Quote:
Originally Posted by elphenor
still nobody can name more than 2 Prince songs
it's the Bob Marley effect
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If you're on these boards and can only name 2 songs from either artist, I'd wonder what you're doing here.
Prince is great, IMO. But he suffers from a few things.
1. He was so ubiquitous that you can almost tell it's a Prince song by listening, even if he didn't record it. Manic Monday sounds like Prince. Nothing Compares 2 U sounds like Prince.
2. The name/sound change was a bad time. I blame WB because they went in and messes up a hot streak.
3. When I listen to Prince now, I definitely think he's a product of his era. Funk isn't a genre with substantial appeal. And some of the new arrangements of his older stuff are much better (Check the Prince thread). Songs like Housequake were innovative for their time. But innovation gets old fast. And since the emphasis was on revolutionary stuff, it doesn't hold up.
Even the lyrics on thins like "Sign o' the Times" where he sings "In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name." - That was understood during the AIDS epidemic. No one inherently knows what it means now. I still love that song, but it's clearly dated.
His newer stuff vacillates between jazz masturbation and electronic boringness. I grew up in the 90s and everyone seemed to think "Electronic music is the music of the future." What they didn't tell us is that if a computer makes some new sound, everyone will just go back to the origins of songcraft and write "Mary had a little lamb" - esque melodies. And you can see that on things like "Black Sweat." A good song, but is it something that sounds like either:
A. Prince
B. Anything novel?
No. It sounds a bit generic. Here, you decide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG-e00c6uT0
And yeah, I'm aware I'm hitting for not being inventive after I said he was too inventive. It's clear to me what the distinction is, so if that doesn't make sense, feel free to push back.
But the sexy/funky/edgy schtick lost its appeal quick once everyone was doing it, the culture decided to get depressed with Grunge, and the Right was losing the culture war. Writing "Darling Nikki" in 1983 when The Moral Majority gave you free press was easy. When you Cream the Clinton Administration could say "it's interesting" with a wink and people didn't freak out, that's harder.
To add a bit more to the innovation thing, when Prince isn't innovating, that is, when he's playing a stripped-down version of his songs and you can see the bones of them, you can see he's amazing. "I could never take the place of your man" on the album, I think, sucks. When he played it Acoustically, on Musicology, I was like "JFC this is a jam."
He gets in his own way a lot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Neapolitan
He mentioned it in the OP, if you have took the time to read it you would have known it was "When Doves Cry." :roll eyes: CC heard that one song and it was ample enough material for him to dismiss Prince as "quite bland and mediocre." Yeah, it's one song but sometimes you gotta make a command decision base on what you know and decide whether or not to further explore that particular musical artist. No harm, no foul in doing that.
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Well since you read it, why don't you answer. Is Doves Cry the only song he's heard?