Thanks, I appreciate your post. I will take a listen to your suggestions.
:dubious: You say that like it’s a bad thing. Being really careful about how one posts generally makes posts better and more interesting.
And yeah, if you voluntarily center your OP on an article that dismissively refers to your subject as “a girls’ idea of what rock music ought to sound like”, it’s not really reasonable to get all huffy when somebody suggests that your disparagement seems to have an element of gender bias.
Actually, I was discussing influence, and how Prince had nowhere near what Hendrix had, in response to CK’s mocking post.
As I said in my very first post on the subject, he was a technically-talented guitar player. However, that has nothing whatsoever to do with his influence on other guitarists. He was not and will never be the seminal influence that Hendrix was. Period. End of story.
I know little about Prince, popped into the thread to learn something, all I found was a bunch of people attacking the OP for having the cheek to ask what the big deal was about Prince.
You all rather proved his point if you ask me.
He’s far more popular in America than Ireland; he’s kind of like the American David Bowie. (Not like Ireland has ever lacked for amazing musicians.) In any case, though I do like Prince - though not a rabid fan - I was more astonished/bemused/offended by the idea, advanced in the article linked in the OP, that “acid house and dance music saved the world” after a musical “dead zone” in the late 1980s. This to me is the musical version of someone saying something like “Donald Trump saved the world after the political dead zone of the Obama administration.”
How do you point out an echo chamber of limited perspective?
An OP: I find The Beatles problematic.
Other Posters: dude, they’re the Beatles
(Some folks post to say that they aren’t big Beatles fans)
OP: I mean, I don’t like their songs and their style - it went all over the place.
Other Posters: hey, that’s fine, you don’t like them. But many people do and what you say is bad, they all dig.
OP: (long, long, long way to say “yeah but I still don’t like them”)
Other Posters: dude. Sigh.
Bucketybuck: you guys are proving his point.
:smack:
Hilarious.
Johnny Ace - yeah, of course. Few are up on Hendrix’s league of influence - Chuck Berry, Clapton, EVH, etc. but I don’t think anyone was claiming that. Prince is a brilliant guitar player but his influence is much more about his songs, sounds, and persona.
I liked it fine, but I don’t honestly think it merits the love it gets. His cocky stalking the stage, the showboating, his trustfall, his antics serve to magnify the actual guitar playing. I wouldn’t say it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination, but there are ppl out there saying it’s the best guitar solo ever. It’s not even the best take on THAT guitar solo.
I’ll give him credit for giving it something of himself while not wandering so far from the original material as to make it unrecognizable. I like that in a cover. Slavish devotion to the original makes performing it pointless.
A fun, entertaining performance to say the least. I didn’t LOVE what he brought to it, though I like and respect that he did it.
This is why some are rolling their eyes. This is not peak Prince, by a long shot. This was when he crossed over into the mainstream.
Please just stick to you not liking him instead of saying things like this which only highlight how misplaced you are in this discussion.
This is a long-winded way of saying it isn’t easy to pigeon hole Prince and then act like that’s a concern. The man wrote and performed all kinds of music and excelled in each.
And to whoever tried to equate this idea there is a lack of emotional resonance from Prince that is found in Bowie, I will repeat my earlier observation - older, white, and male. Bowie was awesome, but his death had none of the profound effect in the circles I run in like Prince did. I was lucky enough to see the man live in concert and there was no equal in terms of performance and sheer joy in that crowd to watch him do his thing.
How many times are you going to post the same thing? We get it.
I’d be interested to know exactly why Prince should be considered a great but I’m certainly not getting the answers from your posts.
I’ll just jog on I guess.
So I should break down a track? Folks posted his Hall of Fame lead, and the OP went “meh.” He doesn’t like it. Google any “Prince’s Hall of Fame Lead” and you will get stories and praise.
Any breaking down is kinda not the point. The OP doesn’t dig that type of music. Cool. The question is whether that is a statement about Prince’s not really being all that, or a simple preference.
There was a long thread here after his death with some good responses, although you’ll have to wade through plenty of “but I didn’t like him” comments too.
But maybe the burden of proof needs to be on those who insist he was nothing special. Millions of people are huge fans, find his songs “catchy”, are in awe of his songwriting, guitar playing, vocals, and showmanship. Critics love him. Other musicians think he was one of the greatest ever. If someone wants to argue that all these people are suffering from mass delusion, they need to bring something better than “I don’t like his music” or homophobia (“he seems like a closeted gay guy trying to fool the world with faux-straight hypersexuality”).
[Bolding mine] Exactly.
If you want to learn more about Prince on this board, why not start a neutral thread asking “Tell me about Prince” or “Where should I start when I listen to Prince.” When you have an OP with such a poisoned well that everything within two miles dies, the thread will inevitably be more about the OP than the ostensible subject.
A strange response to a post about Prince’s influence. Just because he has massive influence in “black music” doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a lot of influence (especially since “black music” is pretty much mainstream music these days)
But melody isn’t the end-all be-all of music and certainly not the only approach to music. I mean, look at James Brown. Guy’s a funk master, but who can whistle a James Brown tune? Doesn’t mean it’s not great music. It is. Maybe it’s doesn’t tickle you in the places you want music to tickle you, but it’s tickled plenty of other people just fine. I don’t know if he “lost touch” with things that you really need in music. I just think it wasn’t as important to him as it is to you. (Though I think Prince did write many lovely melodies, too, like “When 2 R in Love” and I find “When You Were Mine,” a fun early-80s melody. His first two albums, too, have plenty of melodic stuff on them.) But funk is just not a melody-driven genre, so of course you’re not going to have a lot of melody there. And that’s not losing touch with melody, it’s just him being in tune with the genre he’s working in.
Rory Gallagher, Terry Kath, Richard Thompson, Peter Green.
I’ve long felt that many Cafe Society threads would be vastly improved by framing the topic as “Tell me why you like X” instead of “I hate X, prove me wrong”.
It seems to me that “problematic” means overrated. Is that OK? Maybe it’s problematic.
This is a legitimate question, although it can be dangerous in the intellectual envronment here. I don’t know why it ought to be. Fighting ignorance and making sure everyone feels good, are two different things. But I have rarely seen anyone appreciate that fact.
There is lots of music. It seems to me that Princes influence doesn’t stretch too far into the songwriting that I have been following since Prince and I were small children, and am still following today. We could talk about what mainstream music means but it’s a broad topic and I think you are making some big assumptions. If he is into Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder I can’t hear the evidence or positive effect of it in his tunes. That’s problematic to me, if only as a consumer.