“Problematic” definitely doesn’t mean overrated, it means there are problems with the artist beyond the music.
I might be willing to give the OP the benefit of the doubt that he simply used the wrong word, but his later posts revealed that he indeed has problems with Prince beyond the music alone. That poisoned the well and makes discussion of if he’s overrated more difficult. Comments that he’s only popular because he’s black don’t help, and neither do suggestions that even though he’s popular with women and black people, it doesn’t really count because appealing to straight white males is the most important thing.
Melody is most of it for me. The less melody in James Brown the more my mind tends to drift. Sorry James, and funk people. I do not care about that. And I am a musician too. There is no party line you must follow.
I will listen to your suggestions. To me that’s what the forum is supposed to be for. People who are challenged to defend the music of their aspirational heroes should be more resilient, and happy to discuss. It’s not an insult unless you take it that way.
But that’s perfectly fine. I suspect most of Prince’s work is not going to be your bag if you’re melody-driven. You may also want to check out his second album, self-titled, in addition to Dirty Mind. Lots of R&B style falsetto vocals, that sort of thing going on. Try something like “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “I Feel For You.” It is, IMHO, not as good as his later work, but it’s more melodic. That said, I only know maybe five or six albums of his work – he just has so much out there. And of course, stuff he wrote for other artists like “Manic Monday” and “Nothing Compares 2 U.” I definitely think he had an ear for melody, but it wasn’t the most important thing for him in his music.
This is nothing more than a comment on your musical tastes, not the scope of Prince’s influence. If you don’t like Prince, it is not surprising you don’t listen to much music today that was influenced by him.
If you’re truly interested in learning about his influence on music, it’s not hard to find plenty of material to read. Here are a few:
Commenting that he hasn’t had much influence on music you like is fine. Stating that he didn’t have a big influence, full stop, is just ignorant. And comments like this…
…are just . He didn’t lose touch, he didn’t need to do anything for you. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t performing for you alone.
Exactly. He may not have had an influence on particular genre of music a person enjoys, but to claim he didn’t have a big influence on music today is just pretty ridiculous. Especially when you consider that you have Grammy winners and artists who quite recently had #1 albums and songs who were influenced heavily by Prince.
Whoops. “Nothing Compares 2 U” was written for one of his side projects, the Family, and Manic Monday was originally written and recorded for Apollonia 6 (though apparently not released.) I thought the latter was specifically written for the Susanna Hoffs/The Bangles, but apparently it was already written before being offered to them.
We know that he was influential on the music industry, and sounds that are heard. I am influenced by hip hop even though I don’t listen. It’s in the air. I wish there were songs I cared to recall in the genre.
People may or may not think that the influence of anyone, Prince for instance, was good though. You need to believe in the “consensus” very strongly and not doubt that it is always right. I am so not that person. The consensus on many things is meaningless or even horrifying to me, YMMV.
My point: Being influential on the music industry doesn’t really say what kind of influence it was.
No, we don’t - look at the article in the OP to which my original point was directed to. The one where the individual says he can’t hear Prince’s “influence anywhere today”.
And I’m not sure where this whole “was Prince’s influence good thing” came from, but it appears to be a massive shifting of the goalposts.
Well that is an individual value judgement that everyone can make for themselves. How would you suggest quantifying this in a way that actually leads to an answer that is applicable to anyone aside from just yourself?
No, folks like me are not Tools of Conventional Wisdom. The point is that with some artists, there “is” a strong outstanding POV about them. Prince, for instance is deeply respected by peers and critics.
Wouldn’t it be appropriate to start the discussion from that point? “I understand how Prince is regarded; I have these questions about / issues with that…”
Saying you find him Problematic makes this about the OP. So the thread lurches along. Think about how you approach a topic.
One of my favorite musical groups is Wendy and Lisa. They sre awesome musicians in their own right, but they got their start with Prince. And they frequently talk about the mentorship he provided not just for them, but other female performers.
Prince did excel in pretty much every kind of thing he performed, and anyone who doubts that has just not seen & heard the evidence.
But.
I know it’s subjective, but to me, Prince’s music gives the impression that he doesn’t have a gut-level commitment to whatever he’s doing at that moment. To me, it feels like it’s calculated for effect, and impersonal. I don’t enjoy skilled-but-impersonal, unless the skill is wildly over-the-top in-your-face long instrumental solos. Prince was not (for example) Jaco Pastorius.
Being hard to pigeonhole is not the same as lacking a personal point of view. When someone can’t be pigeonholed, it’s because they are themselves and don’t have to do the same thing over and over. It’s possible to fake “you can’t pigeonhole me”, by doing a bunch of semi-random things that you don’t really identify with.
I fault Bowie in the same way, but a lot less. It’s subjective.
Maybe my whole point of view is just not suited to this style. Maybe I secretly want every performer to be the earnest singer/songwriter. But I don’t really think so.
It’s possible to fake it but generally that doesn’t garner widespread accolades from peers and critics. Prince spent his life creating music in a variety of styles, for himself and others, often deciding to hide away his creations forever. Maybe you just need bigger or different pigeonholes. Maybe to him music was like a puzzle and it’s not fair to say he never really committed to jigsaw or the word jumble, he was committed to the idea of a puzzle.
I didn’t start the topic, but it can be what you want to say, no matter how it started. You set the scene. You seem very highly motivated to enforce some kind of CW, as I read your posts going back. “You have to recognize the public recognition of something as being evidence of it’s quality.” But I don’t agree with that.
I don’t understand most of the last two lines, but why do you care about that? If you are a Prince fan why don’t you show up and give your evidence and not complain that people aren’t respectful enough of CW? Isn’t that just needing a safe space?
It sounds like the forum is behaving as it should if someone says someone is problematic and people show up to discuss whether they are full of it or not. I don’t see what there is to scold.
But Wordman, the thing I get is that you are placing prince with the beatles or the stones in making comparisons, for the purposes of this thread. He may actually be better in some cosmic sense, in eternity, but there is a wishful thinking part of this, for you, in placing him with those people, commercially, culturally, creatively, musically in order to argue he needs to be in the pantheon next to them. I can’t see any reason why he is part of that pantheon. It is not his fault. But it’s not my fault either. And there is no blame to be assigned based on this.
If you need to see popular music as a steady state unrolling process where all things equal out in the end, there is a requisite amount of excellent work at any given time, which may be completely equivalenced, and is a zero sum game, then OK, prince is like the beatles for comparisons. But failing that, he isn’t.
Dude, Prince is Prince. In the last thread, I explained various aspect of his musicianship, song writing etc. You, in that case, said “I still don’t see it.”
Again - that’s totally cool as your opinion. But I am not going to bend over backwards to prove anything to you or the OP. It doesn’t matter what I think - Prince’s reputation is that yes, he is up there with the Beatles and Stones and is the Duke Ellington of the back half of the 20th century. That doesn’t require proof - it is a simple Google.
If that is his reputation, then come to the topic with that in mind. If you think it is over-rated, say so. Don’t describe him as Problematic or attempt to frame “I just don’t like his music” as something profound.
I think this missed my point. I don’t get the feeling that Prince did his own thing, at least not mostly. I don’t think listeners usually received the kind of music Prince really would have committed himself to, because I don’t think he ever did that for any length of time. I think the majority of his very best stuff consisted of calculated shots at sales and popularity. That’s how it all feels to me. Like he treated his own music as manipulated image for sale, instead of as his own music.
I’m not saying the manipulated image was not well done - I’m saying I don’t like the manipulated-image feel, it turns me off.
Hey, ETA: Listening to Prince, for me, is like watching that too-good-but-not-perfect CGI in a movie, where it creeps you out to see something too close to real.
With all due respect, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Look at the guy’s complete discography. The vast majority of his songs never made the charts, but he nonetheless kept churning out obscure album after even more obscure album. Do you really think the guy lost the knack for coming up with hit records in his later years, despite his amazing composing abilities? Or do you think there’s a chance as a middle-aged guy, he stopped caring so much about Billboard charts and entertaining the average listener, but rather chose to create more for himself and his hardest-core fans?
If Prince had been any other kind of artist, he would have thrown in the towel in the mid 90s and been yet another performer who does “Free Bird” at concerts so the fans would never forget the good ole days. But one of the criticisms that Prince frequently got is that he tended to avoid performing his radio 80s hits. He didn’t cater to the most casual of fans, but to the fans who really dug him. He hated that the masses were flatlined on his days with the Revolution, and I don’t blame him one bit. A lot of his best stuff didn’t happen with the Revolution. The stuff he did with the Revolution was more pop rock than R&B/funk, and this is really where his heart was. Prince worked so hard developing hits in the 80s because–like anyone in the prime of their career–that’s when he had bills to pay and a reputation to build. So of course he spent those years appealing to the masses and doing what he had to do to stay relevant. But once he became a rock star, he went from being a very committed artist to an obsessively committed artist. Only someone who has not studied his career would say otherwise.
I mean, I don’t mind hearing detractive opinions about Prince or his work. I actually have my own. But when these opinions come from obviously uninformed sources that are nonetheless expressed so self-assuredly, I just can’t go along. I don’t understand why ya’ll can’t do some independent research before sharing all these not-so-profound notions you’ve constructed. The guy’s discography clearly rebuts everything you’ve said about him. So come up with another reason to criticize him. This “He wasn’t a committed artist” stuff is problematic.
I actually defined what I meant, so scroll up is all I can say…
I was trying to use an inoffensive, non-incendiary word. But I get it: there’s nothing you can say that’s negative without people taking huge offense and twisting it into something offensive.
Not really. It just turned into SJW-style wild extrapolations that I’m a homophobe because I find Prince’s sexual shtick unappealing. And I’m a misogynist because people read the article I quoted (fine) and decided that the author was a misogynist based on a part I did not quote. After all, if I quote, for example, Ben Shapiro, I am basically responsible for anything he ever said anywhere. I am not allowed to quote something I agree with and have it end there. I become an avatar of the alt-right.
Well, now you’re talking about the words of someone else, but I might as well be accused of racism at this point too, as I am a straight white male, which has been amply pointed out.
I don’t really have an issue with Prince beyond the music. And I would include his stage/video persona as being “in the music,” and I didn’t/don’t like it, but I actually found him somewhat likeable and vulnerable and real in Purple Rain, which I would call an interesting and enjoyable misfire of a movie. He doesn’t seem like he was a bad guy in real life, just a little odd and unapproachable. I really have been talking about the music.
I have already said twice that Prince was highly skilled. I have also said that I don’t like his music and that I’m not convinced. I am one hundred percent correct. (My comments say nothing about you.)
