9 posts tagged “prince”

Absolutely astounding how much Alicia Keys has matured as a songwriter on her latest album, "As I Am". Of course this is the one that was custom0made for me -- it's got a great lift of the piano part from the outro to "Purple Rain", along with the classic Purple Rain chord transition, and it's produced by Timbaland. And the video's got Common as Alicia's boyfriend. What's not to love?

I just re-watched Prince's performance from the Superbowl halftime, and I while I have some nitpicks because I've truly seen him at his best, I just don't think anybody's ever topped what he's done tonight.

Apparently, the New York Times agrees:

His performance last night at Super Bowl XLI will surely go down as one of the most thrilling halftime shows ever; certainly the most unpredictable, and perhaps the best. “Dearly beloved,” he whispered, intoning the famous first words of “Let’s Go Crazy.”

What followed was a dizzying demonstration.

I'm quite pleased that at least some large number of people who'd never gotten to see him before have an idea why I've always been such a fan of the little man.

The setlist, in case you need it:

• Let's Go Crazy
• 1999 Intro/Baby I'm A Star/Proud Mary
  
• All Along The Watchtower/Best Of You
• Purple Rain

"Proud Mary" is, of course, the CCR classic, though I think it's safe to say Prince was covering Tina Turner's cover. "Watchtower" is the same story -- Prince is clearly covering Hendrix's cover, not Dylan's original. He probably picked both of those to allude to both the original and more famous cover artists.

"Best Of You" was a great surprise, though rumors were out in the fan community as early as last week that he might do the song, since he'd sent the Watchtower/Best medley to Howard Stern to play on his show. I'm a big fan of the Foo Fighters, too, so that was especially fun for me.

And I should get extra credit points because I called it that prince was gonna rip off his do-rag before he really went into Purple Rain. (If you missed it, my pre-game roundup of Prince was posted on Friday.) Yay me.

Most everybody who knows me well knows that I've been a fan of Prince for pretty much my entire life. So when casual fans or non-fans hear that Prince is playing the halftime show at the Superbowl this year, they ask me, "What's up with that guy?" or "Is his name still a symbol?"

So I figured I'd put together a quick primer on Prince, at least what he's been up to since he was at his most prominent back in the 80s.

• Prince's name is Prince. Legally, it always has been, but he did go by the symbol (which is usually typed out as "O(+>") from 1993 until 2000. But his public name is now again the same as his legal name.

• Though he's not commercially or culturally dominant like he once used to be, Prince is not a has-been, either artistically or on the charts. His "3121" album last year debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, and followed the success of his Musicology tour and album in 2004, which had a great run on the charts and grossed over $90 million dollars as the most lucrative tour of the year. And his single, "Song of the Heart" from the "Happy Feet" soundtrack won a Golden Globe for best original song just the other day.

• 3121 is also his most consistently interesting and listenable album in years, so if you have his greatest-hits box set with b-sides or the recent, excellent "Ultimate" collection, it's a good place to start. Oh, and buy "Sign O' The Times", if you don't have it. There's just no excuse not to.

• Overall, Prince has had dozens of top 10 singles, he's released over 20 albums with almost all of them going at least platinum, he's made 3 or 4 films with nearly 50% of them watchable, and even as he nears 50 years old there just aren't any live acts that are better than him. Maybe, now that he's slowed down a bit, somebody who's at their prime can be as good in concert as Prince. But since James is dead, nobody can beat him.

Since most of my readers are geeks who like technology, and care about issues ranging from DRM to artist's rights to the tyrrany of the RIAA, there's some other things that might appeal to you about Prince's career. A short list of highlights:

• Prince has distributed much of his own music independently since 1994, and his major label deals since then have largely been promotion-and-distribution deals where he retained ownership of his master recordings.
• Prince is the first artist not signed to a major label to perform during the Superbowl halftime show, not counting accessory marching bands and child choirs.
• He's had a continuous presence on the web since 1995, and last year won a Webby for his work online
• There are a number of really great prince fansites like prince.org, though Prince's control freak tendencies have resulted in a lot of stupid legal threats towards them
• Prince distributed an online-only album back in 1997 with the liner notes available as a website
• Prince published an interactive CD-ROM in 1994, and it didn't totally suck
• He has distributed several albums' worth of material exclusively online through his own music label (though much of it was DRMed) as well as a number of videos and some really bad poetry
• Prince's webmaster maintained a now-defunct blog, largely ghostwritten by Prince, starting back in 2000.
• Prince and some of his studio staff used to actually join in on AOL chat room discussions with fans as late as 1995, talking about recording work in progress

I get excited about this stuff because I forget most people have never seen him play. (From a jaded reporter: "I've never been to a Prince press conference before, but after Thursday, I would recommend them to all my friends. In fact, I'd give it a 9 out of 10 because you can dance to it.") Anyway, I have a pretty exhaustive storehouse of otherwise-useless Prince knowledge, so feel free to ask any questions if you want in the comments.

I don't think I've blogged about it on Vox before, but I'm a big fan of Alan Leeds and Eric Leeds... they've both been huge parts of my appreciation of music. Alan because of his helping run the business affairs of James Brown, Prince, George Clinton, Maxwell, D'Angelo, ?uestlove and others, and Eric because he was the sax player on my favorite records at a time when I had just been learning to play the saxophone.

Amazingly, Alan Leeds does not (yet) have a wikipedia profile, and Eric only has a stub of one. Because one of my older posts about him is one of the first results for Alan's name, I thought I'd collect some links in case maybe I get time later to write a post or even a (my first!) wikipedia article.

• An interview with Alan about Miles Davis and Prince for the book "The Last Miles". It covers the end of Miles Davis' musical career, with a whole chapter on the various, largely fruitless, flirtations Prince and Miles had with working together.
• Eric Leeds interviews part one and part two, also for "The Last Miles"
• Alan Leed's blog at alanleeds.com, which seems to have been largely superceded by his MySpace profile, which is surprisingly active. Both show off what a great writer he is.
• A truly phenomenal community interview with Alan about his time with Prince on prince.org. Aside from Per Nilsen's books, it's one of the single best discussions about Prince's career from a serious artistic and cultural standpoint that anybody's done.
• An incredibly moving tribute to James Brown, all the more striking because it was written with a day of James' passing. Alan had met James Brown as a teenager, and that's a lot of history to wrap up into so few words.
• Somewhere in my archives or backups, I have an extended version of the liner notes Alan wrote for Prince's The Hits/The B-Sides mini-box-set. On one of Prince's first websites (he had one 11 years ago, and even had a blog 6 years ago), they had put up a longer version of the notes with some interesting additions -- especially interesting because Alan has won a Grammy for his liner notes for the James Brown "Star Time" set.
  

Okay, this is totally wrong, but I have to post it anyway:

I've liked Prince and his music pretty much my whole life, and for a while I was self-conscious about it. These days, pretty much everybody who knows me knows about me being a fan, though I still struggle to explain why.

Two recent YouTube finds might tell the story better than I can.

From New Year's Eve, 1987, one of (I think) only two times Prince and Miles Davis ever played on stage together. Vamping on the middle section of "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night" from Sign O' The Times.

Then, from last month's Happy Feet, the animated penguin movie, the video for Prince's "Song of the Heart".
Same guy. Covers a lot of ground. I like that.

We're inept Quakers

We've been here in California for a few minor tremblors, and miss almost every single one. I caught one, once, but Alaina just plain can't catch a quake to save her life. Then I read about people's stuff falling over, dogs barking, cats singing, and we've got nothing. Our animals are as dumb as us

The best part? david is in from New York, and he felt it. At the time, Promiscuous Girl was playing, and I was thinking about how it should be remixed with "HouseQuake", due to the similar beats. IRONY EXCEPT IT'S NOT IRONIC.

HouseQuake!

Was okay, but not a great performance. At least he had the dignity to not perform alongside any of the contestants.