Simply put, for this fan, Mr. Name Peace, Prince lost his singular hold on my musical tastes after Lovesexy and until recently, he fell off the public's radar screen for more than a decade. Since Prince's new albums failed to "grab" me like his 80's work did during this time, I have spent a lot of time visiting new artists and revisiting old artists and genres. Now, I am a more objective fan than the raving P fanatic you might have seen several years ago.

Don't get it twisted, Prince is and will remain my favorite musical artist. I still keep up with his work and love a lot of it. But since his 80's "reign," I have become less and less inclined to compare artists to Prince and assess them on their own merits.

I felt like saying that because I have noticed that the tenor of a lot of these threads has been about "the next Prince," or "Prince's successor," or "Prince simplied copied [fill in pre-Prince artist here]." I still do some of that too, but I think orgers as a whole judge artists on their own pluses and minuses and point out influences or similarities to Prince when they're obvious.