I feel that way about Pink Floyd. I cannot figure out why anyone would want to listen to that - its an instant migraine for me. I don’t even know much of their catalog because there seriously is something headache inducing for me about their music.
So I’ll never give Pink Floyd a chance. I’ll believe it if someone tells me they are objectively great - I don’t know enough to form my own opinion and never will.
There are a ton of musicians who aren’t my thing, but I’ve learned to appreciate why other people like them (unlike Floyd, which I cannot GET) - Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones - not my go to artists when I want to listen to something, but I’ve learned to enjoy them.
Silly?. Black pop is what they had a chart for for 100 years, during your lifetime too, I imagine. It was called “sepia” “Rhythm and Blues” “Soul” “Urban contemporary” at different times. It is not “potentially offensive” to make note of it in a discussion fighting ignorance. Playing the racist card over it (Which others seem to be doing) is bizarre. He is working with and using black popular music styles constantly.
I’ve heard his songs, and a whole slew of them this week, but they just don’t break out of that for me. I haven’t heard one ballad as good as “In the rain” by the Dramatics" or a thousand other tunes. There were great songwriters who broke ground on melodies and harmonies. They weren’t as popular sometimes. Doesn’t mean anything. Not everyone hears everything or should.
Well, there’s certainly no accounting for taste, intelligent, thoughtful people disagree about art all the time. If it doesn’t click in your brain, for whatever reason, it doesn’t. There’s certainly no harm in that. I don’t like the impressionists for the most part, but they’re often held up as the pinnacle of painting by some people. To pretend that my opinion should weigh heavily on the minds of others who have seen the same works I have seen is just dumb. Who are they going to believe, me or their lying eyes?
However, if I might give a dry explanation of Prince’s pop appeal, even if it might not be what is necessary to make you like him: He’s certainly informed by the post-70’s funk idea of hitting heavy on the one. Parliament/Funkadelic was famous for having quite a few songs where the entire band would play on the one of every measure. In their case, it allowed them a lot of freedom to improvise on the whole, as long as they knew where the one was, and what chord they were on, they could go pretty crazy.
Prince re-used this idea in a lot of his pop songs, at least as far as letting you know exactly where the beat was, even when it’s not a particularly easy to follow beat. When Doves Cry and Kiss show fairly complex beat structures where he’s telegraphing the one, without them being particularly funky*. That goes a long way into making the behindus of any ethnicity shake.
But then again, he put out entire albums without intending for one song to be a pop hit. So, that’s not all of his appeal, but it kind of explains his being rich.
*Funky being relative to Prince’s median. Video links not guaranteed to be available for very long at all. Either way, you could purchase a good copy of either vinyl at a record store for $5 as of a few weeks ago. He sold phenomenal amounts of these records. Go grab Parade, put on the headphones, and listen to Prince kiss you (no, seriously, literally) as a rhythm instrument.
And on preview: Boyo, as far as I can tell that’s his given name.
What isn’t catchy about “Raspberry Beret”? Forget about the hook; the first few measures are magnetizing just because of the funky rock rhythm. And then, what, the violin out of nowhere? The song is like a sushi roll of pop goodness.
What isn’t catchy about “Kiss”? * I just want your extra time and your (dindiddyiddydiddydiddyding) kiss. * Even if you hate this song, the hook is compelling, clear, and hard to forget.
What isn’t catchy about “Controversy”? Am I black and white; am I straight or gay… Controversy! Can you honestly listen to this song and walk away thinking, “gee I wonder what the name of that song is?” Or even “gee, what was the prevailing melody in that song?” I’m pretty certain I could hum two measures of this (in the wrong key, no less) and my 90 year-old grandmother would be able to name this tune. If that’s not catchy, nothing is catchy.
I don’t even think the question of catchiness boils down to taste. People in the industry know what makes a catchy song catchy even if personally they don’t like the song; this insight is what factors into what singles get selected for airplay.
Prince’s strength wasn’t in making catchy tunes anyway. Otherwise anyone who writes commercial jingles would be granted genius status. His strength was in creating fresh, evocative, multi-dimensional music that also happened to be catchy. The songs you’ve held up as examples of catchy seem shallow compared to the storytelling of “Raspberry Beret”, which is much more than a singer wailing a hook into a mic over and over again.
My only personal knock against Prince is how much time he spent singing upper register falsetto…not my favorite…especially weighed against how gorgeous his normal singing tone is. Kiss is a perfect example of getting flogged to death by falsetto.
Music was marketed to black people under the rubric of “race recordings” for years and years. If you have heard Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson, or John Lee Hooker, or a thousand others, that’s what they were making records for originally. You can see it in catalogs (Like sears) prior to the 40s. After that:
“In 1940 the leading trade magazine, Billboard, began to publish charts in three categories: pop, rhythm and blues (first called race music, then sepia), and …”
Jerry Wexler later of Atlantic Records invented the term Rhythm and Blues as a journalist for Billboard, to replace previous terms in the late 40s.
My question to you is do you really not know anything about this?
I can’t tell if this a plea for help or what, but iTunes has a fair amount of Prince’s catalog. So does Amazon. Since his death, I’ve downloaded many songs. So it’s not that difficult if you really want it.
Our question to you is why hasn’t your way of classifying an African American musician not evolved beyond the terminology used in the days when blacks couldn’t vote in the South without risking burning crosses in their lawn? “Black pop” is simply not informative enough to use in a discussion about Prince’s musical style and range, and insistence on not seeing this smacks of racial pigeon holing.
Is David Bowie an example of “white pop”? What about the Talking Heads? They straddled the same fences Prince did, you know. George Michael is another. And Justin Timberlake…what’s he?
When you use the term “black pop” you are giving something a very high compliment and bar to leap over. Do not twist my words. Everybody that cites black music as a musical talking point is not invoking Jim Crow, OK? This music existed, it was great, and get used to it.
My theory is you have to be on the Prince Mythos bandwagon to think this is great. Princes music is OK if you have no idea of what happened before. (In black music, in white music, in undifferentiated music) If you do, though it’s very repetitive, static and unctuous. It never goes anywhere “else.” I have listened to Kiss, Raspberry beret and Controversy a few times since the citing post. It’s hard to imagine caring about these tunes all that much after a couple of spins or citing them as write-home-about stuff.
I am not trying to pigeon hole him. “Black Pop” came up a long time back in the thread as a positive attribute of older music, and I was being honest about what I felt about it’s direction. It describes music made for a black mass audience throughout the history of recordings, which has been a subject of great interest and research for me. Prince was part of that whether you know it or not. I didn’t invent it. But it is a very important musical thread, that if you don’t know it you might read up on. There is just as much “80s” in his music or more. But that’s reflecting worse on him. There’s a lot of human League, spandau ballet etc in Prince too. OK? He was a pioneer and synthesizer of sounds he heard in his head, which he worked at very hard. Got it.
David Bowie is a greater artist than Prince.
It’s OK to be a pop fan, but be honest about it. I don’t know timberlake or Michael too well. But Prince was not part of the rock scene in the 80s. He is now that you want to look back and pretend you live in a post-racial purple planet. So he’s “rock” because you romanticize him to be. Back then he wasn’t. He was crossover maybe. It’s not bad or good. It’s the way it was. In the day he was as far from the underground as you could get. If his material was better he would have been “transcendent.” Can i just say He didn’t transcend “Pop.”? It wasn’t beautiful enough. IMMHOO
1)I’m not old enough to have gotten the Sears catalog ‘prior to the 40’s’
2)Where is that quote from?
3)You said black pop has been used on the charts for 100 years now. I’d like a cite that, not a cite for something else.
No, I really don’t know anything about black pop, race music, or sepia from 100 years ago (puts us around 1916, not the 40’s).
Sorry man, we are just not going to agree. I was in my 20s in the 1980s, and I was an absolute rock fan. I was not a fan of R&B or Motown. Not really a huge fan of those genres now, but I have an appreciation. But I liked Prince in the 80s because he ROCKED.
In the 1980s i was not hung up on what “category” music fell into. Still not. Don’t know why it’s important to do so, even in this thread.
I wouldn’t give up on anyone; I came to Prince later in life myself. I had his “Purple Rain” tape like everone else in the 80’s, but I didn’t become a full-fledged fan until I met my husband in 2000. He had almost all of Prince’s albums, so I listened to them and became familiar with the rest of his work, and I was a total convert.
I always offer a mix cd to people if they have any interest in getting to know Prince’s music better - a selection of songs that I consider his best and most accessible, covering all the genres that he has worked in. If you like pop, R&B, and funk, I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t get to know and love his work like I did.
How in the holy hell you gonna lecture me about 80’s music, when you casually let drop you don’t know anything about George Michael? Thats like claiming expert knowledge of the Bible but not knowing anything about Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus.
Black pop music charts go back 76 years in Billboard. Are you saying that before that the industry was integrated? They just decided to start doing that in 1940? Or is it more likely that it was unspoken and there was so much interest in the black pop record market that a huge demand created the chart?
FWIW: Many posts here claim he is rock or that he is so great that he transcended category, and so he subsumed all the qualities of “rock” and to suggest otherwise may be “offensive”. I find him to be middling pop, and not rock.
