LBrent said:

PeteSilas said:

ya, i didn't want to bring up patti because she's one of my fave singers but Patti labelle and oversinging are inseparable, usually that's a good thing.

Yes, Patti definitely oversings, but I love the look on P's face during her performance...and when he caught her shoe and showed it to the audience. Lol

The expressions on his face that night were priceless.

purplethunder3121 said:

LBrent said:

Yes, Patti definitely oversings, but I love the look on P's face during her performance...and when he caught her shoe and showed it to the audience. Lol

The expressions on his face that night were priceless.

yes lol

you can tell he did not like what Treysongz did to Purple Rain\

Jonelle -Prince is like 'is the song that wild?'

his respect 4 Pattie held his looks in check

Alicia Keys pregnant crawling on the piano -he gave the best faces

OldFriends4Sale said:

purplethunder3121 said:

The expressions on his face that night were priceless.

yes lol

you can tell he did not like what Treysongz did to Purple Rain\

Jonelle -Prince is like 'is the song that wild?'

his respect 4 Pattie held his looks in check

Alicia Keys pregnant crawling on the piano -he gave the best faces

He was so worried she was going to fall off he tried to grab Shelby's arm!

purplethunder3121 said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

yes lol

you can tell he did not like what Treysongz did to Purple Rain\

Jonelle -Prince is like 'is the song that wild?'

his respect 4 Pattie held his looks in check

Alicia Keys pregnant crawling on the piano -he gave the best faces

He was so worried she was going to fall off he tried to grab Shelby's arm!

lol

OldFriends4Sale said:

purplethunder3121 said:

He was so worried she was going to fall off he tried to grab Shelby's arm!

lol

"Shelby, WTactualF???" was written all over P's face!

He looked very very very unsettled during that part.

LBrent said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

lol

"Shelby, WTactualF???" was written all over P's face!

He looked very very very unsettled during that part.

lol

I was unsettled too,
U think piano tops are smooth and slick

the idea of Alicia landing on her stomach wooooo

LBrent said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

lol

"Shelby, WTactualF???" was written all over P's face!

He looked very very very unsettled during that part.

i like alicia a lot but she ain't graceful at fucking all.

PeteSilas said:

LBrent said:

"Shelby, WTactualF???" was written all over P's face!

He looked very very very unsettled during that part.

i like alicia a lot but she ain't graceful at fucking all.

OldFriends4Sale said:

LBrent said:

"Shelby, WTactualF???" was written all over P's face!

He looked very very very unsettled during that part.

lol

I was unsettled too,
U think piano tops are smooth and slick

the idea of Alicia landing on her stomach wooooo

I think everyone watching in the audience, both in the building and at home, were holding thier collective breaths and hoping that no catastrophe ocurred on that piano top...especially an impromptu live broadcast spontaneous birth!

CynicKill said:

Fantasia oversings Purple Rain to perfection.

Unfortunately she doesn't get asked to perform it much, especially during tribute season.

Agreed. Fantasia seems to get possessed by the energy in the crowd when she sings. I love it. I usually get quite irritted by "oversingers", Mariah, Jennifer Hudson, Johnny Gill, (though I do enjoy much of their studio music)... but somehow it just seems such a genuine enthusiasm about the song with Fantasia, not that she's trying to show everyone, "Hey, I can REALLY sing!"

I thought her Purple Rain was awesome. Right there in the middle of a sea of people, for the people!

(Fantasia's April 21 live performance of Purple Rain)

[Edited 4/2/17 7:04am]

laytonian said:

. I call it WHITNEY HOUSTON SYNDROME. . Ever since she turned the national anthem into a contest for oversingers, no one can sing it as originally written. [Edited 4/1/17 21:36pm]

Exactly.

purplethunder3121 said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

yes lol

you can tell he did not like what Treysongz did to Purple Rain\

Jonelle -Prince is like 'is the song that wild?'

his respect 4 Pattie held his looks in check

Alicia Keys pregnant crawling on the piano -he gave the best faces

He was so worried she was going to fall off he tried to grab Shelby's arm!

I haven't seen this before, but it is hilarious, especially P's facial expressions. SJ is just laughing and P is like really nervous, lol.

laytonian said:

. I call it WHITNEY HOUSTON SYNDROME. . Ever since she turned the national anthem into a contest for oversingers, no one can sing it as originally written. [Edited 4/1/17 21:36pm]

YEP YEP YEP! I remember when Jennifer Hudson did a tribute to Whitney by singing I Will Always Love You, at the Grammys I think. It was just JH and the piano. It was gorgeous due to its beautiful simplicty and she didn't do any of the trailing nonsense.

--

Very few people can pull off the trailing. Whitney could, but Whitney was Whitney and her voice is in a class by itself. I don't even thing Mariah pulls off the trailing very well most of the time.

Someone just posted a video on YouTube of a chick on the UK version of The Voice, and she was squealing her way through "Purple Rain". I could not believe the people who were saying "oh, she killed it" "OMG she's awesome". No, no boo, she's not. She might be able to sing, but she butchered the song, and it was a squawking mess. Of course, another no-talent hack is a judge on the show and was standing up through the rendition - will.i.am.

I think they said she did "I Feel For You" (Chaka's version) later, and was voted out. Bye girl.

TrivialPursuit said:

Someone just posted a video on YouTube of a chick on the UK version of The Voice, and she was squealing her way through "Purple Rain". I could not believe the people who were saying "oh, she killed it" "OMG she's awesome". No, no boo, she's not. She might be able to sing, but she butchered the song, and it was a squawking mess. Of course, another no-talent hack is a judge on the show and was standing up through the rendition - will.i.am.

I think they said she did "I Feel For You" (Chaka's version) later, and was voted out. Bye girl.

Dammit!

You totally squandered the opportunity to say, "Bye, Felicia!"

I'm disappointed in you, TP.

LBrent said:

TrivialPursuit said:

Someone just posted a video on YouTube of a chick on the UK version of The Voice, and she was squealing her way through "Purple Rain". I could not believe the people who were saying "oh, she killed it" "OMG she's awesome". No, no boo, she's not. She might be able to sing, but she butchered the song, and it was a squawking mess. Of course, another no-talent hack is a judge on the show and was standing up through the rendition - will.i.am.

I think they said she did "I Feel For You" (Chaka's version) later, and was voted out. Bye girl.

Dammit!

You totally squandered the opportunity to say, "Bye, Felicia!"

I'm disappointed in you, TP.

haha I could have, but it gets overused sometimes. Besides, I'm in DragRace mode lately, so there are plenty of one-liners to use for heifers fuckin' up a Prince song.

TrivialPursuit said:

LBrent said:

Dammit!

You totally squandered the opportunity to say, "Bye, Felicia!"

I'm disappointed in you, TP.

haha I could have, but it gets overused sometimes. Besides, I'm in DragRace mode lately, so there are plenty of one-liners to use for heifers fuckin' up a Prince song.

Lawd

TrivialPursuit said:

LBrent said:

Dammit!

You totally squandered the opportunity to say, "Bye, Felicia!"

I'm disappointed in you, TP.

haha I could have, but it gets overused sometimes. Besides, I'm in DragRace mode lately, so there are plenty of one-liners to use for heifers fuckin' up a Prince song.

Wouldn't DragRace mode be, "Girl Bye"?

Or is that Housewives mode.

I'm getting dizzy.

If the UK Voice is in any way similar to the US version, it solely consists of people horriffically vibrato-screeching overplayed pop songs, intercut by the singers and their celebrity "coaches" sucking each other off about how "inspirational" each other are.

... What was this thread about again?

[Edited 4/2/17 11:48am]

TrivialPursuit said:

Shockedelicus said:

A pathetic syndrome, to say the least.

I would encourage anyone to grab an instrument or to sing — or draw, paint, dance, anything with a tad of artistic ambition. Giving seconds, minutes, hours of your "precious" time (instead of giving it all to Zuckerberg, TV series, video games and the myriad of addictive ways that will prevent from knowing thy self and others) into a non-productive activity, is truly the only revolutionary human behaviour we have left. Maybe also sex, but it's getting more and more perverted.

And no, you narrow-minded fools (allow me a little paranoia as I'm frequently accused of bigotry by one-sided orgers), I'm not talking about practices, but the twisted approaches the young are given and left with: Tinder (humans as trading cards, what a concept), dominant male and submissive female porn, the performance factor, as if even sex should be measurable, quantifiable, instead of being an infinite landscape of joy, fever and freedom, where you can defeat your demons (or ride them, whatever suits you is fine by me), touch God, and then stare at what silence looks like.

In a world where getting out of bed means getting ready for another day at the rat race, manic monday after manic monday, doing something that has no precise market value, no clear meaning, no defined outcome is the only middle finger left you can raise in a world ruled by productivism.

That is, if there were some purity of intent left in these sad times. To turn an initial impulse of creativity or personal expression into the Roman circus, to call for the lowest instincts of social behaviour by giving the crowds the illusion of god-like power (thumbs up! thumbs down!), is what is killing art in the end: deep, risky, ambitious craft is now for intellectual and/or economical elites only. Popular art has become this gigantic dump, a church of distraction, the one and only official soundtrack for malls and commutes.

It's filled with repetitions, copycats, reboots, and needs consumers instead of people to survive. If the public had the slightest clue of how much of it isn't original, it would collapse on the spot. Culture slowly loses its meaning, year after year. In this pernicious, panic-inducing (FOMO and other dark patterns abound) ways of living, the young know nothing of pop music but the poses, the fame, the money as pre-formatted answers to their sexual and identity struggles.

Any craft needs devotion and sacrifice. Prince, as any other artist that's worth something, traded his youth for an uncertain goal. Art takes balls. But He felt the reward that comes from painstakingly trying to do something: you sound average, and average, and a little less average until one day you find your own voice. In his particular case, it happened frighteningly fast, but that's not the point.

"American Idol". The operative word being "Idol". Like Trump, the only thing it has for itself is a certain sincerity in its uglyness: the name itself states that the whole concept is not about becoming a musician or a singer, but to become the center of attention.

"The Voice". You may think this one is more about singing, when in reality the voice it's referring to is the one of the Roman arena crowds, who will decide in the end who lives and who dies.

Fuck them all, fuck this world, fuck this France who has lost all that it stood for, fuck North America and his low IQ/EQ rednecks, fuck both of its coasts and all these fucking hipsters/hamsters who are more concerned with sipping a latte while having an internet connection than going into a voting booth, fuck this world that denies culture, fuck China and India do nothing but mimick us and repeat the same mistakes we made, pretty soon there will be nothing left of art, it will become totally pointless, your grandma and close friends included (at least you had an audience).

True artists will be left alone with nothing but a mirror to wank on.
Oh, wait, that's precisely what happened to Prince at some point!
Your gifts rot when there's no one to give them to.
Thank God, He got out of there pretty fast, and that's one of his many achievements, he went past that and made peace with this fucking illusion that the world could be transformed by beauty.
The craftsman does his craft, and it's enough, art is its own reward.

Art is a great concept, and I sure wish it for the world.
But the stages, the channels, they're owned by management school dorks now.

A trained monkey is a trained monkey. But because people lack culture, they think yodling and flexing vocal cords is singing, but it ain't. The alternative died, in all sense, when Kurt Cobain realized the mountain has gotten to high a climb, and that the revolution will never happen.
It's just too late, all minds are fucked permantently.
No Great Spirit, no unification, no holy purpose. Marley's chants are echoing in the void of sophomore's rooms discovering pot, and that's how far they will ever go. They disappear in smoke.
Guevara is a poster, a t-shirt, a mug, and nothing more. Soon it will speak to no one (if it ever did).

Culture takes time, culture means uncertainty, fear of having being wrong all this time, fear of seeing new possibilities, a creeping, dawning acknowledgement of how deep they are fucking you and dragging you down, culture is what could save the world from the Goldman Sachs cokehead who is playing with water and seeds as I'm writing this rant, fated to end in to the petabytes of the deafening digital noise of people wasting their time by fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecies.

Looking like, or in this case, sounding like, has become more important than finding and searching and suffering, until your true voice is found.
I would gladly join a choir of souls brave enough to take the rocky path.
I know they're out there, but they divided us, and boy do they conquered.

Prince is more than they could ever understand: he's a model, he's a compass.
When his muse had nothing left to say, he grabbed her by the throat, slapped her, made amends, pleaded, prayed her, acted as if he didn't care, but he never left the building.
We're all fucking cowards next to him.
The minute our muse stay silent, we retreat to what they programmed us for.

No, you don't approach the song where he tries to reconcile his father and his mother.
This is deep. It took him a decade and a half to find the proper way to express it.
Unless you lived it yourself, you're doomed to fake it.
And Lord knows they do.

[Edited 4/2/17 13:06pm]

bonatoc said:

A pathetic syndrome, to say the least.

I would encourage anyone to grab an instrument or to sing — or draw, paint, dance, anything with a tad of artistic ambition. Giving seconds, minutes, hours of your "precious" time (instead of giving it all to Zuckerberg, TV series, video games and the myriad of addictive ways that will prevent from knowing thy self and others) into a non-productive activity, is truly the only revolutionary human behaviour we have left. Maybe also sex, but it's getting more and more perverted.

And no, you narrow-minded fools (allow me a little paranoia as I'm frequently accused of bigotry by one-sided orgers), I'm not talking about practices, but the twisted approaches the young are given and left with: Tinder (humans as trading cards, what a concept), dominant male and submissive female porn, the performance factor, as if even sex should be measurable, quantifiable, instead of being an infinite landscape of joy, fever and freedom, where you can defeat your demons (or ride them, whatever suits you is fine by me), touch God, and then stare at what silence looks like.

In a world where getting out of bed means getting ready for another day at the rat race, manic monday after manic monday, doing something that has no precise market value, no clear meaning, no defined outcome is the only middle finger left you can raise in a world ruled by productivism.

That is, if there were some purity of intent left in these sad times. To turn an initial impulse of creativity or personal expression into the Roman circus, to call for the lowest instincts of social behaviour by giving the crowds the illusion of god-like power (thumbs up! thumbs down!), is what is killing art in the end: deep, risky, ambitious craft is now for intellectual and/or economical elites only. Popular art has become this gigantic dump, a church of distraction, the one and only official soundtrack for malls and commutes.

It's filled with repetitions, copycats, reboots, and needs consumers instead of people to survive. If the public had the slightest clue of how much of it isn't original, it would collapse on the spot. Culture slowly loses its meaning, year after year. In this pernicious, panic-inducing (FOMO and other dark patterns abound) ways of living, the young know nothing of pop music but the poses, the fame, the money as pre-formatted answers to their sexual and identity struggles.

Any craft needs devotion and sacrifice. Prince, as any other artist that's worth something, traded his youth for an uncertain goal. Art takes balls. But He felt the reward that comes from painstakingly trying to do something: you sound average, and average, and a little less average until one day you find your own voice. In his particular case, it happened frighteningly fast, but that's not the point.

"American Idol". The operative word being "Idol". Like Trump, the only thing it has for itself is a certain sincerity in its uglyness: the name itself states that the whole concept is not about becoming a musician or a singer, but to become the center of attention.

"The Voice". You may think this one is more about singing, when in reality the voice it's referring to is the one of the Roman arena crowds, who will decide in the end who lives and who dies.

Fuck them all, fuck this world, fuck this France who has lost all that it stood for, fuck North America and his low IQ/EQ rednecks, fuck both of its coasts and all these fucking hipsters/hamsters who are more concerned with sipping a latte while having an internet connection than going into a voting booth, fuck this world that denies culture, fuck China and India do nothing but mimick us and repeat the same mistakes we made, pretty soon there will be nothing left of art, it will become totally pointless, your grandma and close friends included (at least you had an audience).

True artists will be left alone with nothing but a mirror to wank on.
Oh, wait, that's precisely what happened to Prince at some point!
Your gifts rot when there's no one to give them to.
Thank God, He got out of there pretty fast, and that's one of his many achievements, he went past that and made peace with this fucking illusion that the world could be transformed by beauty.
The craftsman does his craft, and it's enough, art is its own reward.

Art is a great concept, and I sure wish it for the world.
But the stages, the channels, they're owned by management school dorks now.

A trained monkey is a trained monkey. But because people lack culture, they think yodling and flexing vocal cords is singing, but it ain't. The alternative died, in all sense, when Kurt Cobain realized the mountain has gotten to high a climb, and that the revolution will never happen.
It's just too late, all minds are fucked permantently.
No Great Spirit, no unification, no holy purpose. Marley's chants are echoing in the void of sophomore's rooms discovering pot, and that's how far they will ever go. They disappear in smoke.
Guevara is a poster, a t-shirt, a mug, and nothing more. Soon it will speak to no one (if it ever did).

Culture takes time, culture means uncertainty, fear of having being wrong all this time, fear of seeing new possibilities, a creeping, dawning acknowledgement of how deep they are fucking you and dragging you down, culture is what could save the world from the Goldman Sachs cokehead who is playing with water and seeds as I'm writing this rant, fated to end in to the petabytes of the deafening digital noise of people wasting their time by fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecies.

Looking like, or in this case, sounding like, has become more important than finding and searching and suffering, until your true voice is found.
I would gladly join a choir of souls brave enough to take the rocky path.
I know they're out there, but they divided us, and boy do they conquered.

Prince is more than they could ever understand: he's a model, he's a compass.
When his muse had nothing left to say, he grabbed her by the throat, slapped her, made amends, pleaded, prayed her, acted as if he didn't care, but he never left the building.
We're all fucking cowards next to him.
The minute our muse stay silent, we retreat to what they programmed us for.

No, you don't approach the song where he tries to reconcile his father and his mother.
This is deep. It took him a decade and a half to find the proper way to express it.
Unless you lived it yourself, you're doomed to fake it.
And Lord knows they do.

[Edited 4/2/17 13:06pm]

i like this

That's a pretty great rant bonatoc.

bonatoc said:

A pathetic syndrome, to say the least.

I would encourage anyone to grab an instrument or to sing — or draw, paint, dance, anything with a tad of artistic ambition. Giving seconds, minutes, hours of your "precious" time (instead of giving it all to Zuckerberg, TV series, video games and the myriad of addictive ways that will prevent from knowing thy self and others) into a non-productive activity, is truly the only revolutionary human behaviour we have left. Maybe also sex, but it's getting more and more perverted.

And no, you narrow-minded fools (allow me a little paranoia as I'm frequently accused of bigotry by one-sided orgers), I'm not talking about practices, but the twisted approaches the young are given and left with: Tinder (humans as trading cards, what a concept), dominant male and submissive female porn, the performance factor, as if even sex should be measurable, quantifiable, instead of being an infinite landscape of joy, fever and freedom, where you can defeat your demons (or ride them, whatever suits you is fine by me), touch God, and then stare at what silence looks like.

In a world where getting out of bed means getting ready for another day at the rat race, manic monday after manic monday, doing something that has no precise market value, no clear meaning, no defined outcome is the only middle finger left you can raise in a world ruled by productivism.

That is, if there were some purity of intent left in these sad times. To turn an initial impulse of creativity or personal expression into the Roman circus, to call for the lowest instincts of social behaviour by giving the crowds the illusion of god-like power (thumbs up! thumbs down!), is what is killing art in the end: deep, risky, ambitious craft is now for intellectual and/or economical elites only. Popular art has become this gigantic dump, a church of distraction, the one and only official soundtrack for malls and commutes.

It's filled with repetitions, copycats, reboots, and needs consumers instead of people to survive. If the public had the slightest clue of how much of it isn't original, it would collapse on the spot. Culture slowly loses its meaning, year after year. In this pernicious, panic-inducing (FOMO and other dark patterns abound) ways of living, the young know nothing of pop music but the poses, the fame, the money as pre-formatted answers to their sexual and identity struggles.

Any craft needs devotion and sacrifice. Prince, as any other artist that's worth something, traded his youth for an uncertain goal. Art takes balls. But He felt the reward that comes from painstakingly trying to do something: you sound average, and average, and a little less average until one day you find your own voice. In his particular case, it happened frighteningly fast, but that's not the point.

"American Idol". The operative word being "Idol". Like Trump, the only thing it has for itself is a certain sincerity in its uglyness: the name itself states that the whole concept is not about becoming a musician or a singer, but to become the center of attention.

"The Voice". You may think this one is more about singing, when in reality the voice it's referring to is the one of the Roman arena crowds, who will decide in the end who lives and who dies.

Fuck them all, fuck this world, fuck this France who has lost all that it stood for, fuck North America and his low IQ/EQ rednecks, fuck both of its coasts and all these fucking hipsters/hamsters who are more concerned with sipping a latte while having an internet connection than going into a voting booth, fuck this world that denies culture, fuck China and India do nothing but mimick us and repeat the same mistakes we made, pretty soon there will be nothing left of art, it will become totally pointless, your grandma and close friends included (at least you had an audience).

True artists will be left alone with nothing but a mirror to wank on.
Oh, wait, that's precisely what happened to Prince at some point!
Your gifts rot when there's no one to give them to.
Thank God, He got out of there pretty fast, and that's one of his many achievements, he went past that and made peace with this fucking illusion that the world could be transformed by beauty.
The craftsman does his craft, and it's enough, art is its own reward.

Art is a great concept, and I sure wish it for the world.
But the stages, the channels, they're owned by management school dorks now.

A trained monkey is a trained monkey. But because people lack culture, they think yodling and flexing vocal cords is singing, but it ain't. The alternative died, in all sense, when Kurt Cobain realized the mountain has gotten to high a climb, and that the revolution will never happen.
It's just too late, all minds are fucked permantently.
No Great Spirit, no unification, no holy purpose. Marley's chants are echoing in the void of sophomore's rooms discovering pot, and that's how far they will ever go. They disappear in smoke.
Guevara is a poster, a t-shirt, a mug, and nothing more. Soon it will speak to no one (if it ever did).

Culture takes time, culture means uncertainty, fear of having being wrong all this time, fear of seeing new possibilities, a creeping, dawning acknowledgement of how deep they are fucking you and dragging you down, culture is what could save the world from the Goldman Sachs cokehead who is playing with water and seeds as I'm writing this rant, fated to end in to the petabytes of the deafening digital noise of people wasting their time by fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecies.

Looking like, or in this case, sounding like, has become more important than finding and searching and suffering, until your true voice is found.
I would gladly join a choir of souls brave enough to take the rocky path.
I know they're out there, but they divided us, and boy do they conquered.

Prince is more than they could ever understand: he's a model, he's a compass.
When his muse had nothing left to say, he grabbed her by the throat, slapped her, made amends, pleaded, prayed her, acted as if he didn't care, but he never left the building.
We're all fucking cowards next to him.
The minute our muse stay silent, we retreat to what they programmed us for.

No, you don't approach the song where he tries to reconcile his father and his mother.
This is deep. It took him a decade and a half to find the proper way to express it.
Unless you lived it yourself, you're doomed to fake it.
And Lord knows they do.

[Edited 4/2/17 13:06pm]

But don't you think that each previous generation all thought the very same thing about the existing generation's art? That it was clumsy and awful and dreary?

And could it be that the current folks who are doing whatever they're doing feel as if they're "creating art"? And that they'll be appreciated by those it resonates with now and in the future?

that's true but if you look, you'll see each generation has just gotten more an more base. Now, today, it's just completely empty, completely. There are grassroots musicians out here so it's not like the don't exist but the industry isn't interested. Every generation kind of had it's redeeming qualities, you know, when rock and roll came in, you could see and understand why some of the jazz musicians were resentful, that such a simplistic thing could outdo their music which is truly an american art. But....rock and roll had plenty to offer of its own without the 9th chords and the long improvisations. I think we've reached a critical mass with music in terms of vapid voidedness and like anything, it'll have to turn around somewhat. everything does change.

LBrent said:

bonatoc said:

A pathetic syndrome, to say the least.

I would encourage anyone to grab an instrument or to sing — or draw, paint, dance, anything with a tad of artistic ambition. Giving seconds, minutes, hours of your "precious" time (instead of giving it all to Zuckerberg, TV series, video games and the myriad of addictive ways that will prevent from knowing thy self and others) into a non-productive activity, is truly the only revolutionary human behaviour we have left. Maybe also sex, but it's getting more and more perverted.

And no, you narrow-minded fools (allow me a little paranoia as I'm frequently accused of bigotry by one-sided orgers), I'm not talking about practices, but the twisted approaches the young are given and left with: Tinder (humans as trading cards, what a concept), dominant male and submissive female porn, the performance factor, as if even sex should be measurable, quantifiable, instead of being an infinite landscape of joy, fever and freedom, where you can defeat your demons (or ride them, whatever suits you is fine by me), touch God, and then stare at what silence looks like.

In a world where getting out of bed means getting ready for another day at the rat race, manic monday after manic monday, doing something that has no precise market value, no clear meaning, no defined outcome is the only middle finger left you can raise in a world ruled by productivism.

That is, if there were some purity of intent left in these sad times. To turn an initial impulse of creativity or personal expression into the Roman circus, to call for the lowest instincts of social behaviour by giving the crowds the illusion of god-like power (thumbs up! thumbs down!), is what is killing art in the end: deep, risky, ambitious craft is now for intellectual and/or economical elites only. Popular art has become this gigantic dump, a church of distraction, the one and only official soundtrack for malls and commutes.

It's filled with repetitions, copycats, reboots, and needs consumers instead of people to survive. If the public had the slightest clue of how much of it isn't original, it would collapse on the spot. Culture slowly loses its meaning, year after year. In this pernicious, panic-inducing (FOMO and other dark patterns abound) ways of living, the young know nothing of pop music but the poses, the fame, the money as pre-formatted answers to their sexual and identity struggles.

Any craft needs devotion and sacrifice. Prince, as any other artist that's worth something, traded his youth for an uncertain goal. Art takes balls. But He felt the reward that comes from painstakingly trying to do something: you sound average, and average, and a little less average until one day you find your own voice. In his particular case, it happened frighteningly fast, but that's not the point.

"American Idol". The operative word being "Idol". Like Trump, the only thing it has for itself is a certain sincerity in its uglyness: the name itself states that the whole concept is not about becoming a musician or a singer, but to become the center of attention.

"The Voice". You may think this one is more about singing, when in reality the voice it's referring to is the one of the Roman arena crowds, who will decide in the end who lives and who dies.

Fuck them all, fuck this world, fuck this France who has lost all that it stood for, fuck North America and his low IQ/EQ rednecks, fuck both of its coasts and all these fucking hipsters/hamsters who are more concerned with sipping a latte while having an internet connection than going into a voting booth, fuck this world that denies culture, fuck China and India do nothing but mimick us and repeat the same mistakes we made, pretty soon there will be nothing left of art, it will become totally pointless, your grandma and close friends included (at least you had an audience).

True artists will be left alone with nothing but a mirror to wank on.
Oh, wait, that's precisely what happened to Prince at some point!
Your gifts rot when there's no one to give them to.
Thank God, He got out of there pretty fast, and that's one of his many achievements, he went past that and made peace with this fucking illusion that the world could be transformed by beauty.
The craftsman does his craft, and it's enough, art is its own reward.

Art is a great concept, and I sure wish it for the world.
But the stages, the channels, they're owned by management school dorks now.

A trained monkey is a trained monkey. But because people lack culture, they think yodling and flexing vocal cords is singing, but it ain't. The alternative died, in all sense, when Kurt Cobain realized the mountain has gotten to high a climb, and that the revolution will never happen.
It's just too late, all minds are fucked permantently.
No Great Spirit, no unification, no holy purpose. Marley's chants are echoing in the void of sophomore's rooms discovering pot, and that's how far they will ever go. They disappear in smoke.
Guevara is a poster, a t-shirt, a mug, and nothing more. Soon it will speak to no one (if it ever did).

Culture takes time, culture means uncertainty, fear of having being wrong all this time, fear of seeing new possibilities, a creeping, dawning acknowledgement of how deep they are fucking you and dragging you down, culture is what could save the world from the Goldman Sachs cokehead who is playing with water and seeds as I'm writing this rant, fated to end in to the petabytes of the deafening digital noise of people wasting their time by fulfilling Andy Warhol's prophecies.

Looking like, or in this case, sounding like, has become more important than finding and searching and suffering, until your true voice is found.
I would gladly join a choir of souls brave enough to take the rocky path.
I know they're out there, but they divided us, and boy do they conquered.

Prince is more than they could ever understand: he's a model, he's a compass.
When his muse had nothing left to say, he grabbed her by the throat, slapped her, made amends, pleaded, prayed her, acted as if he didn't care, but he never left the building.
We're all fucking cowards next to him.
The minute our muse stay silent, we retreat to what they programmed us for.

No, you don't approach the song where he tries to reconcile his father and his mother.
This is deep. It took him a decade and a half to find the proper way to express it.
Unless you lived it yourself, you're doomed to fake it.
And Lord knows they do.

[Edited 4/2/17 13:06pm]

But don't you think that each previous generation all thought the very same thing about the existing generation's art? That it was clumsy and awful and dreary?

And could it be that the current folks who are doing whatever they're doing feel as if they're "creating art"? And that they'll be appreciated by those it resonates with now and in the future?

I think this says it all:

[Edited 4/2/17 14:20pm]

and great essay bona