Probably one of the few people like Prince who could hear music at any given moment. Unlike most, who have to work out the structure of a song (over months), work with engineers, then have an executive producer who decides what should go in, get left out.

Vox said:

'Tones sound, and storm, and roar about me until I have set them down in notes.' I know what it feels like to have P's music in my head all night, but can't imagine hearing new things all the time. Today I am thankful for Prince all over again.

that's lovely.

Beautiful words.

Vox said:

'Tones sound, and storm, and roar about me until I have set them down in notes.' I know what it feels like to have P's music in my head all night, but can't imagine hearing new things all the time. Today I am thankful for Prince all over again.

Ah shit I'm crying

"You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with

certainty; they come unsummoned, directly, indirectly,--I could

seize them with my hands,--out in the open air; in the woods;

while walking; in the silence of the nights; early in the morning;

incited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by

me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have

set them down in notes."

Beautiful

Lovely. Thanks for sharing.

roxy831 said:

Amazing to think, everything these classical masters heard they would have to commit to paper before the memory of the music vanished. Prince however could record anything he heard in the moment.

As much as I love Prince, nothing in his production approaches the 9th Symphony.

He was incredibly fast, but he was a pop musician, and I'm sure pretty happy to be the best.

But Jazz or Classical, well, these are other paths. That doesn't make Prince's talent unquestionable.
It's just that Prince is not Beethoven.

Vox said:

roxy831 said:

"You will ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with

certainty; they come unsummoned, directly, indirectly,--I could

seize them with my hands,--out in the open air; in the woods;

while walking; in the silence of the nights; early in the morning;

incited by moods, which are translated by the poet into words, by

me into tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have

set them down in notes."

Beautiful

Thanks for completting the Quote! It is even more meaningful with all the words.

You're welcome. Thank you for bringing this quote to us!

bonatoc said:

bonatoc said:

Vox said:

bonatoc said:

As much as I love Prince, nothing in his production approaches the 9th Symphony.

He was incredibly fast, but he was a pop musician, and I'm sure pretty happy to be the best.

But Jazz or Classical, well, these are other paths. That doesn't make Prince's talent unquestionable.
It's just that Prince is not Beethoven.

As a Classical musician, I agree that the Ninth Symphony is a masterpiece. When reading that quote, I was reminded of Alan Leeds and others remarking on Prince's need to get in a studio and 'get it out' of his head. Or of playing the radio loudly to mask sound so he could sleep. I have music running through me all the time, but I've never had complete works original to me in there. That's the part I find amazing, whether Prince, Beethoven, or Mozart. A remarkable gift in their genre.

Especially the 9th's third slow movement, and the slow choral sections of the final movement. Music on another planet. He was virtually deaf when he did the 9th.

fortuneandserendipity said:

I'm pretty sure Prince would have still been able to compose and play
if an ear deficiency ever happened late in his life.

You cannot achieve this level in music and not have it engraved in your body, in your spine.
Just look at him playing Dortmund's "The Cross" solo, he's on automatic pilot, the hands move by themselves,
he's just walking around the stage while doing it, and it sounds like an army of angels coming down for big trouble.
As for the brain, yes, he was thinking in music, he said so many times.
That's one point in favour of the comparison.

If I had to judge Prince on his arrangements abilities only (no one could overdub like Prince :
he was coming with several arrangements for a song as he was recording it, real time for crying out loud),
yes, I guess I'll put him par with Beethoven, Mozart, Quincy Jones, McCartney, Wilson, etc.

Except Prince was a rock'n'roll kid, and so the template is 3~4 chords (or less),
verses and repeated choruses, solo and ad libs, all packaged under 3~4 minutes.

Musically, that is a niche, (as Classical Music and Jazz are, no doubt. But then everything's a niche).
Classical and Jazz are for the vast majority pure instrumentals.
They don't follow the 3~4 minutes standard, they have rigid or very loose structures,
dodecaphonism, more modulations than the whole Lennon-Macca catalogue,
very diverse instrumentations (a solo piece, a duo, a trio up to a full scale orchestra with percussions and choirs),
tempo changes, rallentandoes, accelerations, and sometimes they even include electronic sounds,
or noises intended to be made by the player / singer.

Notice that you compare Prince to Beethoven, and that suggests that Beethoven is like your "Max" when it comes
to classical music.
But there's also Bach.
And Mussorgsky.
Fauré.
And many, many others...
Not a lifetime is enough to discover how much talent and depth there are out there.
Craftsmen that never got, that never will have a post-"Purple Rain" trauma to mess with their minds or creativity.
Prince was a poet, but he was also a rock star, and glad to be one.
Beethoven was still living in times when writing a requiem actually meant writing for/to God himself,
plus you had to compete with all the others Requiem.


Let's get rid of the name-dropping once and for all:

Prince is Brian Wilson meets Phil Spector meets Elvis meets Lennon
vs. all the black music, from gospel to funk, blues to ballads.

And we're not mentioning the virtuoso.

But Beethoven, Mozart & Co. were virtuosos as well, and they had to write
under very rigid circumstances :
Music was NOT RECORDED.
It was always played live. Always performed.

Jazz follows the same pattern : record are usually recorded under one week because the tracks are all LIVE takes,
from the first note to the last.

Is recorded music easier to make. Heck no, but, still.

Prince worked his ass off LIKE A CLASSICAL COMPOSER AND A JAZZ (multi) INSTRUMENTIST, I will give you that, absolutely.

He's the closest a pop artist can get to a classical composer's ethic of work.
The closest in pop to a "bare to the bone" feeling only Jazz players can achieve after years of training ("and-no-pay!").

SKipper ultimately got bored in the nineties because he had no competition left.
And he took, played himself out of that boredom, which is a prowess of its own.
Others sniff or drink their royalties.
Prince took an O.D. on counterfeit medication while giving an incredible a capella world tour.
A fucking accident, but how do you convince SKipper to stay put? He never did.



Classical and Jazz are fields where everyone is an exceptional instrumentist.
But not anyone can compose for a given set of instruments.
Prince did not have the time to become Clare Fischer.
Cool thing he admitted it — but he never met the guy, that cracks me up — He must have had a tremendous respect.
So who's to say, maybe Prince himself would roll his eyes if Beethoven was mentioned.
Consider the Mozart outfit he wears in the Dortmund's piano medley,
isn't Skipper himself making fun of this comparison? Sure, he plays with it.
But he got his real kicks out of playing "Just My Imagination" at 2 A.M.
Prince wanted to be a pop star, not the next Miles Davis.
Classical or Jazz are the hardest path.

Prince, given the restricted combinations of the pop genre (drums, bass, chords, vocals),
did his best to always come up with new combinations of sounds, new ways to arrange,
in the narrowed field of pop, xeroxed radio singles,
singers with just the right amount of personality...
And yes, most of his albums will surely stand the test of time,
the songs work whatever the arrangements.

Would he have been, in the same lucky-star configuration as Beethoven (consider ol' Ludwig times!), as good as him?
I think so. But let's stick to reality.

Prince's talent blossomed in an era where sound experimenting was becoming mainstream.
Synths and Colecovision® chips were invading our sonic landscape.
He's also a musical byproduct of white rock radio stations.
SKipper is a black kid going for rock music. That is gonna impress black, white and portoricans. Clever boy.
He's going after the King himself, blame John L. Nelson for the odd name choice for Baby SKipper.

While other were using the hardware to put out atrocious stuff like "I Wanna Dance With Somebody"
or "Livin' On A Prayer", Prince was using it to give us "Hot Thing" and "The Cross".
Yes, Elvis (gone berzerk) and Bob Dylan, and metal, gospel, soul in one package.


And he can dance. Michael doesn't dance: he's too tight-ass. He mimes.
Prince shakes the pelvis, he fucks the stage amps, he fucks his mike, he humps the piano too,
and finally he litterally ejaculates on the crowd (and who knows what was the liquid coming out of the Telecaster made of).
"Rock'n'Roll can never die", as Neil Young would put it.
But I digress... The splits come to mind, and I ache.

I've seen some recent Dirty Mind full concerts on YT that blew my mind :
Prince is still awkward in his moves, but he's working on it, the musical segues do not bear the finesse of the late eighties, but man!
He's litterally becoming Prince under our very eyes. Pity the 1999 concerts are of poor quality, but they show how far he goes in just two years.

Given the incredible performer Prince has always been on stage,
the incredible studio wizard he's been,
the ultimate guitar (super) hero he was,
if you ask me what I've been thinking and praising about Skipper since 1984,
no matter how koo-koo he sometimes went on or off stage,
no matter how many times I disagreed with him,
I would gladly make Beethoven's own words mine.

[Edited 8/21/16 12:55pm]

[Edited 8/21/16 12:59pm]

NorthC said:

And then, to top it all off, in those days, because music wasn't recorded, that meant people couldn't listen to records, all they had was sheet music and you had to be able to read music and play an instrument to hear it. Dutch writer Godfried Bomans recalled a story in one of his books of a German writer from the 19th century called Friedrich Hebbel who went to see Beethoven's Fifth and then when he got home, he fell to the floor crying. Bomans' explanation why this symphony made such an impression on Hebbel: because there was no radio back then, you didn't hear music all the time, so when you finally did hear music, in the atmosphere of a concert hall, it made a much, much, much bigger impression than it would today. Bomans wrote this in the mid 20th century, but I think it's even more true today in the days of i-pad and youtube and what-have-you when tons of music are only a click away. If you travel to Egypt nowadays and see the Pyramids, you'll have already seen them a thousand times on TV and photos. Take that away... Imagine living in the 18th century and you see the Pyramids for the first time... That's the kind of experience we 21st century people have totally lost. There's nothing left to discover...

I would rather say it's time for humankind to slow down at all levels, art included.
There are some many great things in art to consider, and never enough time.
But there are countless songs or pieces worth of interest out there.
What time is it?

Not only the pace of life gives us barely the time to post on the .org,
but worse, it cut us out of the kind of experience you're describing a long, long time ago.

I had the chance to sing in a children's choir of some level when I was a kid.
OK, it was like in the Top 10 of children's choir in the world at one point.
We would sing Haydn Masses and baroque vocal pieces in extraordinary venues,
it was the serious stuff (but in the bus I was hooked on ATWIAD. Thank God for the Sony Walkman®).

Yes, when you perform religious classical music in a church,
well, it's not pop, it's mystical. I mean a hundred times more potent than hearing it.
Because, yes, once you start, it's the same for every live musician,
you have to go through the end. Except there's no microphones, no speakers.
The only sound there is is the sound you make.





Music has become a quiet soundtrack for malls
and a commodity for MP3 players turned phones (for only $0,99 each! Click to buy you dumbass!) years ago.

Yeah, the kids will always need their subversion dose, but it comes from porn nowadays,
not from the lone, bended guitar note found on the intro of "Erotic City".
Or the wet low toms, constantly pulsating and resonating in "Hot Thing".

As much I as love Steve Jobs, I hate the guy for that.
Pop was in an enough bad shape already.



Another thing to admire about SKipper: he stayed a true maverick until the end.
I just wish he would have come up with something better than "real music for real musicians".
We knew Michael and Madonna were doing playbacks, there was no need to brag about it.
But hey, he was mostly in it for the fun.

And we had some, didn't we?

[Edited 8/21/16 13:24pm]

NorthC said:

We did. And that's the sad part, even though, after 4 months I like to believe I'm over it and I enjoy life & other music again, knowing that we'll never have that kind of fun ever again... Yeah, that still hurts a little bit.

This might comfort you. Look for it.
http://www.princevault.com/index.php?title=21_August_1998

Did you try Kool & The Gang (pizza, hamburgers, root beer, pussy)?

[Edited 8/21/16 13:52pm]

Totally out of topic, in this incredible D.M.S.R. rehearsal,
Prince quotes the Talking Heads "Once In A Lifetime".

Further proof he had his ears on everything that was going on.

bonatoc said:

fortuneandserendipity said:

Probably one of the few people like Prince who could hear music at any given moment. Unlike most, who have to work out the structure of a song (over months), work with engineers, then have an executive producer who decides what should go in, get left out.

That sounds poetic, but it's not true Prince had to work like everyone else. Prince was a hard worker which is the majority of so-called "genius".

And then there was George Frideric Handel, whom Beethoven called "the greatest composer that ever lived" purely on the basis of his work, Messiah.

Messiah: 53 movements in 3 parts, written in 24 days. An absolutely stunning work.

Unfortunately, i haven't got anything to say, but thank you, for such and interesting thread.

[Edited 8/23/16 12:27pm]

BlackCandle said: