Take a broad view of Prince's ability to create songs in quick succession (with the use of tricks and improvisation) and oppose it with his more considered, exploratory approaches to songwriting. As the recent box sets have shown - Prince wrote bad songs throughout all of his career, he just wrote fewer and fewer good songs later on. The bold, surprising, shocking & overwehlming elements disappeared wholly from his work by the turn of the new millenium (more or less), only to be replaced with an ever increasing amount of, though competently & effortlessly written, entriely boring and predicatable pop songs - songs reliant on technical expertise, and very little, if none, of the younger Prince's questioning musical mind. Try this: replace the name "Mozart" (and a few other details with the appropriate words) with the name "Prince" and enjoy some of the striking parallels - start watching around 2 minutes into the programme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JauII1jCG6Q

(Glenn Gould on how Mozart became a bad composer)

[Edited 11/1/20 2:28am]

[Edited 11/1/20 9:32am]

wilmer said:

A pop musicians can only write so many good songs but Prince far outpaced the field. The highlights of the catalogues of many artists can be boiled down to a single Best Of CD. Not the case with Prince.

^^^^THIS
Especially Prince, because he didn't want to be stuck in one time period. I don't know why people think his writing became "bad", just because he didn't recreate Purple Rain over and over. He was done with PR so moved on to ATWIAD. A hopeful erasure.
There is genius in every one of his eras.

I hate it here.

Polo1026 said:

I hate it here.

Please watch the video for context.

At 3:40 mins: "... why I think Mozart, especially in his later years, was not a very good composer.

But the italics are squarely on that word “composer,” because Mozart was unquestionably a very great musician. And I’m not being coy when I try to foster that distinction. By the evidence of his contemporaries, he was a superlative performer and an improviser of note; by the evidence of our own eyes and ears, a resourceful craftsman in the theatre; and in all the familiar musical forms of his day, an exhilaratingly dependable artist who could knock out a divertimento the way an accounts executive dispatches an inter-office memo.

But in a way, that’s his problem: too many of his works sound like inter-office memos. They’re pertinent, they’re often blessed with an engaging sense of humour, they sometimes provide a concise résumé of the main points their author wants to make. But like inter-office memos they can jump from point to point, or, on the other hand, dwell at unconscionable length upon a particular point which details the executive’s pet peeve—a point not necessarily germane to the corporate interest. And in that example, I think Mozart was dictating just such a memo. He held that series of rather undistinctive and virtually indistinguishable E-flat-major themes together with listless scale runs [Example 2] and predictable chord changes, [Example 3] like an executive holding forth upon the ramifications of a subject that no one in the front office was much concerned with anyway: “Yeah, well, Harry, as I see it, J.B. has got this thing about replacing the water cooler. Let’s just file it and forget it.”

At 20:15 mins : "Perhaps it all comes down to this: within every creative person there’s an inventor at odds with a museum curator. And most of the extraordinary and moving things that happen in art are the result of a momentary gain by one at the expense of the other. In Mozart’s case, the inventor was endowed with the most precocious gifts, and the curator, who manufactured all those sequences and arpeggiated links and passages of scale padding, zealously carried out his duties as well. But what I object to is that Mozart tries to cover up the conflict between them. Time and again, the curator wins out over the inventor, as he has every right to do. But I’d like to find some evidence of protest, some frantic, disruptive, unsyntactical attempt on the part of the inventor to get free of the curator’s control. Or, in the absence of that desperation move, I’d like Mozart to feel guilty, and because of that guilt to sacrifice something of the charm and courtesy which mask the humanity of his work."

[Edited 11/1/20 10:18am]

funkbabyandthebabysitters said:

Meh.

wilmer said:

A pop musicians can only write so many good songs but Prince far outpaced the field. The highlights of the catalogues of many artists can be boiled down to a single Best Of CD. Not the case with Prince.

Or I guess you could not even engage with an idea, that works too

christobole said:

Take a broad view of Prince's ability to create songs in quick succession (with the use of tricks and improvisation) and oppose it with his more considered, exploratory approaches to songwriting.

As the recent box sets have shown - Prince wrote bad songs throughout all of his career, he just wrote fewer and fewer good songs later on. The bold, surprising, shocking & overwehlming elements disappeared wholly from his work by the turn of the new millenium (more or less), only to be replaced with an ever increasing amount of, though competently & effortlessly written, entriely boring and predicatable pop songs - songs reliant on technical expertise, and very little, if none, of the younger Prince's questioning musical mind. Try this: replace the name "Mozart" (and a few other details with the appropriate words) with the name "Prince" and enjoy some of the striking parallels - start watching around 2 minutes into the programme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JauII1jCG6Q

(Glenn Gould on how Mozart became a bad composer)

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I'm already happy you don't compare the tremendous Glenn gould with Prince. lol

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I like this apporach. Although nothing new here on the .org, at least ot me.

It has been like this with basically most artist at all times.

As in pop music, and classical music, the best creative moments mostly occure in a younger stage.

(Of course there are always exceptions)

I'd like to read a thorough scientific piece investigating on the possibles reasons why it could be like this (or not).

My take is, when you are young, and you are fresh, all influences around you can trigger the most untouched uninflueced creative or newest out of you - you simply don't want to sound like what you've heard, so you can stand out, I believe.

I'd like to call that freshness an innovative contrarian rebelious element that contrasts with the foregoing and offers an answer as something unexpected and drastically new.

And that same formula is difficult to keep up with, when all freshness is been overwhelmed with so much input and influeces, comments, successes or not during your carreer.

You simply get older and become more saturated, and everything starts to look more in perspective, especially as your life becomes more balanced (or not!).

Plus the fact that you also become more aware of influences and insights, then wear and tear can occure more easily.

All my humble opinion of course.

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LoveGalore said:

It's so strange to me that people genuinely write stuff like this without the qualifiers that it's their opinion and not a fact. How hard is it to say "I don't like this because I was bored of it." as opposed to "This is boring." Is the nuance really that subtle? I don't think so.

It's about owning your opinion. Not seeking someone else's validation. But of course, then you have to expect the question of "who gives a fuck about your opinion and why?" And it seems none of these opinionated folks want to answer that. There's plenty of stuff all over Prince's catalog that I didn't get into. But there's not some period where his music became boring or unquestioning. What a strange and presumptuous statement to make. Maybe the questions he was asking weren't about you?

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I could not agree more with you.

Personally I believe it's the contemporary disease of the empowered social media,

thinking it is acceptable and possible to express whatever and whenever th t one think is much needed towards others.

I call it social-diahrrea.

One big reason why I don't have a facebook account anymore since three years.

I was fed up with wrong information and substantiated lies, and most of all with dull pictures of holidyas and food !

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The Magic Flute and Requiem were both written late in Mozart's life. Piano concerto 27 isn't bad either, so it would appear Mr Gould was wrong.

[Edited 11/4/20 20:02pm]

fortuneandserendipity said:

The Magic Flute and Requiem were both written late in Mozart's life. Piano concerto 27 isn't bad either, so it would appear Mr Gould was wrong.

[Edited 11/4/20 20:02pm]

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...As Prince wrote 'The Rainbow Children' and some other good later in his life too...

The overall explained idea by Mr Gould isn't wrong though.

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