Ran across this older but interesting long article about Prince and Rick James today:

https://www.popmatters.co...71459.html

[Edited 6/14/20 10:33am]

If you copy/paste the title in, it's there. Here's another one on the same topic with more details.

The night Rick James almost beat up Prince, bitch!

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_night_rick_james_almost_beat_up_prince

[Edited 6/14/20 5:53am]

Good article.As a huge fan of both artists,I wish that they could have been good friends.Just imagine the type of funky collaboration they could have cooked up.

SoulAlive said:

Good article.As a huge fan of both artists,I wish that they could have been good friends. Just imagine the type of funky collaboration they could have cooked up.

LOVED Rick James superinyourfacenarrativesexfunk, ditto Prince - those kinds of cars don't pass you every day.

SoulAlive said:

For all the talk of "punk funk" and being some sort of genreless renegade, Rick's stuff always sounded pretty much like your average Disco/Contemporary R&B of the era to me - that horn heavy Michael Jackson/Earth Wind and Fire sound, y'know? It's hard to think that even Rick thought Prince had nicked his sound from him.

wildgoldenhoney said:

https://prince.org/msg/7/309788

great thread! thanks for posting.

Mikado said:

For all the talk of "punk funk" and being some sort of genreless renegade, Rick's stuff always sounded pretty much like your average Disco/Contemporary R&B of the era to me - that horn heavy Michael Jackson/Earth Wind and Fire sound, y'know?

really? I think Rick developed a really cool sound of his own."SuperFreak" still sounds fresh and unique to my ears.

On a related note....in light of recent events,I've seen some people posting the song "Mr.Policeman" on their Facebook pages.It got me thinking.....in 1981,Rick was singing about police brutality,a topic that is really relevent now.

Mikado said:

For all the talk of "punk funk" and being some sort of genreless renegade, Rick's stuff always sounded pretty much like your average Disco/Contemporary R&B of the era to me - that horn heavy Michael Jackson/Earth Wind and Fire sound, y'know? It's hard to think that even Rick thought Prince had nicked his sound from him.

A friend of mine rold me a while back that "Rap/Hop Hop supplanted punk" and I'd never considered that but I think he was right.

The spirit of punk was not simply "not taking any shit" as Rick James asserts - at least not primarily. It was a do it yourself, from the gound up, "just play" mindset that was born out poverty and disenfrachisement that also spoke truth and rage to power and the system. Punks were up to here with bloated rock acts and over staging of shows.

Rap was sort of the same thing. You didn't have to play well (or play at all) and one could just grab beats and samples, make some tapes and sell them out of the trunks of cars via a word of mouth. There wasn't a ton of money it and a lot of it was a cultural representation of being poor, black and the stranglehold of systematic racism and poverty within the community.