onlyforaminute said:

I did the PP tour, and while in the office looking at his interview with Travis, I was just talking to some people about how long he'd been friends with him and this lady went to the guide and ask if Prince was black. Some people are completely unaware he is.

This lack of the fact in many is true, I remember my little brother and a friend were hangin out back in my college days, they were in high school. And the friend actually said, "Is Prince black?" and then... "If people knew he was black more people would like him" This was after "Diamonds and Pearls" and but before the symbol album.

True story that.

ufoclub said:

onlyforaminute said:

I did the PP tour, and while in the office looking at his interview with Travis, I was just talking to some people about how long he'd been friends with him and this lady went to the guide and ask if Prince was black. Some people are completely unaware he is.

This lack of the fact in many is true, I remember my little brother and a friend were hangin out back in my college days, they were in high school. And the friend actually said, "Is Prince black?" and then... "If people knew he was black more people would like him" This was after "Diamonds and Pearls" and but before the symbol album.

True story that.

Ok. I wish I could to hear the explanation of that one.

lol @ race stuff. facts are facts. again, then there's songs like black muse & baltimore. Prince is black. period. "Like Books and Black lives, albums still matter" remember that? all i'm saying is people who aren't black love to make his blackness irrelevant just as they do every other black artist with all kinds of fans.

OldFriends4Sale said:

tab32792 said:

music is not just music...and it has nothing to do with insecurities. why do his non black fans always take it personally when we claim him? then they constantly inject old utopian lyrics from 40 years ago vs. more recent material? lol

let's be careful about the race stuff, it turns the thread, and then needs to get moved to P&R

.

but Prince continued with the utopian lyrics through his whole career. Even a song like Lavaux and 3121 are in the same vein as 7, Alphabet St, Mountains, Paisley Park, ATWIAD, The Dance Electric, Uptown. You hear the same message throught the Truth album. Prince never changed from that. He was very constant and consistent in it. Afshin Shahidi's book is a photographical testament to it. When he made a reply about the Grammy awards being more diverse, or one of those award shows he said "That is the America I know"

.
Through the gates, knock on the door
Put you're clothes in the pile on the floor
Take you're pick from the Japanese robes and sandals
Drink champagne from a glass with chocolate handles

Lock the door
'Til you see the sun
We gon' party like there ain't gonna be another one
Futuristic fantasy
This is where the purple party people be

.

And when he had his parties, he made sure it reflected that.

.

I mean remember Prince is still the man who had even deeper 'religious and spiritual' ideals of life that probably had more affect on him than politics and race and sex.

.

Take me to the vineyards of Lavaux

Want to see the mountains where the waters flow
Life back home depresses me, just another form of slavery
The cost of freedom is anything but free

I don't care if they are covered with snow
I don't care if the road is narrow, if it is I'll know
It was always meant to be, still in love I must believe
Whatever path I choose will lead me home
Lead me home, Lavaux

Take me to the streets of Portugal
That might be my destiny to see the waterfall
Tears or rain, they're all the same
The only way to win this game
To let everybody play and share the ball

Ain't nobody got no chains on me (they got no chains on me)
I'm flying higher than any mountain, deeper than any sea
A paradox is box's key, I'm the why in mystery
You can unlock the secrets if you please

Come take me to an assembly in New York
To speak of the brand new everlasting wonder war
To win or lose is so absurd
And the only casualties the word, the word

Revolution time has come today
'Cause it took a black face to see the same decay
Like the chocolate of Vavey, in the sun they'll melt away
As for me, I'll laugh and go to the mountains where the waters flow
Back to the vineyards of Lavaux

Lavaux
Lavaux
Lavaux
Lavaux

darkroman said:

Some of these posts are the reason dudes essay is essential lol. smh at those who still dont get it.

I am white and had lived in a very diverse area for 30+ years, Berkeley/Oakland,until recently. One thing I have learned is that I am, by the very nature of not being black, "not always getting it". I know I don't.

Many of my black friends and acquaintances have been good about it but I do detect some patient eye-rolls at times.I think what Black folks may be saying is that we are not able to completely tune into the entire experience of what it was like to be Prince. And, I would like to graciously accept that. I think it was said during Michael Bland's recent interview that Prince was in a club in Minneapolis watching a performer. He wrote something on a napkin and brought it up to the performer and it said "you are not black". He was aware of being black and I just wish white folks could realize this is not something we shared with him, but that is OK. I think we need to step back a wee bit and hear what our black friends may be trying to tell us.

[Edited 11/10/18 10:07am]

When I say folks arent getting it, Im talking abut what the essay is basically about. That most written about Prince is from a different perspective aka from white writers for whatever reason that may be (certain publications hiring certain witers, the industry being rockist etc etc). So that overall we mostly get a, lack of better term, white view of Prince's importance etc. Nothing wrong with havin other views of his music and being, but there also needs to be a view with black folks as writers to be considered JUST AS MUCH. Hell, just like the heralded Pop Life book had dismissive statements about some of his RnB tracks being described as throwaways proves the essays point. I remember posting a Greg Tate review of Princes 1984 show and some folks were critical of it because it contained his view from a black writer regarding what HE felt the white audience didn't get and how things ..done changed..with said audience now being front and center of the Prince world.

Here is that article from Record magazine on the openeing of the Purple Rain tour. It is the top 3-4 most important thing written about him in the 80's imho.

And He Was Baa-aad

COPPING MOVES FROM ALL THE GREATS, AND ADDING A FEW OF HIS OWN, PRINCE ROCKS, FUNKS AND ROLLS ACROSS AMERICA – BY GREG TATE

DEARLY BELOVED WE ARE GATHERED here to get through this thang called Prince---three nights worth of the mug to be exact. All of which just went down in Detroit, where your truly caught the opening leg of His Royal Badness’ Purple Rain tour. Since naturally the first thing you want to know is just how bad was he I won’t hold you in suspense: the Kid was baa-aad. Which is to say he put on a bout as exiting a funk-cum-pop-rock-and-roll show as you’re going to get these days. Up front, however, let me warn you of my reservations, because baa-aad as he was, he wasn’t electrifying or awe-inspiring even, just pretty damn good. For the record, though (no pun intended), he had the most massive sound system I’d seen since Van Halen, went through more than half a dozen costume changes (half of which came from Hendrix’ and Sly Stone’s wardrobe closets) and had as many sets and props onstage as you’d need to throw on a Broadway musical. We’re talking purple curtains, back projections screens, fountains, a bathtub, balustrade, spiral stairway, hydraulic lifts up the kazoo, Prince mannequins, confetti, a Star Wars light show and enough dry ice smoke to make the stage look like it was fast on its way to becoming a Transylvanian moat.

The bulk of the set consisted of Purple Rain material, natch, with the exceptions of “1999,” “Delirious,” “Little Red Corvette” and a bizarre ballad medley of “Free,” “Do Me Baby” and “God.” I say bizarre because the vibes projected during this interlude ranged from hammy, lachrymose and blasphemous to asinine and cloyingly confessional. The hammy part came during “Do Me Baby,” where Prince makes like the lyrics’ show of vulnerability so embarrasses him that he just cannot finish the song and must leave the stage before losing face. (Naturally the nubile screaming-meemies in attendance stroked his ego enough to save him from a total wimp-out. Manhood secure, homeboy continued on with the show.) Lachrymose was Prince falling to his knees whining that the powers that be had never given him any awards. Asinine was Prince shaking his little tail-feather and sneering as to how he wondered when they’d be giving out awards for the best ass. The blasphemous portion of the show came when after leading the crowd through a Sunday school hymn (“God made you/God made me/God made us all equally”) our anti-hero went through a Jekyll-and-Hyde bit at the keyboard, became possessed by devilish sexual temptation and asked God if he’d like to take a bath with him. At which point he ascended a staircase, stripped to his caballero pants, lid into this tub for a neon green shower and descended hydraulically to the smoky lower depths beneath the stage (when he came up for “Computer Blue” he was in S&M garb). Now while I ain’t no born-again Christian and certainly don’t think sex is a sin before God, this kinky little tableau put about as chiller a vibe on me as I’ve ever gotten from a concert; not in the least because it was soon followed by backwards running tapes and the arena being plunged into abyssinian darkness. Too weird for the kid y’all.

In any event, for journalistic purposes let me acknowledge that on opening night the Cool Ruler clearly came out nervous and jittery, racing through a raggedy version of “Let’s Go Crazy” and not settling down until about halfway through when he sat at the piano for the ballad medley and thanked Detroit for their years of support, explaining that was howcum he’d chosen to have the tour’s first party there. Trip is, though, the audiences for all three sell-out shows in the 22,000 seat Joe Louis Arena were 90 percent white, so the people Prince were thanking weren’t even the ones who’d been his backbone before Purple Rain proved the power of movies and MTV to make or break you in pop America. Last tour Prince did six nights in Detroit at the Masonic Temple, so the locals told me, and damn near nothing but black folks rocked the house for those shows. So now check this out: while you figure Prince knows he’s conquered this apartheid-oriented culture to the point where there’s gonna be some palefaces showing up at his gigs that weren’t there a year ago, even he didn’t have any notion that the brothers and sisters were mostly missing in action from this year’s Detroit stop. What proved this to me was when Prince tried to get the audience to do the dog chant you’ll hear if you been to any black concerts recently (any post-P-funk’s “Atomic Dog” tour that is). After trying to rouse the crowd into doing the dog with him and getting nothing back but blank stares he asked, “Is this Detroit?!” Which said to me something’s going on here but Mr. Prince don’t know what it is: that on a certain level he might as well have been saying “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

No one I talked to in Detroit gave me an adequate explanation for why so many bloods chose to miss out on presumably the biggest concert event of the year. Unlike the Michael Jackson fandango, it wasn’t because of ticket prices or venue: $17.50 was tops in the first balcony and Joe Louis Arena is in the heart of downtown Detroit. The answer may lie in a combination of factors. Some said it’s because us black folks are notorious for waiting until the day of the show to cop tickets (though in my hometown of Washington, D.C., the brothers and sisters bought 130,000 seats in six hours for Prince’s mid-November shows there). Others I talked to said they’d seen him seven or eight times already and didn’t feel pressed to catch him this time around. Still others professed that while Prince had made his bones with Detroit’s hardcore funk crowd, the ratio of rockers to funk numbers on Purple Rainjust plain turned the mugs off; maybe even cost him some of his black audience. It’s a mystery to me just what the real deal is far as this racial imbroglio goes, but I do know that before he came back for his encore that first night, bloods were screaming at the top of their lungs for Prince-funk like “Erotic City,” “Lady Cab Driver” and Irresistible Bitch.” One brother in fact wanted to hear the latter so bad he got to hurling obscenities at Prince—as in “Play Irresistible Bitch’ you bitch, you faggot mutha!” Listening to Detroit’s black radio stations, however, you didn’t get any sense that he’d lost a black audience: flipping from station to station you could hear “Erotic City” non-stop, like it was damn near on a city wide tape loop. And in fact one local deejay of reknown, “The Electrifying Mojo,” nightly devoted his entire graveyard shift to nothing but the music of Prince, with maybe a little Time, Sheila E., Apollonia 6 thrown in to relieve the routine of radioactive splendor.

If the Detroit shows proved anything—besides the fact that next to Michael Jackson Prince is the biggest black crossover act in pop history—it’s that he’s out to prove himself the living embodiment of every baa-aad mutha who ever rocked, funked and rolled the American stage. I mean this cat done copped all the moves, man—James Brown’s, Jimi Hendrix’, Sly Stone’s, Little Richard’s, Elvis’, Mick Jagger’s, Cab Calloway’s, the Nicholas Brothers’—and got a few of his own to boot, like the humping-the-speaker, holding-one-leg-behind-his-back bit he does during “darling Nikki,” which I’ve seen turn women from 16 to 60 into quivering bowls of Jell-o. Funny thing is, for all his eroticism Prince really doesn’t come off as any more electric a performer than Michael Jackson, as everybody has been predicting he would. Reason being that Michael not only got just as much fire but more grace and precision, not to mention originality. In his moves; and the media saturation of him on film and video for lo these many months undercut Prince’s dynamism in an arena, where intimacy is lost alongside the novelty of his routine. As energetic as the shows were, they also had a air of the perfunctory about them, not so much because I felt like he was going through the motions, but because he had shot so much of wad in the movie. Making me realize that this was the first time he’d ever gone out on tour having to top himself. In sum, while Prince rose to the challenge—dancing, singing, and playing his booty off—there was an emotional depreciation to experiencing the event that, again, I think derives from how dramatically the film set up his moves and music. Where the live performance transcended the film though, was in the encores of “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” and then the second encore of “Purple Rain.”

“Baby I’m a Star” is especially killer because it’s like Prince’s version of the James Brown/Sly Stone revues combined: I’m saying here’s where the brother bust out with his fanciest amalgam of dance steps yet, the splits, the breaking, the works. Even gets to telling the band to give him five stoptime breaks on the one, just like the Godfather of Soul does. For the second night’s encore he even brought on Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Apollonia 6 and Sheila E. for some impromptu jamming and throwing down. And matter of fact, soon as Jerome hit the stage I thought to myself (while boogying along) how sorry I was that the original Time had disbanded; because while Prince might be more versatile, Morris Day and crew got the funk in their bones like no other band I’ve heard since Parliament-Funkadelic. And anybody want to talk choreography knows the Time’s unison steps so smooth, supple and slick they make Prince look like he got two left feet for days. Another problem I had with Prince’s act now, matter of fact, is that he’s really the only one up on stage who throws down visually in terms of that terpsichore. Guitarist Wendy Melvoin and bassist Brown Mark look cool and doohickey on the frontline, but the Prince band with Dez Dickerson and Andre Cymone was too chill. Yet if the loss of Dez and Cymone cost Prince’s show a measurable degree of fire and stage presence, losing his black audience of old to the MTV generation may end up costing him something more precious as far as emotional and spiritual gratification goes. I really didn’t pick up this vibe until the final encore of “Purple Rain,” truly the evening’s transcendent moment all three nights. Principally because it’s there Prince kicks into a torrid and explosively intense 10-minute guitar solo ablaze with Hendrixian fury (albeit if not ablaze with Hendrixian imagination). The spiritual pull Prince exerts stretching out this anthem is both riveting and chilling, because for perhaps the first time in the show you feel as plugged into whatever energy he’s been drawing on a she himself does. The upshot is that on the third night he got so into it his face and body were visibly wracked with pain, suffering, tears and, dare I say it, a need to be loved. And however he came to sense it, he seemed to know that his audience that night was not feeding back to him what he was pouring forth in incendiary ergs. And during the end of the solo he began screaming and cursing at the crowd, the rage clearly evident on his face. I suddenly thought of Hendrix back when he was playing his heart out to stadiums full of drugged-out zombies who could no more reciprocate his energy than catatonics; only this crew wasn't spiritually void by way of substance abuse (I may have smelled but one or two joints each evening) but by way of music videos. Concerts simply aren’t the Events of One’s Young Life as they were when I was coming up. The rock audience of today is so saturated by music, its heroes so accessible by way of television, film and home video that much of the magic of live events seems to have been considerable diminished. Walking out of the show with Prince’s audience I felt none of the excitement or electricity in the air that I know would’ve been there when me and my friends were 16-, 17-, 18-years old; that night I felt like I was with people who were heading home after watching a giant video screen light up then fade to black. And I got to wondering what would happen to Prince when, like Hendrix, he got tired of being the circus freak and just wanted to receive as much respect for his musicianship as for his visual razzle-dazzle and highly sexual showmanship.

One thing I’ve never felt Prince has gotten enough credit for is how much he truly loves music in all its varieties and forms. The Purple Rain album is proof positive of this with all its quotes and homages to Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Yardbirds, hip-hop, Zep, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and hosts of others. I’ve never felt like the physicality of Prince’s talents as a performer were just phony bits of stage business; clearly he loves dancing and showboating for the crowd as much as he does writing and composing—yet the danger is in getting trapped in his audience’s expectations for him to continually play the freak for them, and losing his musicality to the antics in the process. But I’ve got hope that this won’t happen to the Kid. More then any other rock star besides David Bowie (whom I’m convinced Prince has learned a few lessons from), Prince long ago showed himself savvy enough to know that to stay ahead in this business you’ve got to never let people get too familiar with your music or your face. And it’s for that reason that I, like every other Prince fan of old, am waiting to see what he’s going to come up with for an encore, if for no other reason than that he’s capable do so many unpredictable metamorphosis and musical coups. (With “Erotic City” he’s given funk the crossover appeal George Clinton has been attempting for years, and though protégé Sheila E.—who put on a killer show opening for him, sporting the tightest band choreography I’ve seem since the Time—he’s managed a provocative and popular synthesis of Latin pop new wave like August Darnell/Kid Creole has been wanting to get over with for half a decade now.) Meaning that in the final analysis the big question with regards to the Crown Chameleon of Pop is now that he’s got America eating out of the palm of his hand, what’s he gonna feed ‘em next? Stay tuned.

....

[Edited 11/10/18 9:59am]

Moonbeam said:

I think this article is quite good. Like it or not, Prince’s continuing legacy is still being written through books, career retrospectives, and extended pieces like this that attempt to contextualize who Prince was as well as how and why he mattered and continues to matter. The truth is that as time passes, it will become increasingly easy for the truth to become distorted because Prince is no longer with us. And while many thinkpieces after his death have attempted to shoehorn Prince into a narrative that isn’t warranted (I remember one that tried to align Prince’s career with hip hop, for example), this isn’t one of them. Prince was a black artist, and his experiences as a black man certainly shaped a lot of what he thought and felt throughout his career, right until the end. If somehow that is becoming lost, then there is every reason for those who know better to present the picture correctly.

It has been my observation that the purple lore (which has been built up over many years by a majority white fanbase) tends 2 consist of cherry picked quotes & subjective (& at times agenda driven) opinions on Prince.
At the same time they have ignored & dismissed certain other people's quotes & insights. The fans who have tried 2 discuss these issues have also been dismissed, & censored. The gods of the lore are people like Hahn, Alan Leeds, the Melvoins & Susan Rogers.

[Edited 11/10/18 9:51am]

rdhull said:

Some of these posts are the reason dudes essay is essential lol. smh at those who still dont get it.

Exactly.

rdhull said:

When I say folks arent getting it, Im talking abut what the essay is basically about. That most written about Prince is from a different perspective aka from white writers forwhatever reason that may be (certain publications hiring certain witers, the industry being rockist etc etc). So that overall we motly get a , lack of better term, white view of Prince's importance etc. Nothing wrong with havin other views of his music and being but there also needs to be a view with black folks as writers to be considered JUST AS MUCH. Hell, just like the heralded Pop Life book had dismissive statements about some of his RnB tracks being described as throwaways proves the essays point. I remmeber posting a Greg tate review of Princes show and some folks were critical of it because it contained his view froma blck writer regarding what HE felt the white audience didnt get and how things ..doe changed..with said audience now being fron and center of the Prince world.

Here is that article from Record magazine on the openeing of the Purple Rain tour. It is the top 3-4 most important thing written about him in the 80's imho.

And He Was Baa-aad

COPPING MOVES FROM ALL THE GREATS, AND ADDING A FEW OF HIS OWN, PRINCE ROCKS, FUNKS AND ROLLS ACROSS AMERICA – BY GREG TATE

DEARLY BELOVED WE ARE GATHERED here to get through this thang called Prince---three nights worth of the mug to be exact. All of which just went down in Detroit, where your truly caught the opening leg of His Royal Badness’ Purple Rain tour. Since naturally the first thing you want to know is just how bad was he I won’t hold you in suspense: the Kid was baa-aad. Which is to say he put on a bout as exiting a funk-cum-pop-rock-and-roll show as you’re going to get these days. Up front, however, let me warn you of my reservations, because baa-aad as he was, he wasn’t electrifying or awe-inspiring even, just pretty damn good. For the record, though (no pun intended), he had the most massive sound system I’d seen since Van Halen, went through more than half a dozen costume changes (half of which came from Hendrix’ and Sly Stone’s wardrobe closets) and had as many sets and props onstage as you’d need to throw on a Broadway musical. We’re talking purple curtains, back projections screens, fountains, a bathtub, balustrade, spiral stairway, hydraulic lifts up the kazoo, Prince mannequins, confetti, a Star Wars light show and enough dry ice smoke to make the stage look like it was fast on its way to becoming a Transylvanian moat.

The bulk of the set consisted of Purple Rain material, natch, with the exceptions of “1999,” “Delirious,” “Little Red Corvette” and a bizarre ballad medley of “Free,” “Do Me Baby” and “God.” I say bizarre because the vibes projected during this interlude ranged from hammy, lachrymose and blasphemous to asinine and cloyingly confessional. The hammy part came during “Do Me Baby,” where Prince makes like the lyrics’ show of vulnerability so embarrasses him that he just cannot finish the song and must leave the stage before losing face. (Naturally the nubile screaming-meemies in attendance stroked his ego enough to save him from a total wimp-out. Manhood secure, homeboy continued on with the show.) Lachrymose was Prince falling to his knees whining that the powers that be had never given him any awards. Asinine was Prince shaking his little tail-feather and sneering as to how he wondered when they’d be giving out awards for the best ass. The blasphemous portion of the show came when after leading the crowd through a Sunday school hymn (“God made you/God made me/God made us all equally”) our anti-hero went through a Jekyll-and-Hyde bit at the keyboard, became possessed by devilish sexual temptation and asked God if he’d like to take a bath with him. At which point he ascended a staircase, stripped to his caballero pants, lid into this tub for a neon green shower and descended hydraulically to the smoky lower depths beneath the stage (when he came up for “Computer Blue” he was in S&M garb). Now while I ain’t no born-again Christian and certainly don’t think sex is a sin before God, this kinky little tableau put about as chiller a vibe on me as I’ve ever gotten from a concert; not in the least because it was soon followed by backwards running tapes and the arena being plunged into abyssinian darkness. Too weird for the kid y’all.

In any event, for journalistic purposes let me acknowledge that on opening night the Cool Ruler clearly came out nervous and jittery, racing through a raggedy version of “Let’s Go Crazy” and not settling down until about halfway through when he sat at the piano for the ballad medley and thanked Detroit for their years of support, explaining that was howcum he’d chosen to have the tour’s first party there. Trip is, though, the audiences for all three sell-out shows in the 22,000 seat Joe Louis Arena were 90 percent white, so the people Prince were thanking weren’t even the ones who’d been his backbone before Purple Rain proved the power of movies and MTV to make or break you in pop America. Last tour Prince did six nights in Detroit at the Masonic Temple, so the locals told me, and damn near nothing but black folks rocked the house for those shows. So now check this out: while you figure Prince knows he’s conquered this apartheid-oriented culture to the point where there’s gonna be some palefaces showing up at his gigs that weren’t there a year ago, even he didn’t have any notion that the brothers and sisters were mostly missing in action from this year’s Detroit stop. What proved this to me was when Prince tried to get the audience to do the dog chant you’ll hear if you been to any black concerts recently (any post-P-funk’s “Atomic Dog” tour that is). After trying to rouse the crowd into doing the dog with him and getting nothing back but blank stares he asked, “Is this Detroit?!” Which said to me something’s going on here but Mr. Prince don’t know what it is: that on a certain level he might as well have been saying “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

No one I talked to in Detroit gave me an adequate explanation for why so many bloods chose to miss out on presumably the biggest concert event of the year. Unlike the Michael Jackson fandango, it wasn’t because of ticket prices or venue: $17.50 was tops in the first balcony and Joe Louis Arena is in the heart of downtown Detroit. The answer may lie in a combination of factors. Some said it’s because us black folks are notorious for waiting until the day of the show to cop tickets (though in my hometown of Washington, D.C., the brothers and sisters bought 130,000 seats in six hours for Prince’s mid-November shows there). Others I talked to said they’d seen him seven or eight times already and didn’t feel pressed to catch him this time around. Still others professed that while Prince had made his bones with Detroit’s hardcore funk crowd, the ratio of rockers to funk numbers on Purple Rainjust plain turned the mugs off; maybe even cost him some of his black audience. It’s a mystery to me just what the real deal is far as this racial imbroglio goes, but I do know that before he came back for his encore that first night, bloods were screaming at the top of their lungs for Prince-funk like “Erotic City,” “Lady Cab Driver” and Irresistible Bitch.” One brother in fact wanted to hear the latter so bad he got to hurling obscenities at Prince—as in “Play Irresistible Bitch’ you bitch, you faggot mutha!” Listening to Detroit’s black radio stations, however, you didn’t get any sense that he’d lost a black audience: flipping from station to station you could hear “Erotic City” non-stop, like it was damn near on a city wide tape loop. And in fact one local deejay of reknown, “The Electrifying Mojo,” nightly devoted his entire graveyard shift to nothing but the music of Prince, with maybe a little Time, Sheila E., Apollonia 6 thrown in to relieve the routine of radioactive splendor.

If the Detroit shows proved anything—besides the fact that next to Michael Jackson Prince is the biggest black crossover act in pop history—it’s that he’s out to prove himself the living embodiment of every baa-aad mutha who ever rocked, funked and rolled the American stage. I mean this cat done copped all the moves, man—James Brown’s, Jimi Hendrix’, Sly Stone’s, Little Richard’s, Elvis’, Mick Jagger’s, Cab Calloway’s, the Nicholas Brothers’—and got a few of his own to boot, like the humping-the-speaker, holding-one-leg-behind-his-back bit he does during “darling Nikki,” which I’ve seen turn women from 16 to 60 into quivering bowls of Jell-o. Funny thing is, for all his eroticism Prince really doesn’t come off as any more electric a performer than Michael Jackson, as everybody has been predicting he would. Reason being that Michael not only got just as much fire but more grace and precision, not to mention originality. In his moves; and the media saturation of him on film and video for lo these many months undercut Prince’s dynamism in an arena, where intimacy is lost alongside the novelty of his routine. As energetic as the shows were, they also had a air of the perfunctory about them, not so much because I felt like he was going through the motions, but because he had shot so much of wad in the movie. Making me realize that this was the first time he’d ever gone out on tour having to top himself. In sum, while Prince rose to the challenge—dancing, singing, and playing his booty off—there was an emotional depreciation to experiencing the event that, again, I think derives from how dramatically the film set up his moves and music. Where the live performance transcended the film though, was in the encores of “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” and then the second encore of “Purple Rain.”

“Baby I’m a Star” is especially killer because it’s like Prince’s version of the James Brown/Sly Stone revues combined: I’m saying here’s where the brother bust out with his fanciest amalgam of dance steps yet, the splits, the breaking, the works. Even gets to telling the band to give him five stoptime breaks on the one, just like the Godfather of Soul does. For the second night’s encore he even brought on Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Apollonia 6 and Sheila E. for some impromptu jamming and throwing down. And matter of fact, soon as Jerome hit the stage I thought to myself (while boogying along) how sorry I was that the original Time had disbanded; because while Prince might be more versatile, Morris Day and crew got the funk in their bones like no other band I’ve heard since Parliament-Funkadelic. And anybody want to talk choreography knows the Time’s unison steps so smooth, supple and slick they make Prince look like he got two left feet for days. Another problem I had with Prince’s act now, matter of fact, is that he’s really the only one up on stage who throws down visually in terms of that terpsichore. Guitarist Wendy Melvoin and bassist Brown Mark look cool and doohickey on the frontline, but the Prince band with Dez Dickerson and Andre Cymone was too chill. Yet if the loss of Dez and Cymone cost Prince’s show a measurable degree of fire and stage presence, losing his black audience of old to the MTV generation may end up costing him something more precious as far as emotional and spiritual gratification goes. I really didn’t pick up this vibe until the final encore of “Purple Rain,” truly the evening’s transcendent moment all three nights. Principally because it’s there Prince kicks into a torrid and explosively intense 10-minute guitar solo ablaze with Hendrixian fury (albeit if not ablaze with Hendrixian imagination). The spiritual pull Prince exerts stretching out this anthem is both riveting and chilling, because for perhaps the first time in the show you feel as plugged into whatever energy he’s been drawing on a she himself does. The upshot is that on the third night he got so into it his face and body were visibly wracked with pain, suffering, tears and, dare I say it, a need to be loved. And however he came to sense it, he seemed to know that his audience that night was not feeding back to him what he was pouring forth in incendiary ergs. And during the end of the solo he began screaming and cursing at the crowd, the rage clearly evident on his face. I suddenly thought of Hendrix back when he was playing his heart out to stadiums full of drugged-out zombies who could no more reciprocate his energy than catatonics; only this crew wasn't spiritually void by way of substance abuse (I may have smelled but one or two joints each evening) but by way of music videos. Concerts simply aren’t the Events of One’s Young Life as they were when I was coming up. The rock audience of today is so saturated by music, its heroes so accessible by way of television, film and home video that much of the magic of live events seems to have been considerable diminished. Walking out of the show with Prince’s audience I felt none of the excitement or electricity in the air that I know would’ve been there when me and my friends were 16-, 17-, 18-years old; that night I felt like I was with people who were heading home after watching a giant video screen light up then fade to black. And I got to wondering what would happen to Prince when, like Hendrix, he got tired of being the circus freak and just wanted to receive as much respect for his musicianship as for his visual razzle-dazzle and highly sexual showmanship.

One thing I’ve never felt Prince has gotten enough credit for is how much he truly loves music in all its varieties and forms. The Purple Rain album is proof positive of this with all its quotes and homages to Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Yardbirds, hip-hop, Zep, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and hosts of others. I’ve never felt like the physicality of Prince’s talents as a performer were just phony bits of stage business; clearly he loves dancing and showboating for the crowd as much as he does writing and composing—yet the danger is in getting trapped in his audience’s expectations for him to continually play the freak for them, and losing his musicality to the antics in the process. But I’ve got hope that this won’t happen to the Kid. More then any other rock star besides David Bowie (whom I’m convinced Prince has learned a few lessons from), Prince long ago showed himself savvy enough to know that to stay ahead in this business you’ve got to never let people get too familiar with your music or your face. And it’s for that reason that I, like every other Prince fan of old, am waiting to see what he’s going to come up with for an encore, if for no other reason than that he’s capable do so many unpredictable metamorphosis and musical coups. (With “Erotic City” he’s given funk the crossover appeal George Clinton has been attempting for years, and though protégé Sheila E.—who put on a killer show opening for him, sporting the tightest band choreography I’ve seem since the Time—he’s managed a provocative and popular synthesis of Latin pop new wave like August Darnell/Kid Creole has been wanting to get over with for half a decade now.) Meaning that in the final analysis the big question with regards to the Crown Chameleon of Pop is now that he’s got America eating out of the palm of his hand, what’s he gonna feed ‘em next? Stay tuned.

....

[Edited 11/10/18 8:52am]

Thank you for sharing that.

ABro said:

rdhull said:

When I say folks arent getting it, Im talking abut what the essay is basically about. That most written about Prince is from a different perspective aka from white writers forwhatever reason that may be (certain publications hiring certain witers, the industry being rockist etc etc). So that overall we motly get a , lack of better term, white view of Prince's importance etc. Nothing wrong with havin other views of his music and being but there also needs to be a view with black folks as writers to be considered JUST AS MUCH. Hell, just like the heralded Pop Life book had dismissive statements about some of his RnB tracks being described as throwaways proves the essays point. I remmeber posting a Greg tate review of Princes show and some folks were critical of it because it contained his view froma blck writer regarding what HE felt the white audience didnt get and how things ..doe changed..with said audience now being fron and center of the Prince world.

Here is that article from Record magazine on the openeing of the Purple Rain tour. It is the top 3-4 most important thing written about him in the 80's imho.

And He Was Baa-aad

COPPING MOVES FROM ALL THE GREATS, AND ADDING A FEW OF HIS OWN, PRINCE ROCKS, FUNKS AND ROLLS ACROSS AMERICA – BY GREG TATE

DEARLY BELOVED WE ARE GATHERED here to get through this thang called Prince---three nights worth of the mug to be exact. All of which just went down in Detroit, where your truly caught the opening leg of His Royal Badness’ Purple Rain tour. Since naturally the first thing you want to know is just how bad was he I won’t hold you in suspense: the Kid was baa-aad. Which is to say he put on a bout as exiting a funk-cum-pop-rock-and-roll show as you’re going to get these days. Up front, however, let me warn you of my reservations, because baa-aad as he was, he wasn’t electrifying or awe-inspiring even, just pretty damn good. For the record, though (no pun intended), he had the most massive sound system I’d seen since Van Halen, went through more than half a dozen costume changes (half of which came from Hendrix’ and Sly Stone’s wardrobe closets) and had as many sets and props onstage as you’d need to throw on a Broadway musical. We’re talking purple curtains, back projections screens, fountains, a bathtub, balustrade, spiral stairway, hydraulic lifts up the kazoo, Prince mannequins, confetti, a Star Wars light show and enough dry ice smoke to make the stage look like it was fast on its way to becoming a Transylvanian moat.

The bulk of the set consisted of Purple Rain material, natch, with the exceptions of “1999,” “Delirious,” “Little Red Corvette” and a bizarre ballad medley of “Free,” “Do Me Baby” and “God.” I say bizarre because the vibes projected during this interlude ranged from hammy, lachrymose and blasphemous to asinine and cloyingly confessional. The hammy part came during “Do Me Baby,” where Prince makes like the lyrics’ show of vulnerability so embarrasses him that he just cannot finish the song and must leave the stage before losing face. (Naturally the nubile screaming-meemies in attendance stroked his ego enough to save him from a total wimp-out. Manhood secure, homeboy continued on with the show.) Lachrymose was Prince falling to his knees whining that the powers that be had never given him any awards. Asinine was Prince shaking his little tail-feather and sneering as to how he wondered when they’d be giving out awards for the best ass. The blasphemous portion of the show came when after leading the crowd through a Sunday school hymn (“God made you/God made me/God made us all equally”) our anti-hero went through a Jekyll-and-Hyde bit at the keyboard, became possessed by devilish sexual temptation and asked God if he’d like to take a bath with him. At which point he ascended a staircase, stripped to his caballero pants, lid into this tub for a neon green shower and descended hydraulically to the smoky lower depths beneath the stage (when he came up for “Computer Blue” he was in S&M garb). Now while I ain’t no born-again Christian and certainly don’t think sex is a sin before God, this kinky little tableau put about as chiller a vibe on me as I’ve ever gotten from a concert; not in the least because it was soon followed by backwards running tapes and the arena being plunged into abyssinian darkness. Too weird for the kid y’all.

In any event, for journalistic purposes let me acknowledge that on opening night the Cool Ruler clearly came out nervous and jittery, racing through a raggedy version of “Let’s Go Crazy” and not settling down until about halfway through when he sat at the piano for the ballad medley and thanked Detroit for their years of support, explaining that was howcum he’d chosen to have the tour’s first party there. Trip is, though, the audiences for all three sell-out shows in the 22,000 seat Joe Louis Arena were 90 percent white, so the people Prince were thanking weren’t even the ones who’d been his backbone before Purple Rain proved the power of movies and MTV to make or break you in pop America. Last tour Prince did six nights in Detroit at the Masonic Temple, so the locals told me, and damn near nothing but black folks rocked the house for those shows. So now check this out: while you figure Prince knows he’s conquered this apartheid-oriented culture to the point where there’s gonna be some palefaces showing up at his gigs that weren’t there a year ago, even he didn’t have any notion that the brothers and sisters were mostly missing in action from this year’s Detroit stop. What proved this to me was when Prince tried to get the audience to do the dog chant you’ll hear if you been to any black concerts recently (any post-P-funk’s “Atomic Dog” tour that is). After trying to rouse the crowd into doing the dog with him and getting nothing back but blank stares he asked, “Is this Detroit?!” Which said to me something’s going on here but Mr. Prince don’t know what it is: that on a certain level he might as well have been saying “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

No one I talked to in Detroit gave me an adequate explanation for why so many bloods chose to miss out on presumably the biggest concert event of the year. Unlike the Michael Jackson fandango, it wasn’t because of ticket prices or venue: $17.50 was tops in the first balcony and Joe Louis Arena is in the heart of downtown Detroit. The answer may lie in a combination of factors. Some said it’s because us black folks are notorious for waiting until the day of the show to cop tickets (though in my hometown of Washington, D.C., the brothers and sisters bought 130,000 seats in six hours for Prince’s mid-November shows there). Others I talked to said they’d seen him seven or eight times already and didn’t feel pressed to catch him this time around. Still others professed that while Prince had made his bones with Detroit’s hardcore funk crowd, the ratio of rockers to funk numbers on Purple Rainjust plain turned the mugs off; maybe even cost him some of his black audience. It’s a mystery to me just what the real deal is far as this racial imbroglio goes, but I do know that before he came back for his encore that first night, bloods were screaming at the top of their lungs for Prince-funk like “Erotic City,” “Lady Cab Driver” and Irresistible Bitch.” One brother in fact wanted to hear the latter so bad he got to hurling obscenities at Prince—as in “Play Irresistible Bitch’ you bitch, you faggot mutha!” Listening to Detroit’s black radio stations, however, you didn’t get any sense that he’d lost a black audience: flipping from station to station you could hear “Erotic City” non-stop, like it was damn near on a city wide tape loop. And in fact one local deejay of reknown, “The Electrifying Mojo,” nightly devoted his entire graveyard shift to nothing but the music of Prince, with maybe a little Time, Sheila E., Apollonia 6 thrown in to relieve the routine of radioactive splendor.

If the Detroit shows proved anything—besides the fact that next to Michael Jackson Prince is the biggest black crossover act in pop history—it’s that he’s out to prove himself the living embodiment of every baa-aad mutha who ever rocked, funked and rolled the American stage. I mean this cat done copped all the moves, man—James Brown’s, Jimi Hendrix’, Sly Stone’s, Little Richard’s, Elvis’, Mick Jagger’s, Cab Calloway’s, the Nicholas Brothers’—and got a few of his own to boot, like the humping-the-speaker, holding-one-leg-behind-his-back bit he does during “darling Nikki,” which I’ve seen turn women from 16 to 60 into quivering bowls of Jell-o. Funny thing is, for all his eroticism Prince really doesn’t come off as any more electric a performer than Michael Jackson, as everybody has been predicting he would. Reason being that Michael not only got just as much fire but more grace and precision, not to mention originality. In his moves; and the media saturation of him on film and video for lo these many months undercut Prince’s dynamism in an arena, where intimacy is lost alongside the novelty of his routine. As energetic as the shows were, they also had a air of the perfunctory about them, not so much because I felt like he was going through the motions, but because he had shot so much of wad in the movie. Making me realize that this was the first time he’d ever gone out on tour having to top himself. In sum, while Prince rose to the challenge—dancing, singing, and playing his booty off—there was an emotional depreciation to experiencing the event that, again, I think derives from how dramatically the film set up his moves and music. Where the live performance transcended the film though, was in the encores of “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star,” and then the second encore of “Purple Rain.”

“Baby I’m a Star” is especially killer because it’s like Prince’s version of the James Brown/Sly Stone revues combined: I’m saying here’s where the brother bust out with his fanciest amalgam of dance steps yet, the splits, the breaking, the works. Even gets to telling the band to give him five stoptime breaks on the one, just like the Godfather of Soul does. For the second night’s encore he even brought on Jerome Benton, Billy Sparks, Apollonia 6 and Sheila E. for some impromptu jamming and throwing down. And matter of fact, soon as Jerome hit the stage I thought to myself (while boogying along) how sorry I was that the original Time had disbanded; because while Prince might be more versatile, Morris Day and crew got the funk in their bones like no other band I’ve heard since Parliament-Funkadelic. And anybody want to talk choreography knows the Time’s unison steps so smooth, supple and slick they make Prince look like he got two left feet for days. Another problem I had with Prince’s act now, matter of fact, is that he’s really the only one up on stage who throws down visually in terms of that terpsichore. Guitarist Wendy Melvoin and bassist Brown Mark look cool and doohickey on the frontline, but the Prince band with Dez Dickerson and Andre Cymone was too chill. Yet if the loss of Dez and Cymone cost Prince’s show a measurable degree of fire and stage presence, losing his black audience of old to the MTV generation may end up costing him something more precious as far as emotional and spiritual gratification goes. I really didn’t pick up this vibe until the final encore of “Purple Rain,” truly the evening’s transcendent moment all three nights. Principally because it’s there Prince kicks into a torrid and explosively intense 10-minute guitar solo ablaze with Hendrixian fury (albeit if not ablaze with Hendrixian imagination). The spiritual pull Prince exerts stretching out this anthem is both riveting and chilling, because for perhaps the first time in the show you feel as plugged into whatever energy he’s been drawing on a she himself does. The upshot is that on the third night he got so into it his face and body were visibly wracked with pain, suffering, tears and, dare I say it, a need to be loved. And however he came to sense it, he seemed to know that his audience that night was not feeding back to him what he was pouring forth in incendiary ergs. And during the end of the solo he began screaming and cursing at the crowd, the rage clearly evident on his face. I suddenly thought of Hendrix back when he was playing his heart out to stadiums full of drugged-out zombies who could no more reciprocate his energy than catatonics; only this crew wasn't spiritually void by way of substance abuse (I may have smelled but one or two joints each evening) but by way of music videos. Concerts simply aren’t the Events of One’s Young Life as they were when I was coming up. The rock audience of today is so saturated by music, its heroes so accessible by way of television, film and home video that much of the magic of live events seems to have been considerable diminished. Walking out of the show with Prince’s audience I felt none of the excitement or electricity in the air that I know would’ve been there when me and my friends were 16-, 17-, 18-years old; that night I felt like I was with people who were heading home after watching a giant video screen light up then fade to black. And I got to wondering what would happen to Prince when, like Hendrix, he got tired of being the circus freak and just wanted to receive as much respect for his musicianship as for his visual razzle-dazzle and highly sexual showmanship.

One thing I’ve never felt Prince has gotten enough credit for is how much he truly loves music in all its varieties and forms. The Purple Rain album is proof positive of this with all its quotes and homages to Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Yardbirds, hip-hop, Zep, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and hosts of others. I’ve never felt like the physicality of Prince’s talents as a performer were just phony bits of stage business; clearly he loves dancing and showboating for the crowd as much as he does writing and composing—yet the danger is in getting trapped in his audience’s expectations for him to continually play the freak for them, and losing his musicality to the antics in the process. But I’ve got hope that this won’t happen to the Kid. More then any other rock star besides David Bowie (whom I’m convinced Prince has learned a few lessons from), Prince long ago showed himself savvy enough to know that to stay ahead in this business you’ve got to never let people get too familiar with your music or your face. And it’s for that reason that I, like every other Prince fan of old, am waiting to see what he’s going to come up with for an encore, if for no other reason than that he’s capable do so many unpredictable metamorphosis and musical coups. (With “Erotic City” he’s given funk the crossover appeal George Clinton has been attempting for years, and though protégé Sheila E.—who put on a killer show opening for him, sporting the tightest band choreography I’ve seem since the Time—he’s managed a provocative and popular synthesis of Latin pop new wave like August Darnell/Kid Creole has been wanting to get over with for half a decade now.) Meaning that in the final analysis the big question with regards to the Crown Chameleon of Pop is now that he’s got America eating out of the palm of his hand, what’s he gonna feed ‘em next? Stay tuned.

....

[Edited 11/10/18 8:52am]

Thank you for sharing that.

Thank you, as well

I'm talking about making racial comments about people. If someone did the same about black people you'd have a problem.

tab32792 said:

lol @ race stuff. facts are facts. again, then there's songs like black muse & baltimore. Prince is black. period. "Like Books and Black lives, albums still matter" remember that? all i'm saying is people who aren't black love to make his blackness irrelevant just as they do every other black artist with all kinds of fans.

OldFriends4Sale said:

let's be careful about the race stuff, it turns the thread, and then needs to get moved to P&R

.

but Prince continued with the utopian lyrics through his whole career. Even a song like Lavaux and 3121 are in the same vein as 7, Alphabet St, Mountains, Paisley Park, ATWIAD, The Dance Electric, Uptown. You hear the same message throught the Truth album. Prince never changed from that. He was very constant and consistent in it. Afshin Shahidi's book is a photographical testament to it. When he made a reply about the Grammy awards being more diverse, or one of those award shows he said "That is the America I know"

.
Through the gates, knock on the door
Put you're clothes in the pile on the floor
Take you're pick from the Japanese robes and sandals
Drink champagne from a glass with chocolate handles

Lock the door
'Til you see the sun
We gon' party like there ain't gonna be another one
Futuristic fantasy
This is where the purple party people be

.

And when he had his parties, he made sure it reflected that.

.

I mean remember Prince is still the man who had even deeper 'religious and spiritual' ideals of life that probably had more affect on him than politics and race and sex.

.

Take me to the vineyards of Lavaux

Want to see the mountains where the waters flow
Life back home depresses me, just another form of slavery
The cost of freedom is anything but free

I don't care if they are covered with snow
I don't care if the road is narrow, if it is I'll know
It was always meant to be, still in love I must believe
Whatever path I choose will lead me home
Lead me home, Lavaux

Take me to the streets of Portugal
That might be my destiny to see the waterfall
Tears or rain, they're all the same
The only way to win this game
To let everybody play and share the ball

Ain't nobody got no chains on me (they got no chains on me)
I'm flying higher than any mountain, deeper than any sea
A paradox is box's key, I'm the why in mystery
You can unlock the secrets if you please

Come take me to an assembly in New York
To speak of the brand new everlasting wonder war
To win or lose is so absurd
And the only casualties the word, the word

Revolution time has come today
'Cause it took a black face to see the same decay
Like the chocolate of Vavey, in the sun they'll melt away
As for me, I'll laugh and go to the mountains where the waters flow
Back to the vineyards of Lavaux

Lavaux
Lavaux
Lavaux
Lavaux

rogifan said:

darkroman said:

Why are people obsessed with claiming Prince as 'black' for themselves?

Can a man not be a man without people putting their own insecurities in the way?

Interestingly Prince never played the race card, he was just himself and that is why his music travelled so far.

Prince supported all communites, genders etc.

In fact Prince was able to do this because he wrote pop music that travelled far. He got the radio play, he got the TV airtime and an eclectic audiences flocked to see him perform live.

To put this in a USA context; he wrote white pop music, that was played on white radio stations, that was watched by white people which attracted a white audience to see him perform. He even had a white woman play his mother in Purple Rain and throughout his career he even looked white.

I say 'USA context' because (as far as I know) it's only the USA who has 'white radio', 'black radio', 'white charts', 'black charts', etc etc.

I've always thought this really odd as to me (and the majority of people) music is just music!

I spent years listening to Prince before I even knew he had black parents because it wasn't important to me to know and it didn't define Prince nor his music.

So in conclusion let Prince be Prince. He transcended the divides between people so don't try to create them when they don't exist as this risks alienating an extremely large percentage of Prince's audience that gave him his success.

Yes to all of this. Also I hate when people project on to others which I think happens with Prince a lot. I remember right after he died guests on MSNBC claiming his fro was a political statement. Just a reminder, the place Prince chose to build Paisley Park and call home (Chanhassen) is like 96% white.

and the posts about Prince being a 'political figure' eeek

peggyon said:

ABro said:

Thank you for sharing that.

Thank you, as well

And thank you too, I appreciate your post.

rogifan said:

darkroman said:

Why are people obsessed with claiming Prince as 'black' for themselves?

Can a man not be a man without people putting their own insecurities in the way?

Interestingly Prince never played the race card, he was just himself and that is why his music travelled so far.

Prince supported all communites, genders etc.

In fact Prince was able to do this because he wrote pop music that travelled far. He got the radio play, he got the TV airtime and an eclectic audiences flocked to see him perform live.

To put this in a USA context; he wrote white pop music, that was played on white radio stations, that was watched by white people which attracted a white audience to see him perform. He even had a white woman play his mother in Purple Rain and throughout his career he even looked white.

I say 'USA context' because (as far as I know) it's only the USA who has 'white radio', 'black radio', 'white charts', 'black charts', etc etc.

I've always thought this really odd as to me (and the majority of people) music is just music!

I spent years listening to Prince before I even knew he had black parents because it wasn't important to me to know and it didn't define Prince nor his music.

So in conclusion let Prince be Prince. He transcended the divides between people so don't try to create them when they don't exist as this risks alienating an extremely large percentage of Prince's audience that gave him his success.

Yes to all of this. Also I hate when people project on to others which I think happens with Prince a lot. I remember right after he died guests on MSNBC claiming his fro was a political statement. Just a reminder, the place Prince chose to build Paisley Park and call home (Chanhassen) is like 96% white.

No, to quite a bit of this...

I'm not going to respond point by point, but I disagree with a lot of your assumptions/conclusions.

First, what is wrong with black people, or any people claiming Prince as black. He was. I don't think that's up for debate. He was a treasure to the black community. Why should black people feel uncomfortable claiming him as black? (Maybe you should consider why its such a problem for you...)

Secondly, Prince clearly liked MANY forms of music and decided early that to reach superstardom he'd have to target diverse listeners. (That is not to say he was not claiming his blackness/ie not playing the race card.) He knew staying only in "black" music circles wouldn't get him the stardom he wanted.

Claiming Prince as black does let Prince be Prince. He was a black man. Whatever he transcended didn't make him any less of a black man.

ABro said:

Moonbeam said:

I think this article is quite good. Like it or not, Prince’s continuing legacy is still being written through books, career retrospectives, and extended pieces like this that attempt to contextualize who Prince was as well as how and why he mattered and continues to matter. The truth is that as time passes, it will become increasingly easy for the truth to become distorted because Prince is no longer with us. And while many thinkpieces after his death have attempted to shoehorn Prince into a narrative that isn’t warranted (I remember one that tried to align Prince’s career with hip hop, for example), this isn’t one of them. Prince was a black artist, and his experiences as a black man certainly shaped a lot of what he thought and felt throughout his career, right until the end. If somehow that is becoming lost, then there is every reason for those who know better to present the picture correctly.

It has been my observation that the purple lore (which has been built up over many years by a majority white fanbase) tends 2 consist of cherry picked quotes & subjective (& at times agenda driven) opinions on Prince.
At the same time they have ignored & dismissed certain other people's quotes & insights. The fans who have tried 2 discuss these issues have also been dismissed, & censored. The gods of the lore are people like Hahn, Alan Leeds, the Melvoins & Susan Rogers.

[Edited 11/10/18 9:51am]

I got crucified for not bootlicking Leeds when he posted here a few years ago. Im not downing him becasue he does hav some good insight, but he has an aire of superiority regarding Prince's music thats oft-putting to me. Even when Prince was alive. Like his opinion is the be all to end all regarding the conscousness of Prince.

rdhull said:

ABro said:

It has been my observation that the purple lore (which has been built up over many years by a majority white fanbase) tends 2 consist of cherry picked quotes & subjective (& at times agenda driven) opinions on Prince.
At the same time they have ignored & dismissed certain other people's quotes & insights. The fans who have tried 2 discuss these issues have also been dismissed, & censored. The gods of the lore are people like Hahn, Alan Leeds, the Melvoins & Susan Rogers.

[Edited 11/10/18 9:51am]

I got crucified for not bootlicking Leeds when he posted here a few years ago. Im not downing him becasue he does hav some good insight, but he has an aire of superiority regarding Prince's music thats oft-putting to me. Even when Prince was alive. Like his opinion is the be all to end all regarding the conscousness of Prince.

I can imagine, lol certain folks are above critique.

Shame he doesn't have the understanding for Prince's human flaws the way he does for JB's...

tab32792 said:

music is not just music...and it has nothing to do with insecurities. why do his non black fans always take it personally when we claim him? then they constantly inject old utopian lyrics from 40 years ago vs. more recent material? lol

not all of his non black fans feel that way

i don't profess to know where Prince stood on things ... but to me, he was clearly a proud black man very much connected to the history of black people in america

i agree it's easy for people to pick certain lyrics out to suit what they want to believe... but just because Prince at times wrote about the love of humanity and "perfect world" scenarios.... doesn't mean he wasn't completely connected to reality

Moonbeam said:

Let me add to the chorus of people thanking RD for the article. An amazing read!

yep.. ditto that

No problem yall. Sorry for the typos as I re-wrote the article back in the day. As an aside from the racial aspects of the thread here (even though Tate did address some of these issues in his article), I've always been haunted since I read it in 1984 by his last two sentences about what was Prince going to feed us next.

tab32792 said:

pdiddy2011 said:

rogifan said:

darkroman said: Yes to all of this. Also I hate when people project on to others which I think happens with Prince a lot. I remember right after he died guests on MSNBC claiming his fro was a political statement. Just a reminder, the place Prince chose to build Paisley Park and call home (Chanhassen) is like 96% white.

No, to quite a bit of this...

I'm not going to respond point by point, but I disagree with a lot of your assumptions/conclusions.

First, what is wrong with black people, or any people claiming Prince as black. He was. I don't think that's up for debate. He was a treasure to the black community. Why should black people feel uncomfortable claiming him as black? (Maybe you should consider why its such a problem for you...)

Secondly, Prince clearly liked MANY forms of music and decided early that to reach superstardom he'd have to target diverse listeners. (That is not to say he was not claiming his blackness/ie not playing the race card.) He knew staying only in "black" music circles wouldn't get him the stardom he wanted.

Claiming Prince as black does let Prince be Prince. He was a black man. Whatever he transcended didn't make him any less of a black man.

Your horns are showing, Morris.
Interpretation, and projection.
It's pretty arrogant to assume what motivated Prince.
And a little dumb, because Purple Rain was never made or intended to be a blockbuster.


Really, this reclaming thing, I sense a lot of anger under it.
A useless pride. He was not a champion for the black cause. He was not a "treasure to the black community", his sales post eighties prove it.
The charts, R&B or 200, were not his anymore, if we want to talk music business.

He enhanced the sense of community and party that is genuinely afro-american, and taught little pink asses like me what being cool is.
There's a humour in Prince's work that's all blaxpoitation, at least the dude got UTCM right in his article, even if he goes overboard.
Because it can also cynically be interpreted as Prince going after the rich white folks world, despite the script.

But let us raise our middle fingers to that:
cut me, cut you, both the blood is red.
Like Lennon dissing the hippies that reclaimed him,
so does Prince when one tries to recuperate him for his own agenda.

If the air is a little thick in this room tonight,
I reckon it's the result of an onslaught of separatist rookies

[Edited 11/10/18 13:45pm]

bonatoc said:

pdiddy2011 said:

No, to quite a bit of this...

I'm not going to respond point by point, but I disagree with a lot of your assumptions/conclusions.

First, what is wrong with black people, or any people claiming Prince as black. He was. I don't think that's up for debate. He was a treasure to the black community. Why should black people feel uncomfortable claiming him as black? (Maybe you should consider why its such a problem for you...)

Secondly, Prince clearly liked MANY forms of music and decided early that to reach superstardom he'd have to target diverse listeners. (That is not to say he was not claiming his blackness/ie not playing the race card.) He knew staying only in "black" music circles wouldn't get him the stardom he wanted.

Claiming Prince as black does let Prince be Prince. He was a black man. Whatever he transcended didn't make him any less of a black man.

Your horns are showing, Morris.
Interpretation, and projection.
It's pretty arrogant to assume what motivated Prince.
And a little dumb, because Purple Rain was never made or intended to be a blockbuster.


Really, this reclaming thing, I sense a lot of anger under it.
A useless pride. He was not a champion for the black cause. He was not a treasure to the black community, his sales post eighties prove it.
The charts, R&B or 200, were not his anymore, if we want to talk music business.

He enhanced the sense of community and party that is genuinely afro-american, and taught little pink asses like me what being cool is.
There's a humour in Prince that's all blaxpoitation, at least the dude got UTCM right in his article, even if he goes overboard.
Because it can also cynically be interpreted as Prince going after the rich white folks world, despite the script.

But let us raise our middle fingers to that:
cut me, cut you, both the blood is red.
Like Lennon dissing the hippies that reclaimed him,
so does Prince when one tries to recuperate him.

If the air is a little thick in this room tonight,
I reckon it's the result of an onslaught of separatist rookies

[Edited 11/10/18 13:37pm]

No. Not in the mood to argue, but no.

darkroman said:

Why are people obsessed with claiming Prince as 'black' for themselves?

Can a man not be a man without people putting their own insecurities in the way?

Interestingly Prince never played the race card, he was just himself and that is why his music travelled so far.

Prince supported all communites, genders etc.

In fact Prince was able to do this because he wrote pop music that travelled far. He got the radio play, he got the TV airtime and an eclectic audiences flocked to see him perform live.

To put this in a USA context; he wrote white pop music, that was played on white radio stations, that was watched by white people which attracted a white audience to see him perform. He even had a white woman play his mother in Purple Rain and throughout his career he even looked white.

I say 'USA context' because (as far as I know) it's only the USA who has 'white radio', 'black radio', 'white charts', 'black charts', etc etc.

I've always thought this really odd as to me (and the majority of people) music is just music!

I spent years listening to Prince before I even knew he had black parents because it wasn't important to me to know and it didn't define Prince nor his music.

So in conclusion let Prince be Prince. He transcended the divides between people so don't try to create them when they don't exist as this risks alienating an extremely large percentage of Prince's audience that gave him his success.

Some of you are going to have to stop being defensive long enough to realize that black can refer to the culture rather than skin color, which is your automatic go to thought.

We are talking from the cultural perspective so you can calm down...nothing to do with any "race card", smh. You seem to be the only one embracing a stereotype of what black is.

Moonbeam said:

I think this article is quite good. Like it or not, Prince’s continuing legacy is still being written through books, career retrospectives, and extended pieces like this that attempt to contextualize who Prince was as well as how and why he mattered and continues to matter. The truth is that as time passes, it will become increasingly easy for the truth to become distorted because Prince is no longer with us. And while many thinkpieces after his death have attempted to shoehorn Prince into a narrative that isn’t warranted (I remember one that tried to align Prince’s career with hip hop, for example), this isn’t one of them. Prince was a black artist, and his experiences as a black man certainly shaped a lot of what he thought and felt throughout his career, right until the end. If somehow that is becoming lost, then there is every reason for those who know better to present the picture correctly.

rdhull said:

Some of these posts are the reason dudes essay is essential lol. smh at those who still dont get it.

Like Rogi....lol.

rdhull said:

ABro said:

It has been my observation that the purple lore (which has been built up over many years by a majority white fanbase) tends 2 consist of cherry picked quotes & subjective (& at times agenda driven) opinions on Prince.
At the same time they have ignored & dismissed certain other people's quotes & insights. The fans who have tried 2 discuss these issues have also been dismissed, & censored. The gods of the lore are people like Hahn, Alan Leeds, the Melvoins & Susan Rogers.

[Edited 11/10/18 9:51am]

I got crucified for not bootlicking Leeds when he posted here a few years ago. Im not downing him becasue he does hav some good insight, but he has an aire of superiority regarding Prince's music thats oft-putting to me. Even when Prince was alive. Like his opinion is the be all to end all regarding the conscousness of Prince.

LOL, So did I.

OldFriends4Sale said: