modified said:

Jacob Collier is much more advanced in music theory. He is a jazz/classical musician.

That's undoubtedly true.

StrangeButTrue said:

fen said:

If Prince had grown up working with a modern DAW in his bedroom, I’ve no doubt that he could have achieved similar feats, and I'd wager that the music would have been better.

[Edited 5/21/18 14:15pm]

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Fen that's kinda unfair Its like saying The Beatles would have been better with hip hop verses or Charlie Byrd would've been better with electric guitars. Tech changes, times change, life changes.

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Prince could've also become so dependent on DAW that he became a trap producer and never mastered harmonies or how to tune an instrument and been much worse because "the computer does it". A part of me wonders if all this shenanigansery about vocoders, Ableton, and ProTools had never existed if ANY of our current pop 'artists' would be "who they are" today.

[Edited 5/21/18 14:27pm]

Just to be clear, I wasn’t arguing that Prince’s music would have been better if he’d had access to those tools. I meant that if Prince had attempted a similar thing to the Jacob Collier performance posted above, I’d more than likely prefer his performance.

That said, I think I’m probably guilty of judging Collier on those early videos (The Flintstones ) and the live solo performances that I’ve seen. Listening to some of his tracks there’s clearly a great deal of originality and musical complexity at work there. Structurally, he actually has some things in common with Hermeto Pascoal (mentioned above). I still can’t say that I love them, but I’ll concede that he has a lot of potential.

there may have been other artists who can technically do everything in the studio by themselves to create albums...of course there were... but WHO could combine all the gifts with Prince's compelling and magnetic physical screen/video appearance and stage presence, and mystical persona?...no one... who else was given the support by the labels and movie industry that Prince was given, early on?... Paisley Park complex, movies, labels, artistic freedom.... who else was every other entertainer's favorite entertainer?... there's other factors to consider than just the musical output, and even with that considered, what singular artist can match Princes' discography for sheer output?... Stevie Wonder is the only one worthy of even discussing and he comes up way short of P... other than his music and some activist efforts, Stevie never was the international cultural force that Prince became...Stevie was a star musician...Prince was a star being...