If you step up and say “Although I can’t demonstrate I’ve really dug into a topic, I hold a strong opinion. Let me share it with you.” how would you like to be regarded on a website focused on fighting ignorance?
You were not the worst, but you seem to be endorsing the overall approach of making the argument about the poster and not the poster’s opinion:
**Why should anyone care about your views on Prince? So far, the best you’ve come up with is that he doesn’t blow your skirt up. Spin your prop. Peel your banana.
Not my problem, Poindexter. Go learn something.**
It’s pretty basic invalidation: you don’t deserve to be talking here. Go away. I firmly disagree with this approach and think it’s poison to a forum such as this.
Hey OP. your’e getting batted around a little. Just checkin’ you ok?
I agree with a lot of this post. It’s not unreasonable to note if you think he doesn’t close the deal on his songs. Obviously it’s a divergent opinion, here, but is legit.
The cheesiness and the production values of the era, that Prince was a part of, the superficiality, and visual aspects, and the overcompensating exagerated sex exploitation. Those are all legit subjects to bat around in trying to get who he was.
I’ve seen Prince, (3/3/82) so he isn’t immortal to me. If you do that stuff, and climb a mountain and masturbate a guitar, you need to have music to justify it or else it’s offensive, to me. and I’m a liberal. I thought the same thing the night I saw the dude. He never justified the dirty talk with the songs. And I hold him accountable in that way.
Takes himself too seriously? I can see that. The RRHOF clip was very self regarding shall we say. Good soloing but he is showing off. To be honest I don’t think he was a happy person being that sexual a showoff on stage. In that way he was a little hendrixian.
He is a fast guitarist. But I don’t care about the songs. They sound like a cartoon version of sex music. You need to play on great songs to be a great guitarist is the way I order my preferences. It’s not expertise as part of a resume that adds up to greatness. The songs come first, and then the laurels.
Let’s be clear: if you are trying to present your opinion as just that, cool. If you are trying to present it as equal in weight to musicians and academics…really?
You don’t see where you might need a bit of snark to point out your self-inflated view? Really?
You can be negative all you want. And we allowed to say, “Dude, your opinion is crazy and makes you look ignorant!” You have a strange definition of “thread shitting” if you think it means we can’t vehemently disagree with your arguments and point out their weaknesses.
(You seem to want to have your “it’s just an opinion!” cake but eat it served on an intellectual plate. If it’s just an opinion you’ve been sharing with us, then all the pontificating in the OP is totally unnecessary. If we’re having an intellectual discussion, then we are totally allowed to debate you and tell you you’re wrong.
If someone created a thread entitled: “Pizza is a problematic food” and went on to say that the only pizza that is any good is the rectangular-shaped stuff served in grammar school cafeteria, wouldn’t you think that person was being a buffoon? Especially if that person admitted that cafeteria pizza is the only pizza they’ve ever eaten? Because that’s kind of like how your OP reads to me. I don’t see someone who is open to being convinced he’s wrong in the OP. I see someone whose mind has already been made up (and he has an expert critic to back him up and everything!), and he’s just looking for folks to agree with him. Maybe you could have gotten that kind of discussion with some other artist. But it’s clear Prince ain’t the one. Even people who don’t dig his music can understand why others feel differently.
Thanks for your points. You expressed what I would say better than I did.
As far as being ok… I am not taking what has been said here personally, despite the effort to make it personal. It is just pretty standard Internet behavior.
People don’t seem to realize, or don’t wish to realize, that it’s not just about whether a particular behavior can be justified in the instance. It’s also about what kind of incentive system that behavior creates if allowed.
If pile-ons are allowed because the poster is a fool and those piling are just and wise and would only do so to a fool, then that incentivizes fools (who think themselves just and wise) to pile on anyone.
Read this Aeschines.
WordMan said:
Not sure where you get that.
I’m saying that your thinking here leads to a really bad incentive system.
Let’s grant that WordMan is wise and just poster. You only hand out the snark when it’s deserved. But for every one of you, there are ten or more IdiotMen who are piling on the snark where it is not deserved. So a 15-year-old comes here and talks about Prince in an inadequate manner, and, while you would have immediately intuited the person’s age and lack of experience and pulled punches and been encouraging, IdiotMan would have given the person the business, and that person would have been deflated and left the Dope for good.
I mean, have we learned nothing from GamerGate? The people who were trashing and trolling the women really thought they were justified, and they even had some kernels of controversy to work with. Because there always is something. IdiotMan always feels he is right and acts accordingly. Thus, the incentive system must anticipate the existence of IdiotMan and his penchant for trashing the place. That’s why personal attacks are not allowed, even if they are justified.
Maybe. But a reasonable person could also say “He looks troubled” or “over sexualized”. If he was a woman it would be asked “Was she an abused child who is acting out?” As it was he was an abused child.
He is oozing but I just think when someone is oozing something you have to watch out.
What would be an example of a thoughtful examination of why Prince is problematic, that is not about those things?
Aeschines, if you have some time, there’s a nice little album dissection of Purple Rain just over here that may help elucidate what music listeners and critics like about Prince’s music. Just scroll down to the second box where it says “Classic Album Dissection, Prince Purple Rain” and click on that, or at the top left of the page, there’s this little pie-charty circle icon to the left of the “play” icon. If you click on the main white section, that’s the portion of the show that is the album dissection.
I’ve always liked these guys and their approachable musical commentary and criticism. Whenever they’ve done an album dissection on albums that are highly respected but I’ve never much liked (like Pink Floyd’s The Wall), I do come away with a new appreciation and understanding. There was even a wonderful re-appraisal of disco music a few years ago that made me respect the genre a heck of a whole lot. So, if you have a few minutes free, just give it a listen.
A lot of it is an interview with Wendy and Lisa, but there’s a dissection at the end at 32 minutes of “Darling Nikki” and “When Doves Cry.”
[quote=“Aeschines, post:168, topic:811571”]
[quote=“WordMan, post:164, topic:811571”]
Let’s be clear: if you are trying to present your opinion as just that, cool. If you are trying to present it as equal in weight to musicians and academics…really?
All Posters should be treated with respect. Ad Hominem attacks from a mean place suck.
But monstro’s paradox*** holds. You’re asking folks to start by accepting your opinion as a fact. It comes across as short sided. At best. If you keep not seeing this, what do you expect to happen?
***why isn’t this already a band?!?
Maybe I’m crazy but all this talk of an artist whose music was a product of its time(s), who always did his own thing, who was hugely influential, who went through a spiritual/Christian period, who people either consider a multifaceted genius or just don’t much care for brings to mind Bob Dylan (OK, he never oozed sexuality.)
Prince Rogers…Zimmerman!!
They also do a very nice retrospective of his career after he died here. That might be a better place to start, actually. So give that a listen first, if you have the time. 
Do the rules of the Dope prohibit personal attacks or not? Do you feel that any of the comments have been personal attacks?
If you are OK with all of the comments, then I firmly disagree. I believe in disagreeing with people in a polite and respectful way, and I think I have demonstrated that in my responses to the people who have been commenting against me here.
I love the Beatles. I would be happy to read a post about how the Beatles suck here. I have actually sought out anti-Beatles blogs and whatnot online in order to see how that side thinks. Because it’s interesting. I would not attack a poster on here for expressing that opinion and try to make him/her feel as though s/he had no right to express that opinion here, however poorly expressed I thought it was. That’s how I roll, and that’s what I think is conducive to a good forum.
Go for it. Maybe behave as though you were on TV debating someone else and you had the social pressure to be polite and respectful even if you really thought the other person was an idiot. I think that’s what incentivizes free expression and debate in the first place.
I would then politely debate that point.
I felt I wrote the OP rather carefully and I fully expected disagreement. I think a pretty decent effort should be “good enough” on the Dope. Again, if the standard is set so high that one is not allowed to “diss” or be negative without a doctoral thesis-level of care, then that will have the effect of eliminating negative posts on the Dope. And that is kinda how Cafe Society, at least, is. Very few posts are of the variety of someone stating a thesis, negative or positive.
I already did. Your response was to whine about how it was threadshitting for someone who didn’t like Prince to post in a thread about…not liking Prince. I wasn’t impressed, nor was I impressed by your claim that you can’t be homophobic because you “love campy gay stuff”.
Well, I don’t think it’s problematic at all that Prince had a lot of female fans, so almost anything would be a better example than that.
A while back I heard an interview with some celebrity who had known Prince (I’m afraid I don’t remember who), and he said something that indicated that Prince himself may have felt some conflict between the religious views he embraced later in his life and the sexy content of many of his songs. I had thought this thread might be about that, which seems like a potentially interesting topic even if one isn’t into Prince’s music.
Beyond that, I don’t know enough about Prince to examine why he might have been problematic, which is why I didn’t start a thread called “Prince: I find him to be a problematic artist”.
OK, cool, glad we agree on that.
I’m not sure what this is…
I don’t get this. It’s just a thesis, stated. Written.
Again, if someone writes an outrageous, insulting OP, I can understand a certain amount of backlash (though if it were too outrageous, it’s probably best just to assume “troll,” right?). But I think my OP was careful enough such that, if that level of care deserves a nasty pile-on, then that is going to disincentivize free discussion on the Dope.
What about any other points, from the OP, other than the bigotry thing? (which can be distracting)
Well, it’s not clear what you are accusing me of saying or what Delingpole said. Or is a guilt by association thing? I didn’t quote the part you took issue with.
I don’t think straight guys found Prince’s sexualized persona a selling point of his music, and I personally found it to be an annoying and fake part of what he offered. I never said, and do not think, that (if true) the fact that more women than men like(ed) him diminishes his accomplishments in any way.
This is a perfect example of the SJW ethos. I’m not a homophobe, and you’re not my judge, thank you very much.
And you needn’t have commented in such a thread, either.