ones has elements of that 50's rock not as prominent as the others I mentioned

you hear it in Let's Go Crazy in different places, one place is the synth sound durin the extended version right before Prince yells and get's on the piano
I forget the term for that sound but it is very prominent in 50's music/rock

She's Always In My Hair & the Beautiful Ones it's mostly in the style and carried by the piano playing. That style of playing-piano is very visible in 50's rock/music

Broken from 4 U/Prince outtakes is another
[Edited 10/7/09 11:13am]

theDance & Ernestsewell
U 2 both hit it square on the head

It's why I can listen to music from those periods and still seem to hear something I never heard before, and even though certain album music I can tell is 'from the 80's' most of the music has a very unique timeless sound to it

music especially from the Parade(Dream Factory) era and a good amount of the Purple Rain era

ernestsewell said:

I agree with some things others have said here.

He was at his best when he was creating/inventing trends, instead of chasing them. And that happened most of all in between 1980 and 1987 (Dirty Mind unto Sign of the Times).
Sure, some of the synth sounds or beats he used can sound a bit 'dated' now, but in general his typical use of a mixture of several styles within a song, and also the way he arranged his material in that period, resulted in original AND often timeless sounding material.
What 'helped' him there is that he often used to mix STYLES of music that are rather 'archetypical': with that I mean basic-styles (like fifties rock and roll, elementary blues, traditional R&B / soul, the 'perfect pop' of the sixties, big band jazz) of pop music that are used untill this day by musicians to create their music. Styles that have a certain timelessness.

Things did change however when he started to incorporate elements of more 'modern' styles that are characterized by a change in sound every few years or so: Hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronic dance music.
Every other year/month/week another 'sound' to be considered 'hip' within these genres.
What has always 'fascinated' me is that Prince sounded years ahead of most other musicians with his 'genrebending' in the eighties, but when he did start to incorporate those 'contemporary' styles in the nineties, he was often sounding dated compared to other artists trying out those styles.

As early as on Lovesexy and the Batman album he did start to incorporate 'house'-like dancebeats in his music, some of them sounding rather dated now. But the rest of his multi-styled, cleverly arranged music on those albums offers quite some 'compensation'.
On Graffiti Bridge he was using New Jack Swing-elements on several songs, a shortliven style that was very popular in the charts around that period. And when you listen to the album nowadays you can clearly hear: this is an album from the early nineties.
But its really on Diamonds and Pearls and The Symbol album, that he is more and more sounding like someone following the trends / trying to reach out to the young, 'hip' mainstreampublic, rather then taking part in the forefront of creative musical pioneers: the raps by the likes of Tony M and the music of a song like Jughead, sound like a throwback to what was above the charts a few years before (MC Hammer), a song like Melt with You sounds like the type of house-music that was popular in 1989 and did allready sound dated at the time of the release of the Symbol album.
I agree with some things others have said here.

He was at his best when he was creating/inventing trends, instead of chasing them. And that happened most of all in between 1980 and 1987 (Dirty Mind unto Sign of the Times).
Sure, some of the synth sounds or beats he used can sound a bit 'dated' now, but in general his typical use of a mixture of several styles within a song, and also the way he arranged his material in that period, resulted in original AND often timeless sounding material.
What 'helped' him there is that he often used to mix STYLES of music that are rather 'archetypical': with that I mean basic-styles (like fifties rock and roll, elementary blues, traditional R&B / soul, the 'perfect pop' of the sixties, big band jazz) of pop music that are used untill this day by musicians to create their music. Styles that have a certain timelessness.

Things did change however when he started to incorporate elements of more 'modern' styles that are characterized by a change in sound every few years or so: Hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronic dance music.
Every other year/month/week another 'sound' to be considered 'hip' within these genres.
What has always 'fascinated' me is that Prince sounded years ahead of most other musicians with his 'genrebending' in the eighties, but when he did start to incorporate those 'contemporary' styles in the nineties, he was often sounding dated compared to other artists trying out those styles.

As early as on Lovesexy and the Batman album he did start to incorporate 'house'-like dancebeats in his music, some of them sounding rather dated now. But the rest of his multi-styled, cleverly arranged music on those albums offers quite some 'compensation'.
On Graffiti Bridge he was using New Jack Swing-elements on several songs, a shortliven style that was very popular in the charts around that period. And when you listen to the album nowadays you can clearly hear: this is an album from the early nineties.
But its really on Diamonds and Pearls and The Symbol album, that he is more and more sounding like someone following the trends / trying to reach out to the young, 'hip' mainstreampublic, rather then taking part in the forefront of creative musical pioneers: the raps by the likes of Tony M and the music of a song like Jughead, sound like a throwback to what was above the charts a few years before (MC Hammer), a song like Melt with You sounds like the type of house-music that was popular in 1989 and did allready sound dated at the time of the release of the Symbol album.

Since then (1993) it seems like Prince has problems focussing on what kind of artist he should / wants to be: going for the mainstream succes, and trying to 'copy' what is popular in the charts? OR playing the music he likes to play himself, and not caring too much about if its hip or so?.
IMO Examples of the first are many of those mid-tempo, often generic and 'plastic' sounding R&B songs on Emancipation (Somebody, Somebody, Big White Mansion, to name a few), New Power Soul, Rave (The greatest romance), Mr Goodnight / Future Baby Mama on Planet Earth, 3121 (Beautifull, loved and blessed, Incense and Candles) and several songs on the MPLSound-album (who is he trying to 'compete' with? The Black Eyed Peas?). These are often the kind of songs that are allready sounding dated.
In the second category I put an album like Chaos and Disorder (a loose collection of rock-songs, which sound like they were recorded live in a few days), The Vault (a loose collection of tradiotional R&B, jazz and blues-songs, which sound like they were recorded in a few days), The Rainbow Children (One of my less favourite Prince-albums, and also quite dated sounding in its use of seventies 'jazz-rock' influences, but it also sounds like the kind of album he wanted to make at that moment, not giving a shit about commercial succes) and Lotusflower (a sort of toned-down version of The Rainbow Children, highly 'unhip').
Allthough i dont hear a lot of artistic / creative development in those albums from the second category (at least, not as much as i hoped for...lol), I feel they are closer to who he is as an artist at this moment, then those often forced and DATED sounding attempts in the first category.

Mars23 said:

Basically. Even the stuff that sounds "fresh" you can tell that it was done in the 70's, 80's or 90's. That's not a bad thing at all, especially if the music was hot and the majority of his music was/is.

vainandy said:

I think the idea of music "aging" is quite simple: Can it stand the test of time? Does it still move you and sound as great years later as it did the first time it dripped into your aural cavity? Songs like "Peaches" from The Presidents Of the United States of America now sounds absolutely ridiculous, whereas back then, people were all over it. Same with "Lump". Endless examples of songs that were fun at the time, but even five years later, people couldn't care less about them, and it puts a bad taste in their mouth. Like a good cheese, or wine, aging enhances the flavor of a good song. We can still hear Prince's swagger, his machismo, his ego, his pomp and circumstance in his music from the 80's. We can hear him having a good amount of braggadocio in stuff like "Automatic". We can hear him pleading and begging in "The Beautiful Ones". We can hear his indecision and emotional conflict in "Strange Relationship". We can hear the fucking in "Let's Work". We can hear the oral sex in "Do Me, Baby" (whereas 10 years later he was literally putting the sounds of oral sex on record in "Come").

Nowadays, we can hear him grasping at straws. Perhaps Prince's aversion to acknowledging age, or aging, or numbers has stunted his own growth as a musician and songwriter in some regards. He wants to stay young and "hopefully look this way", yet the more he tries to stay young, the older he sounds.

the only reason why fans bash P
on this site
is only because his music have
very wide appeal to
all kinds of music lovers.

But Prince have one nice ability
even if he do a
bad album there is at least one

Stand out song that will make you come back for more.
you can love him or hate him but that's the fact

to be honest i think alot of his music has aged

but i think most of the songs on Dirty Mind Parade and most of his 90s music still sound modern

thebanishedone said:

That's a good post!

dance4me3121 said:

Some of the boots are "dated" but a lot of P's music will stand the test of time. His music seems timeless to me. It feels that way to say the least.

i dont think prince's current stuff sounds old.lotusflow3r has grown on me a lot this year.its different in parts and outclasses all the processed rubbish we are used too quite easily.chocolate box,crimson and clover and the list goes on.if prince had went with a major label this year lotusflow3r would have done well.