Harlepolis said:

you seriously cannot compare jazz fusion with Hip Hop. I'll argue Hip Hop isn't music because the concerts are just guys with turntables and mics, No musicians. What makes MILLIONS flock to the genre is the foundation it's set on. Perfect example... MC Hammer "Can't Touch This".. this song sold millions. But without Rick's sample what have you got?
[Edited 12/26/09 21:42pm]

NONSENSE said:

I didn't, I brought it up to make a point.

You say its not music because its concerts use turntables,,,,,what about bands like The Roots who happen to be ALL musicians? And Sa-Ra and Jay-Z(who recently relied on musician ensembles to carry him live)? I'm sure there're many examples that escape me right now.

For your use of MC Hammer as an example, I'll give you Laurn Hill's "Doo Wop(That Thing)", a RAP SONG that consists of harmonies, melodies and musicianship,,,,sample free and it sold millions.

I don't know, it just seems to me that you guys are quick to throw rap music under the bus without giving it an open minded listen. You might say you don't like it, but to say that its not music is just absurd.

Harlepolis said:

I don't think anyone is trying to throw it under a bus, yet I think what is trying to maintain is that it takes much less talent to make it in that field. If you go back and read my post, I give almost no slack to any bands out now, black or white, live or digital. It seems people have lost almost all sense of demanding good consumer music.

There are no Hendrix's these days, no M J's, and I believe that the way the market is set up, we may have seen the last of those calibur of performers.

babynoz said:

One of the best threads in years with some damn good points being made.

You win the grand prize because that is why this shit is forced on people.

Where is the new Madonna,Micheal Jackson, and Prince that will take music to the next level? Hip-Hop and rap when done in it's purest state is great but the genre is killing off creative talent because the "record biz" people don't want to pay people.

The original premise is just too short sighted and poorly thought out to really dwell on.

What I don't see in any of the complaints is any blame placed on the consumer. The recording industry delivers what sells, if people didn't buy the shit, they would move on to something else.

Do you think any recording exec wants do do business with a moron like Lil Wayne? They do it because people will lap it up.

In the early days of rap and even now how were people getting discovered? Mix tapes. No record execs were out there selling out of their trunk, forcing people to buy the tapes. The record execs saw that it sold and took the natural step any industry would take. Pump out what the people want to buy.

Sorry, but I can't read through all this. So if my point has been made, excuse my redundancy...

You might want to rethink that peterv, since it's so rare to get an interesting topic going in this forum.

The author gives valid examples. But they (the examples) do nothing to support the thesis of his initial statement. In actuality, Prince did more for "black" music in a sense that he reminded (and continues to remind) folks that black artists are (more than 50%) responsible for R&R, which is derived from R&B, but in the mainstream.,,

Therefore, put me down for an: I disagree.

I see what you mean. I had to read over it more than once to figure out what the author was getting at. As I understand it, the point he was trying to make, (albeit poorly made), is that as Prince's method succeeded, it opened the door to inferior elements within the industry to do the same. He seems to feel that Prince, moreso than any other figure of "his time", is responsible for that.

But under closer scrutiny, the argument doesn't hold together well, because by the same token, it could be argued that Prince has actually done far more good than whatever inadvertent harm or unintended consequences came about with regard to his impact on music in general and black music in particular.

For example, we could cite his mastery at blending genres, the consistently high quality of his live performances, his leadership in owning and marketing his own work, (even considering a few missteps along the way), and his work ethic among other things.

All things considered, I reached the same conclusion you did even though the article made a couple of interesting points.

muleFunk said:

Exactly. Many people are more influenced by clever marketing than they care to admit...it's a factor that can't be discounted. The constant bombardment of one type of message and the simultaneous suppression of others has an effect in everything from entertainment to politics, etc. Media and marketing people have known this for a long time and they make good use of it, especially in this age of media conglomerates.
They are creating and selling a brand and the main goal is not to nurture creativity or to invest in diversity. They use a forumula to create a cost effective business model that minimizes overhead and maximizes profit. Sadly, creating actual art is only incidental in the procedure.

"Agree/Disagree" what the hell am I thinking?

Anyway I found this post to be very intersting, it was shared to me by a fellow org pal(who posts in Okayplayer, where he found it).

Disregard it if its a repost.

First off most people on here know I think Prince is one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years. I can't think of anyone that has made as many songs that I have enjoyed as much as I have his. If I listed my top 10 concerts ever, the 6 Prince shows I've seen would all be there. That said ..... Prince was NOT good for black music people.

I think a lot of what made him great also made him destructive. His creativity and confidence turned him into a sort of musical demigod. He didn't need a band to create and record with because in his mind nobody could play his music as well as he could. He didn't use background singers for the most part for the same reason. Prince was the show, standing above all others and he wanted to make sure you didn't forget that. Now of course Prince wasn't the first artist to feel this way. But he was the first that had the technology to isolate himself creatively the way he did. When you have the talent and ideas Prince did at the time, this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is, it inspired less creative and original people to follow in his footsteps. The end result was a parade of mediocre singer/songwriter/producer wannabes that would have been much better severed (creatively) being part of a larger collective. Just because you can make music by yourself doesn't mean you should. Of course existing bands also took note of what Prince was doing. They started cutting the "fat" and in doing so, knocked over the first domino in death of the black band.

As I said, Prince wasn't the first artist to have an ego. But he was the first to go to the lengths he did to keep from being shown up. One need to look no further than his first two side projects ... The Time and Vanity 6.... for prove of his obsessive narcissism.

Flyte Tyme by everyone's account was the baddest band in Minneapolis. So what did Prince do when he signed them? Fired their lead singer (Alexander O'Neal) and replaced them with his drummer friend Morris Day. The fact Morris couldn't sing meant nothing to Prince. As a matter of fact in his mind this was a good thing. This meant one less threat to Prince. But even this wasn't enough for him. Prince went into the studio and recorded almost all (if not all, there are various opinions on this) the music and background vocals for the first Time album. Think about this for a minute. You sign a band and then record an album under their name with your friend who you made lead singer. But that didn't matter to P. He was selling an alternate image of himself with the group. He wasn't producing in a way that would bring out the creativity in his artist, he was acting as a puppet master with his hand guiding every sight and sound associate with them. They weren't artist, they were props. Never was this truer than with his next project Vanity 6. Never before in black music history had there been a group that had this much style over substance. None of the girls could sing ...not even in a serviceable way really ... play any instruments or even dance. With Vanity Prince created the video chick before the video era even really kicked off. Once again, Prince was the star and his project was his window dressing. With Vanity 6 Prince proved you could market and sell records even though the "artist" had little to no talent. It would be foolish to think the industry didn't take note of this. This knowledge along with the emergence of the music video formed a powerful one two punch that marginalized vocal talent.

The interesting thing in all of this is how Prince slowly reverted back to more "traditional" ways as his creative tank started to run dry. Now days he loves to talk about "real music" and sing the praises of the funk and jazz stars of the past. He basks in the spotlight as the symbol of a by gone era. The last of his kind. And once again Prince is the show. And once again, Prince got exactly what he wanted.

Well?
[Edited 12/25/09 16:10pm]

Harlepolis said:

I remember reading this one....It was an insightful post then and it's an insightful post now.....But of course, judging from some of the comments, the posts' underlining point has been lost on most of Org nation....Which isn't a surprise...

murph said:

How so? Just wondering, did you read all the posts to come to that conclusion? There's some very good points being made here regarding the article. Can you be more specific with your comment?
[Edited 12/27/09 9:36am]

Okay, my take:

First off, let's get a couple of things straight for you politically corrected social police - R&B is black music. Yes, it is. Don't even bother throwing up a couple of names of white artists that have had minor hit records doing R&B music. For the most part, IT IS BLACK MUSIC. It is referred to as black music by black people. Why? Because its what a great majority of black people listen to. How do I know? Because I can say black music in a room full of black people at any given time and they will know exactly what I am talking about. You can play semantics all day long and bitch and whine about the terms but it is what it is and there's nothing any non-black person can do to change it, so don't waste your time trying to bully people into saying what you want them to because I for one, will not. Black folks know what black music is. If you don't - tough. That's why the OP made that statement on Okayplayer and not Prince.org - because he/she was addressing a specific group of forumers.
Now, onto the Prince thing...
I agree. Prince helped usher in the wave of no-talents that rule the charts right now. Prince by way of Warner Brothers, successfully promoted the idea of the one man band to the world, but more specifically to black radio - because that's where his initial audience was pre-Purple Rain.
There have always been multi-instrumentalists. That goes without saying. What happened with Prince was part timing and part promotion. Back when MJ blew up the charts with Thriller, this was also during the earlier years of the label wars when whoever had the most popular artists had the biggest numbers. Who was more popular was much more in the hands of the fans back then than it is now. WB needed to one-up the MJ craze, so they went through their roster and used Prince as their label savior. They had been pushing Prince as this all-in-one musician who does everything by himself and his musicians in his camp were there for show. We know this was not the whole truth but at the time Prince always played the mysterious card, so people outside of the circle stayed confused. Prince also pushed the use of technology and synths.
Where the timing comes in: It just so happened that sequencers became advanced and usable enough to make music during the time Prince was rising to the top. Prince used sequencers extensively. He became one of the biggest artists in the country, thus popularizing the use of sequencers. Technology advanced and artists who were following Prince's style of production (as artists often did when there was one very popular artist in style at the moment) were all on that one-man-band kick and this really accelerated the death of black bands. LABELS caught on and fed this course of action because they could get away with paying less people. It was also during this era that the key member clauses started to appear in every record contract with bands. This was the death of big bands and since Prince had already helped make synth horns popular, they were "out of style" and thus horn players were out of work in R&B music. Synths, on the other hand, because bigger than ever. This was the beginning of the producer's era in R&B music. While rock bands remained in a hair metal phase, R&B became more of a one-man-runs-the-show situation. This was a beautiful thing to record labels because they now had to dish out less money to their R&B acts for music production. That can be directly attributed to the "blueprint" that Prince laid out and WB's promotion of him as a do-it-all-yourself artist.
So, yeah - Prince helped big time.
Rap was in a development stage and hadn't yet made an impact, so all of this happened beforehand.
His actions definitely helped pave the way for the demise of the black band.
Even though he himself always had a band, they promoted him as the "source of all" and that made people believe that no matter what they saw, it was all him.

I'm done.

Mtv and Hip Hop are responsible for the decline in good music. Mtv killed a lot of artist careers because image became more important than music. And Hip Hop definitely destroyed R&B. With sampling, cheap production, and very little talent it's amazing how this industry grew the past 20 years.

Interesting take on the 'black music' subject.

Is it ok then for someone who talks in an urban vernacular (politically correct term folks ) as "talking black"?

I sometimes still say that, but I know it's probably offensive to some folks. But for me, everybody knows what 'talking black' means even if they claim they don't. It's sort of like me saying, "talking Asian"...folks can say they don't know what that means, but bitch please...we've all seen A Christmas Story.

What's your take on "talking black" and other expressions like that?

So what that initial post was saying is that Prince, unlike MJ was the man that ushered in a unsegregated color blind era of music that knew no boundaries, incorporating white and black in his sound and band.
If that's the case, that's a not a bad thing.
The perceived lack of talent of other artists has nothing to do with Prince.

Me on the other hand, as much as I love Prince, would argue that MJ had a far bigger impact on the state of "Black" music simply by the magnitude of his prominence on all music across the globe. heck even Prince took cues from MJ in the 90's

..Cute theory, but goofy in every respect.
[Edited 12/27/09 10:36am]

So what that initial post was saying is that Prince, unlike MJ was the man that ushered in a unsegregated color blind era of music that knew no boundaries, incorporating white and black in his sound and band.
If that's the case, that's a not a bad thing.
[Edited 12/27/09 10:36am]

violetblues said:

That would be all well and good if this^^^was the original post's underlining point...Unfortunately, it wasn't...

Imago said:

Well, why don't you walk into room full of black men, say that and find out?[
I promise, you'll get an answer.

Imago said:

Black people didn't coin the phrases "talking black" nor "black music" - whites did. Rock and roll used to be referred to as race music by whites. So, black people took the term "black music (formerly n*gger music) and put a positive spin on it. The term "talking black" is from a different era and has different connotations.
But, let's stay on topic, please.

"Agree/Disagree" what the hell am I thinking?

Anyway I found this post to be very intersting, it was shared to me by a fellow org pal(who posts in Okayplayer, where he found it).

Disregard it if its a repost.

First off most people on here know I think Prince is one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years. I can't think of anyone that has made as many songs that I have enjoyed as much as I have his. If I listed my top 10 concerts ever, the 6 Prince shows I've seen would all be there. That said ..... Prince was NOT good for black music people.

I think a lot of what made him great also made him destructive. His creativity and confidence turned him into a sort of musical demigod. He didn't need a band to create and record with because in his mind nobody could play his music as well as he could. He didn't use background singers for the most part for the same reason. Prince was the show, standing above all others and he wanted to make sure you didn't forget that. Now of course Prince wasn't the first artist to feel this way. But he was the first that had the technology to isolate himself creatively the way he did. When you have the talent and ideas Prince did at the time, this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is, it inspired less creative and original people to follow in his footsteps. The end result was a parade of mediocre singer/songwriter/producer wannabes that would have been much better severed (creatively) being part of a larger collective. Just because you can make music by yourself doesn't mean you should. Of course existing bands also took note of what Prince was doing. They started cutting the "fat" and in doing so, knocked over the first domino in death of the black band.

As I said, Prince wasn't the first artist to have an ego. But he was the first to go to the lengths he did to keep from being shown up. One need to look no further than his first two side projects ... The Time and Vanity 6.... for prove of his obsessive narcissism.

Flyte Tyme by everyone's account was the baddest band in Minneapolis. So what did Prince do when he signed them? Fired their lead singer (Alexander O'Neal) and replaced them with his drummer friend Morris Day. The fact Morris couldn't sing meant nothing to Prince. As a matter of fact in his mind this was a good thing. This meant one less threat to Prince. But even this wasn't enough for him. Prince went into the studio and recorded almost all (if not all, there are various opinions on this) the music and background vocals for the first Time album. Think about this for a minute. You sign a band and then record an album under their name with your friend who you made lead singer. But that didn't matter to P. He was selling an alternate image of himself with the group. He wasn't producing in a way that would bring out the creativity in his artist, he was acting as a puppet master with his hand guiding every sight and sound associate with them. They weren't artist, they were props. Never was this truer than with his next project Vanity 6. Never before in black music history had there been a group that had this much style over substance. None of the girls could sing ...not even in a serviceable way really ... play any instruments or even dance. With Vanity Prince created the video chick before the video era even really kicked off. Once again, Prince was the star and his project was his window dressing. With Vanity 6 Prince proved you could market and sell records even though the "artist" had little to no talent. It would be foolish to think the industry didn't take note of this. This knowledge along with the emergence of the music video formed a powerful one two punch that marginalized vocal talent.

The interesting thing in all of this is how Prince slowly reverted back to more "traditional" ways as his creative tank started to run dry. Now days he loves to talk about "real music" and sing the praises of the funk and jazz stars of the past. He basks in the spotlight as the symbol of a by gone era. The last of his kind. And once again Prince is the show. And once again, Prince got exactly what he wanted.

Well?
[Edited 12/25/09 16:10pm]

2elijah said:

I read most of the comments...And there are some who truly believe that Prince didn't (unknowingly) contribute to the destruction of Black Music...These folks laid out some STRONG points (Vain being one of those folks...While I don't agree with his blind hatred for hip hop, he made some pretty interesting comments...)...

But a lot of the other comments totally missed the underlining point of the original post....That much is clear when you have folks saying that the post was alluding to Prince's musical style (the rock-funk fusion) as being the reason black music got shaky in the future, when that had nothing to do with it...

Old Pro (the original poster) spelled it out: It was Prince's ONE-MAN-BAND mantra that had other R&B artists thinking this was the way to go...Of course there were others after Prince that did the one-man-band justice (Kashif comes to mind...He really utlilized Prince's synth style and made some solid R&B)...But there were a shit load of other R&B acts that stumbled using this mindset....A lot of R&B lost a lot of its soul when it went all-Synth...But you have to keep in mind just as the post said, it wasn't Prince's fault...He was the right artist at the right time...

On the real, I like what one poster said on Okayplayer on the original thread:

"we've always alluded to it but never get in depth abt it....but Prince singelhandedly revolutionized Black music for good AND for ill...but the bad part isnt his fault....he was such a revolutionary figure that directionless, lesser talented cats couldnt help but to blindly follow and make a lot of bullshit records in the process..."

This^^^is the point that seems lost with folks....

Okay, my take:

First off, let's get a couple of things straight for you politically corrected social police - R&B is black music. Yes, it is. Don't even bother throwing up a couple of names of white artists that have had minor hit records doing R&B music. For the most part, IT IS BLACK MUSIC. It is referred to as black music by black people. Why? Because its what a great majority of black people listen to. How do I know? Because I can say black music in a room full of black people at any given time and they will know exactly what I am talking about. You can play semantics all day long and bitch and whine about the terms but it is what it is and there's nothing any non-black person can do to change it, so don't waste your time trying to bully people into saying what you want them to because I for one, will not. Black folks know what black music is. If you don't - tough. That's why the OP made that statement on Okayplayer and not Prince.org - because he/she was addressing a specific group of forumers.
Now, onto the Prince thing...
I agree. Prince helped usher in the wave of no-talents that rule the charts right now. Prince by way of Warner Brothers, successfully promoted the idea of the one man band to the world, but more specifically to black radio - because that's where his initial audience was pre-Purple Rain.
There have always been multi-instrumentalists. That goes without saying. What happened with Prince was part timing and part promotion. Back when MJ blew up the charts with Thriller, this was also during the earlier years of the label wars when whoever had the most popular artists had the biggest numbers. Who was more popular was much more in the hands of the fans back then than it is now. WB needed to one-up the MJ craze, so they went through their roster and used Prince as their label savior. They had been pushing Prince as this all-in-one musician who does everything by himself and his musicians in his camp were there for show. We know this was not the whole truth but at the time Prince always played the mysterious card, so people outside of the circle stayed confused. Prince also pushed the use of technology and synths.
Where the timing comes in: It just so happened that sequencers became advanced and usable enough to make music during the time Prince was rising to the top. Prince used sequencers extensively. He became one of the biggest artists in the country, thus popularizing the use of sequencers. Technology advanced and artists who were following Prince's style of production (as artists often did when there was one very popular artist in style at the moment) were all on that one-man-band kick and this really accelerated the death of black bands. LABELS caught on and fed this course of action because they could get away with paying less people. It was also during this era that the key member clauses started to appear in every record contract with bands. This was the death of big bands and since Prince had already helped make synth horns popular, they were "out of style" and thus horn players were out of work in R&B music. Synths, on the other hand, became bigger than ever. This was the beginning of the producer's era in R&B music. While rock bands remained in a hair metal phase, R&B became more of a one-man-runs-the-show situation. This was a beautiful thing to record labels because they now had to dish out less money to their R&B acts for music production. That can be directly attributed to the "blueprint" that Prince laid out and WB's promotion of him as a do-it-all-yourself artist.
So, yeah - Prince helped big time.
Rap was in a development stage and hadn't yet made an impact, so all of this happened beforehand.
His actions definitely helped pave the way for the demise of the black band.
Even though he himself always had a band, they promoted him as the "source of all" and that made people believe that no matter what they saw, it was all him.

I'm done.
[Edited 12/27/09 10:57am]

2elijah said:

I read most of the comments...And there are some who truly believe that Prince didn't (unknowingly) contribute to the destruction of Black Music...These folks laid out some STRONG points (Vain being one of those folks...While I don't agree with his blind hatred for hip hop, he made some pretty interesting comments...)...

But a lot of the other comments totally missed the underlining point of the original post....That much is clear when you have folks saying that the post was alluding to Prince's musical style (the rock-funk fusion) as being the reason black music got shaky in the future, when that had nothing to do with it...

Old Pro (the original poster) spelled it out: It was Prince's ONE-MAN-BAND mantra that had other R&B artists thinking this was the way to go...Of course there were others after Prince that did the one-man-band justice (Kashif comes to mind...He really utlilized Prince's synth style and made some solid R&B)...But there were a shit load of other R&B acts that stumbled using this mindset....A lot of R&B lost a lot of its soul when it went all-Synth...But you have to keep in mind just as the post said, it wasn't Prince's fault...He was the right artist at the right time...

On the real, I like what one poster said on Okayplayer on the original thread:

"we've always alluded to it but never get in depth abt it....but Prince singelhandedly revolutionized Black music for good AND for ill...but the bad part isnt his fault....he was such a revolutionary figure that directionless, lesser talented cats couldnt help but to blindly follow and make a lot of bullshit records in the process..."

This^^^is the point that seems lost with folks....

Okay, my take:

First off, let's get a couple of things straight for you politically corrected social police - R&B is black music. Yes, it is. Don't even bother throwing up a couple of names of white artists that have had minor hit records doing R&B music. For the most part, IT IS BLACK MUSIC. It is referred to as black music by black people. Why? Because its what a great majority of black people listen to. How do I know? Because I can say black music in a room full of black people at any given time and they will know exactly what I am talking about. You can play semantics all day long and bitch and whine about the terms but it is what it is and there's nothing any non-black person can do to change it, so don't waste your time trying to bully people into saying what you want them to because I for one, will not. Black folks know what black music is. If you don't - tough. That's why the OP made that statement on Okayplayer and not Prince.org - because he/she was addressing a specific group of forumers.
Now, onto the Prince thing...
I agree. Prince helped usher in the wave of no-talents that rule the charts right now. Prince by way of Warner Brothers, successfully promoted the idea of the one man band to the world, but more specifically to black radio - because that's where his initial audience was pre-Purple Rain.
There have always been multi-instrumentalists. That goes without saying. What happened with Prince was part timing and part promotion. Back when MJ blew up the charts with Thriller, this was also during the earlier years of the label wars when whoever had the most popular artists had the biggest numbers. Who was more popular was much more in the hands of the fans back then than it is now. WB needed to one-up the MJ craze, so they went through their roster and used Prince as their label savior. They had been pushing Prince as this all-in-one musician who does everything by himself and his musicians in his camp were there for show. We know this was not the whole truth but at the time Prince always played the mysterious card, so people outside of the circle stayed confused. Prince also pushed the use of technology and synths.
Where the timing comes in: It just so happened that sequencers became advanced and usable enough to make music during the time Prince was rising to the top. Prince used sequencers extensively. He became one of the biggest artists in the country, thus popularizing the use of sequencers. Technology advanced and artists who were following Prince's style of production (as artists often did when there was one very popular artist in style at the moment) were all on that one-man-band kick and this really accelerated the death of black bands. LABELS caught on and fed this course of action because they could get away with paying less people. It was also during this era that the key member clauses started to appear in every record contract with bands. This was the death of big bands and since Prince had already helped make synth horns popular, they were "out of style" and thus horn players were out of work in R&B music. Synths, on the other hand, became bigger than ever. This was the beginning of the producer's era in R&B music. While rock bands remained in a hair metal phase, R&B became more of a one-man-runs-the-show situation. This was a beautiful thing to record labels because they now had to dish out less money to their R&B acts for music production. That can be directly attributed to the "blueprint" that Prince laid out and WB's promotion of him as a do-it-all-yourself artist.
So, yeah - Prince helped big time.
Rap was in a development stage and hadn't yet made an impact, so all of this happened beforehand.
His actions definitely helped pave the way for the demise of the black band.
Even though he himself always had a band, they promoted him as the "source of all" and that made people believe that no matter what they saw, it was all him.

I'm done.
[Edited 12/27/09 10:57am]