Hello,

Recently I have apllied to work as a writer on a site that speaks about the world of techno-pop, electronic and indie music ... and as a hardcore fan of P, I want to bring him to the table.

But I'm stuck, the only albums I know of P's that cover the electronic category are MPLSoUND and ART OFFICIAL AGE (according to wikipedia at least).

I want to know if you can help me by giving me songs or albums of P's that you think cover the electronic genre for me to write about and send in.

Also, would you say FallInLove2Nite is electronic too? Because that's the first song that came to mind when assessing what songs of his I could write about.

And if he has any indie tracks, posting those song names and what album they're from will be helpful too!

Peace N B WiLD!

Victor

(Please don't give me any stick over this)

Loose and the human body

New World (Emancipation) sounds somewhat like acidhouse.

go back and listen to the opening of Anne Christian from Controversy. I believe this was a precursor to techno in a lot of ways, esp. since the "holy trnity" of the genre, founding fathers Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson are ALL huge Prince fans and grew up in Detroit where they heard HUGE doses of Prince via the Electrifying Mojo.

also isn't Eye Wanna Melt with U from the Love Symbol album considered "electronic"

1999 was synth and drum machine heavy, as well as massive use of guitar effects on drums, vocals etc...

It doesn't have a statis of being electronic music maybe, but it sure did influence A WHOLE LOT of electronic music to come.

I would imagine if you are a hardcore fan, and a genuine electronic music writer, the pieces to your puzzle should already be apparent.

Prince has a vast catalogue, and you would have to re-visit all of it from the beginning to find your answers.

Any suggestions from outside opinions would surely distort your report, no?

I'm simply implying that you might consider doing your own homework and have fun doing it

Prost!

MusicFan20Ten said:

Hello,

Recently I have apllied to work as a writer on a site that speaks about the world of techno-pop, electronic and indie music ... and as a hardcore fan of P, I want to bring him to the table.

But I'm stuck, the only albums I know of P's that cover the electronic category are MPLSoUND and ART OFFICIAL AGE (according to wikipedia at least).

I want to know if you can help me by giving me songs or albums of P's that you think cover the electronic genre for me to write about and send in.

Also, would you say FallInLove2Nite is electronic too? Because that's the first song that came to mind when assessing what songs of his I could write about.

And if he has any indie tracks, posting those song names and what album they're from will be helpful too!

Peace N B WiLD!

Victor

(Please don't give me any stick over this)

Automatic 1999

The Human Body Emancipation

If it is four to the floor beats you are after then I would start with the song Controversy. That right there a precursor to house music if ever there was one.

Also have a listen to:
All The Critics... (1999)

Lemon Crush (Batman)

I Wanna Melt With U ( )

Loose (Come)

New World (Emancipation)

Human Body (Emancipation)

Rave In2 The Joy Fantastic (although this is actually a remix)

Y Should Eye Do That When Eye Can Do This (Slaughterhouse)

Art Official Cage (AOA)

FallInLove2Nite (Single)

Then of course there are a whole bunch of official remixes such as Dance 4 Me (Jamie Lewis), RnR Love Affair (Jamie Lewis), The Future (William Orbit), Breakfast Can Wait (Joshua Welton).

It all depends on what you mean by electronic music. If you mean specifically EDM type songs with a techno/house sort of vibe then there are not really that many thankfully. I dont think Prince does that genre very well. But anything with a synth and/or drum machine can be deemed electronic so pretty much any album since day one would have what you are looking for, except maybe the jazzy stuff and the live albums. And Prince does drum machines and synths very well indeed. 1999 is a lesson in electronic music!

I find it quite strange that in the 80's the house music coming out of Detroit was heavily influenced by Prince which subsequently exploded as a genre all over the world. Now the genre has spawned countless sub genres such as Jungle, DnB, Minimal, Psy, Acid etc etc. And here we are in 2014 and the man that helped spawn the genre is now making songs like Art Official Cage. I dont know if it is sad or parody.

"strange but true"

you should probably start with this article...

http://www.redbullmusicac...ance-music

[Edited 12/24/14 11:41am]

Controversy, for sure. A lot of the early stuff was very much in the mold of dance music, disco, techno, new wave, of the time. I'd also say Purple Rain is very much an electronic record.

May 19-1992

2Nite by Bria Valente

Silicon (the song)

Everything on Art Official Age

My Medaillon (maybe)

Black Sweat

New World

My Computer

Loose

MusicFan20Ten said:

Hello,

Recently I have apllied to work as a writer on a site that speaks about the world of techno-pop, electronic and indie music ... and as a hardcore fan of P, I want to bring him to the table.

But I'm stuck, the only albums I know of P's that cover the electronic category are MPLSoUND and ART OFFICIAL AGE (according to wikipedia at least).

I want to know if you can help me by giving me songs or albums of P's that you think cover the electronic genre for me to write about and send in.

Also, would you say FallInLove2Nite is electronic too? Because that's the first song that came to mind when assessing what songs of his I could write about.

And if he has any indie tracks, posting those song names and what album they're from will be helpful too!

Peace N B WiLD!

Victor

(Please don't give me any stick over this)

Here what u need is a historical perspective, because "electronic music" has meant a lot of different things over the years. Originally it was really an avant-garde, experimental field, close to electroacoustic music, then in the 70's it became a genre "pop" music artists started to experiment with, notably seminal purely electronic bands such as Kraftwerk or Yellow Magic Orchestra, but also pop acts that started to integrate lots of synthesizers and drum machines in their music such as Gary Numan or The Human League. Back then when Prince's career began this was what electronic music was about, then in the 80's came electrohop, hip-hop, house music and other genres that built on new technology as it became available until the 90's explosion when computers entered the party and changed our definition of "electronic music" once more with genres such as breakbeat, jungle, trip-hop, etc. until the loop somehow got looped in the 2000's when the electroclash movement then the synthpop revival brought together modern electronica and its new wave/postpunk/synthpop roots. Today, a lot of pop music is "electronic" to some extent in the sense that it integrates electronic elements, but not all of it is perceived as "electronic" (for example hip-hop was by essence a genre of electronic music since almost the beginning, but was never really perceived as such).

.

Prince's music has always been electronic to some extent in the sense that from the very beginning it relied on synthesizers a lot, then integrated drum machines, then samplers, etc. He made later attempts at what we'd come to call more typically electronic music in the 90's and ever since with for example techno-house tracks such as Go-Go Dancer, Eye Wanna Melt With U, Children Of The Sun or more impressively Slave, The Human Body and Sleep Around or Strange But True, and so on until AOA and Fallinlove2nite which of course contain strong electronic elements but would be defined by most people as being R&B or pop, not electronic music in the sense Plaid, Björk or Aphex Twin are considered being electronic artists. So this is NOT what you should write about.

.

So in the end most of Prince's post 1984 electronic music has been as electronic as everything else in pop music at the time, and his attempts mentioned above at doing "typical" dance electronic music were quite inimportant and often gross caricatures of the genres they were trying to emulate (see the Carmen Electra and Mayte "dance" tracks). Therefore I think an article on Prince and electronic music should focus mostly on the period when he was an avant-garde and influencial actor of the electronic revolution, i.e. mostly from 1978 to 1984. Prince was one of the first to use the Linn LM-1 drum machine and he used it in a truly unique way, and he was extremely influential in bringing electronic music in R&B at a time when it was primarly done by white artists in the US and Europe, and Japanese artists in Tokyo. By 1982, when P released 1999 (arguably his electronic masterpiece), everyone was catching up slowly, from the NY scene (Afrika Bambaataa, Grand MasterFlash, etc.) to George Clinton (Computer Games) but Prince had been at it since 1978 and Dirty Mind was probably the first album by a black artist to integrate new wave/post-punk/synthpop elements so proeminently. Also, P's minneapolis sound not only defined what the sound of dance music would be for a decade but also paved the way to Jam & Lewis and Teddy Riley's new jack swing wave from the late 80's. Notably there were electronic drum programming that were quite innovative as late as 1989 with some tracks in Batman, and Batdance itself was a remarkable way for Prince to appropriate the kind of samples-based house music that was popular at the time (see S'Express or M/A/R/R/S for example). His collaboration with Ingrid Chavez, recorded from 89 until its release in 1991, was also quite visionary, anticipating what would be called trip-hop a few years later and merging spoken word with minimalist pop music in a way that was quite rare at the time (despite other comparable contemporary attempts such as Enigma). After that, Prince integrated many things but didn't innovate anymore in the electronic genre, and it could also be said that he totally missed the British electronic revolution of the mid-90's (I'm pretty sure he had NO IDEA of what was happening in Europe at the time, he said he liked Björk but when Liz Jones asked him if he'd heard about Tricky as late as 1997, he said he had no idea who Tricky was - it says it all!).

.

Another thing is that today Prince's influence can be felt MUCH MORE in the neo synthpop scene (mostly white musicians from Europe and North America) than in the R&B scene and I think this says a lot. I hear typical Mplssound/Prince elements in many synthpop records from the last decade while I struggle to find any defining Prince influence in any R&B act: R&B artists always quote Prince as a major influence but it doesn't show in their music in the end, while it shows a lot in synthpop artists' music. Prince's legacy is therefore more significant in the electronic scene than in the R&B scene and I think it says a LOT!

.

Of course u can mention the fact that P kept using electronic music to this day and integrated the new technologies as they happened, but I think an article based at the song titles mentioned above in this thread, the post-1990 attempts at imitating techno or house, would totally miss the point. Prince was a defining electronic artist in the early 1980's not only because he was very good at using electronic tools but also because he contributed a lot to making it a capital element in Afro-American music AND because he created a whole new musical electronic esthetic that can still be felt to this day.

Fhunkin said:

May 19-1992

Aerogram said:

2Nite by Bria Valente

Silicon (the song)

Everything on Art Official Age

My Medaillon (maybe)

Black Sweat

New World

My Computer

Loose

Wolfie87 said:

New World (Emancipation) sounds somewhat like acidhouse.

Yeah but nearly a decade after acidhouse was the hot thing

Prince was either a visionary (those sounds came back big in the early 00's) or late

treehouse said:

Controversy, for sure. A lot of the early stuff was very much in the mold of dance music, disco, techno, new wave, of the time. I'd also say Purple Rain is very much an electronic record.

When Doves Cry is a seminal electronic song!

Don't forget the Gett Off remixes, the Dance 4 Me remixes or the Batdance remixes!

That is all!

Peace

gotta put that "if i was your girlfriend" in there. One of the all time classics!

Batdance of course.

databank said:

Notably there were electronic drum programming that were quite innovative as late as 1989 with some tracks in Batman, and Batdance itself was a remarkable way for Prince to appropriate the kind of samples-based house music that was popular at the time (see S'Express or M/A/R/R/S for example).

Some of that just sounded like Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and maybe Sheep on Drugs, or KLF, to me.

treehouse said:

databank said:

Notably there were electronic drum programming that were quite innovative as late as 1989 with some tracks in Batman, and Batdance itself was a remarkable way for Prince to appropriate the kind of samples-based house music that was popular at the time (see S'Express or M/A/R/R/S for example).

Some of that just sounded like Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and maybe Sheep on Drugs, or KLF, to me.

Might be, I'm not familiar with the first 2 band's work and The KLF I know only their later works, which were certainly different from 1989 Prince, but I'm not familiar with their early works.