Prince... RIP?!

[Gusington]

That is awesome and so sad at the same time.

[Ubercat]

In his favor, I'll add that he took his religion seriously enough to take his turn among the Jehovah's Witnesses doing evangelization.  O:-)

Maybe I'm missing something here but taking ones religion seriously, in and of itself, isn't much of a plus. There are plenty of suckers in ISIS who take their religion seriously.

Edit: Speaking of JW, there are a couple of old ladies who come chat with me once in a while. Yesterday, I had a wargame day (US: Europe) scheduled with a transgendered opponent at 1PM. Just before 1 I saw the ladies talking to neighbors across the street for a bit.

I was expecting the doorbell to ring any minute, and it was even odds whether it would be the JW or my opponent. It finally did, and it turned out to be her. I wonder if the JW saw her walk up and decided to stay clear.  ;D ;D :D ;D ;D

[bayonetbrant]

Are you in Chicago?

[Staggerwing]

Sadly, I have to count myself among the ranks of those who saw Prince as more of a technically proficient pop star than as a musical genius. I am completely unfamiliar with anything he has recorded in the last 20 years and, while it may or may not be true that I have been living in a cave, I have adequate radio reception here.

[Ubercat]

Are you in Chicago?

Me, no. I'm near Allentown, PA.

[Centurion40]

George RR Martin is writing 2016

Well played.

[Centurion40]

Was never a big fan but a few years ago my wife dragged me to a Prince concert. He put on one hell of a show. One of the most electric concerts I have ever seen.

[bayonetbrant]

OK, some of these twitter quips about Prince are just awesome...

[JasonPratt]

In his favor, I'll add that he took his religion seriously enough to take his turn among the Jehovah's Witnesses doing evangelization.  O:-)

Maybe I'm missing something here but taking ones religion seriously, in and of itself, isn't much of a plus. There are plenty of suckers in ISIS who take their religion seriously.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that like most other evangelists he genuinely was trying to help those people by doing that; and was maybe showing some humility at the same time.

I fully grant (because after all I was criticizing him for this) that he could have taken his religion more seriously by living better than he did, whether when he was 7DA or JH. Neither group of Christians (trinitarian and high unitarian respectively, both of them sharing some group origins in the 1800s) encourages the kind of life he insisted on choosing to lead. Maybe he thought he could buy a pass for his life otherwise by putting in some time trying to sales pitch for God -- I don't know, although I know there are people in any religious group who have that mindset. It's tempting, for me anyway, to think that was his intention, as an inference drawn from the life he led otherwise. But I have a tendency to think the worst of people.

And after all I don't really know. So I'm trying to give him the benefit of my doubt instead of the other way around.

I can't feel any fondness for him, but I'm willing to acknowledge I should, relatedly, actively hope he did clean up his life to some real extent before he died and didn't keep taking drugs -- that it was a false rumor (whether accidentally or maliciously in origin). I shouldn't be so willing to believe the worst of him.

And after all, however much he helped ruin however many people's lives, he could have been someone like the ISIS guys. Knocking on doors to help save someone from a fire and set them free from imprisonment, right or wrong, is at least a little different in intention from knocking down doors to enslave and throw people into a fire.  O:-)

[Gusington]

Good SNL special on him right now. He was on that show a lot.

[GibbyG]

I'm not sure it's possible to overstate how awesome that dude was, and unlike damn near everyone else who's dies lately, it's pretty hard to find something personally unlikeable about him - no drug habits, no pedophilia... etc etc

He had some serious moral problems; people are just being nice and not talking about them. 6 days before he died, he was in the hospital for a drug overdose. That wasn't new: he would find young women to promote, get them horribly hooked on drugs and wild sex as part of his own lifestyle, and then move along to the next new thing when he got bored or they escaped him.

One of the first, and the most public such case, was Denise Matthews, whom Prince renamed as "Vanity", as part of an ego trip to make her into the female version of himself. After nearly dying of a crack overdose in the mid-90s, she renounced her life in music and Hollywood and became a Christian evangelist (marrying Oakland Raider Anthony Smith soon afterward). But the drugs had ruined her body, especially her kidneys -- she had to spend 20 minutes five times a day each day for the rest of her life on dialysis.

She died this February of renal failure, age 57 -- the illness that nearly killed her the first time, a lingering delay of about 20 years.


Was he a talented and creative artist? No doubt. Should the moral judgment of his life be confined to things like this? I don't think so; anyone who knows me knows I firmly believe God will allow no good in what we do in life to be lost, and I'm willing to recognize and remember any charity and other true love he gave to anyone no matter how large or small it might seem to other people.

But I remember his victims, too. And that includes everyone he led to live, to whatever degree, the shattered and shattering way he lived.

He could have been just as good an artist, or even a better one, without living the life he insisted on living. And that's a damned shame.

Do you have actually sources for this info?  I know Vanity was on drugs, but I'm pretty sure she was actually in rehab before she ever met Prince.  She also dated Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue in the late 80's; lots of drugs there.  She didn't OD until '94.  She also did dialysis 3 times a week, not 5 times a day (according to her gofundme page).  What you say may be 100% correct, I've just never heard it.

[bayonetbrant]

The obit from The Economist

SO SEXY, freedom. So sexy, he couldn't begin to explain it. Free to put on mascara, paint his lips, glue on long eyelashes to lower, flutter and seduce. Wear any colour, especially purple, but also electric blue, scarlet, glitter-silver and eye-aching lizard green. Strut in ruffles, squeeze in black leather, preen his naked midriff, shake his naked ass out of a yellow jumpsuit. Stack his heels, until his elfin figure became a giant. Dance with a white man, writhe with a black woman, kiss both, couple with either, be both races and sexes and neither in one cat-like, commanding frame. And, along the way, sell more than 100m records worldwide.

Free in his music, too. Brutal as a rapper, tender as a balladeer, swooping smoothly from bass to falsetto. Astounding on guitar, soaring off into a universe of riffs and improvisations. At the half-time concert at the Super Bowl at Miami in 2007, in torrential rain, he seemed unable to stop; and it was the same on piano, keyboards, percussion, drums. He played 27 instruments on his first album, "For You", in 1978, but felt he had the hang of thousands.

A thousand genres, too, from funk ("Kiss"), dance ("Uptown"), rock ("The Cross"), techno ("New World"), pop ("When Doves Cry"), obscenity ("Jack U Off"), beauty ("Nothing Compares 2 U") and all the world in between. Half a dozen genres in the same song, sometimes. The rhythm & blues of Little Richard, the soul of Sly Stone, the clicks and whoops of Michael Jackson, James Brown, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Duke Ellington, were mixed up, fused, made fantastic, and poured in astonishing profusion through his guitar. If he couldn't get the music out of his head, everyone's music as well as his, he couldn't function.   

Most necessary of all was the freedom to reinvent who he was, throw the world off his track, and hide. In the mid-1980s he refused to give interviews, reducing any to the statement: "I'm looking 4 the ladder." When writing songs for other people he hid behind the names "Jamie Starr" and "Alexander Nevermind". In the wake of his album "Purple Rain" (1984), which sold more than 20m copies, became a film and won him an Academy Award for best score, he made a cult of that colour, like a cloak. The best ruse came in 1993 when he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol that combined, gracefully, the male and female signs. It couldn't even be whispered; he drew it on the air. If people called him Prince, he didn't know who they were referring to. His name was right there, beautifully enciphered: all he was, and all his music was about.

There was also a sharp point behind it. He was fighting his recording company, Warner Bros, because they weren't releasing his albums fast enough to keep up with the music inside him. He was defying them because the name "Prince" was now their property, not his. Not even the rights to his own songs belonged to him. He wasn't going to be yet another black entertainer selling his soul, as Little Richard had, for a new car and a bucket of chicken. He'd got a pink Cadillac thanks to Warner Bros; that was enough. At the Brit Awards in 1995 his 13 words of thanks concluded: "In concert: Perfectly free. On record: Slave." "SLAVE" was written on his face too, in bold black pen. After 19 years he wrestled free, putting out an album called "Emancipation" and answering to Prince again.He made a stand for all black musicians, not just himself.

Uncatchable
Could anything pin him down? Not women: his two marriages were unhappy, and didn't last. Not time: his sense of it was limited to an indefinite future, his appearances onstage usually late. Not expectations, because he could cancel shows on a whim and then as suddenly put them on, impromptu, all-night and free. Not religion, because his fervour as a fresh-minted vegan, teetotal Jehovah's Witness came and went, together with the spirits who sometimes ordered him around.

Roots defined him slightly. He was born and schooled in Minnesota and stayed loyal to it, supporting the Timberwolves, sneaking into the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and building his studio complex at Paisley Park in Chanhassen. There, though, he was as elusive as ever, not to be caught on any recording device, including mobile phones. Fleeting impressions only, like vivid strobes. The internet bothered him, and he strove to ban his music from Spotify, iTunes and anywhere where he could not control it. For a while he tried to ban his showman's likeness, too.

Only one thing held him. He felt its tingling grip when he was seven, struggling to be good enough to be allowed to play his father's piano. It possessed him at Minneapolis Central High School: all those hours in the music room, his already-high-teased hair nodding over the keys, after his friends had gone home. It roared through his body on the stage like a river without end. At Paisley Park, if he was not at his purple grand piano, he would be recording; and though he produced 39 studio albums, four in his last 19 months alone, he still had shelves of recordings that were not quite ready, not sufficiently perfect, in his vault: enough material (some said) to make annual albums for the next hundred years.

To be bound to music was sexier even than freedom. So he let it fill both his days and his white, unsleeping nights.

[bayonetbrant]

Funk/soul master shreds classic rock guitar. Love him or hate him, it's going to be a long, looooooooooooong time before another more versatile superstar comes along

[yt]https://youtu.be/6SFNW5F8K9Y[/yt]

Required reading about this performance

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/arts/music/prince-guitar-rock-hall-of-fame.html

especially this part:

GALLEN They finish, and I go up to Jeff and Tom, and I sort of huddle up with these guys, and I'm like: "This cannot be happening. I don't even know if we're going to get another rehearsal with him. [Prince]. But this guy cannot be playing the solos throughout the song." So I talk to Prince about it, I sort of pull him aside and had a private conversation with him, and he was like: "Look, let this guy do what he does, and I'll just step in at the end. For the end solo, forget the middle solo." And he goes, "Don't worry about it." And then he leaves. They never rehearsed it, really. Never really showed us what he was going to do, and he left, basically telling me, the producer of the show, not to worry. And the rest is history. It became one of the most satisfying musical moments in my history of watching and producing live music.

[bayonetbrant]

another great memory piece

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/entertainment/arts-culture/article74458597.html

[bayonetbrant]

http://wncn.com/2016/05/03/music-icon-prince-once-crashed-nc-state-frat-party/