Results tagged “prince”

If you don't follow me on Twitter, you've been missing out. But fear not! I take care of my loyal blog readers as well, by offering you the highlights of the interesting links I've been sharing there:

• "I find it bonkers, by the way!" That's Rick Astley in his tribute to moot, as part of the Time 100 package. He's specifically referring to the the Obama rickroll video, but I think it applies in general.
• "If you love something, charge for it. ... People will pay for things they value." My esteemed colleague Andrew Anker makes the case for being unashamed of your value. (Semi-related: Four years later, my post on how freelancers should price their work remains one of the most popular things I've ever written.)
• Focus on the Family reviewed Prince's tepid new release and decided that even reactionary late-career Prince isn't tame enough for them. I would pay to see them review Dirty Mind.
• "In the U.S. people view names & identities as absolute things ... but in China, identities are more amorphous." It's a bit of an over-generality, but overall this Slate piece on names and identity was terrific. I tend to like Slate articles, though.
• Arsenio looks askance at his own Wikipedia article. I wish they would air classic episodes of the Arsenio Hall Show or screen them on Hulu or something; I'd watch them.
• I pimped the MP3 of James Brown's "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing" because it's a shame that so many people have never heard the whole thing.
• Nate Silver's TED talk about race and heterogeneity is pretty strong throughout (though the reach of some of the conclusions exceeds the grasp of the data), but I most enjoyed the point about 8 minutes into the clip where he talks about the implications of cul de sacs in (sub)urban planning.
• There are photos of lots of people wearing Aretha Franklin's big grey bow from the Obama inauguration. Most are photoshopped, but the best are not.
• Joel Spolsky gets to the heart of why B&H is a New York institution: "The whole operation is a crazy Willy Wonka factory."
• The organizers of the National Day of Prayer (you missed it last week!) have one of their key campaigns focused on praying for the media. It seems to be working as well as prayer usually does.
• I liked the new Star Trek movie, though it felt a little bit like when the eye doctor looks at my retinas. Just as enjoyable was this excellent look at Trek food, which has as its only shortcoming the regrettable omission of "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
• Genius illustrator Christoph Niemann's venerable Periodic Table of Metaphors is always worth another look. It's funny because it's true!

This world wide web thing, i think it's going to work out. I think it's gonna be good for the both of us. As always, "HAHA LOL" is courtesy of Alaina Browne.

Put these in your browser, and shake well.

• Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook's platform, will there ever be another popular new application on Facebook again. Or is the era of hit F8 apps over already?
• Prince is Rolling Stone's most underrated guitarist. The article's got a great shot of Prince's most ridiculously entertaining affectation of recent years: His habit of throwing his guitar away in faux-disgust at the end of his solos. His poor guitar tech Takumi is gonna take one of these spiky symbol-shaped guitars to the head one of these days while trying to make the catch.
• I loved Ian Rogers' post about digital music, "Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses". Choice quote: "Back in 1999 ... We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, 'What’s MP3?' or 'Um, no.' Instead they commenced suing Napster." Working in music promo online back then, I got to see those reactions first hand, and I guess I was equally naive.
• Rafe points to Jeff Atwood's great post about copyright and YouTube. I have the opposite conclusion than these guys: If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people -- they're not carved on stone tablets.
• The PlayStation 3 is a complete failure for casual gaming. That's not news, but it's never been articulated as well. Especially damning is that even the fanboys can only dispute minor facts, not the fundamental conclusion.

In the New Yorker, Bruce Wagner tries to live my life:

The performance began at two in the morning and took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was amazing. I was so close to Prince that I was injured during the six-and-a-half-hour set. A few lucky ones, who paid an additional hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars--twelve of us, to be exact, including Simon Cowell, the body of Christopher Isherwood, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Moore, the lissome Emma Watson, and the physicist Stephen Hawking--milled about after the show. We were all gregarious and high from the experience....

After Prince stopped playing, the two of us had brunch together. I was sitting so close to the diminutive legend that, as he ate, flecks of his omelette fell into my mouth. The privilege of this intimate meal cost an additional eighty-five thousand dollars, but it was worth every penny.

For a few weeks afterward, I was depressed. Going out to dinner with friends--for, say, two hours of convivial overfamiliarity and banal, rehashed conversation--seemed like idiocy, and the emptiness was only exacerbated when my friends jumped for the check. Even my normal morning ritual held no joy. Usually, one assistant comes into the bedroom with a pot of Indonesian coffee (the brew, six hundred dollars a pound and DHL'd from England, where it is rumored to be a favorite of the Royal Family, is sifted from the dung of wild civets) while a second factotum presents me with a freshly bound volume containing selections from every blog and Twitter and Facebook entry that has mentioned my name in the past twenty-four hours--hundreds of pages, with "BRUCE WAGNER" in convenient boldface--but even this lost its allure.

This is exactly what my experience was like, only my freshly bound volume is slightly thicker than Bruce's.

In the New York Times, Jon Pareles gets it exactly right:

Prince's priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it's purchased or not. "Prince's only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it," his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. ... Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music -- impossible as that is in the digital era -- and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals.

Prince's latest album Planet Earth was bundled for free with newspapers in the U.K.; His 2004 album Musicology was given away with all of his concert tickets that year, as he's doing again this year. And in his 1993 track "Pope", Prince said, "Every time u want it, I'll be live -- bring a date, I mean a computer; When it's over, press save." -- I think he meant it. Somehow the record industry thinks that giving music away for free is unsustainable, but I suppose that depends on what you're good at.

The Times story has a bunch of MP3 samples of Prince's biggest hits, too.

As much as we like to blame the RIAA for all the evils of the recording industry, leave it to my boy Prince to bring out the best in the execs over in the U.K. And mind you, these are music retailers, not even the people who, despite their extortionate ways, might actually have once helped an artist with production or distribution.

The Entertainment Retailers Association’s co-chairman Paul Quirk couldn’t help himself at an industry conference:

“It would be yet another example of the damaging covermount culture which is destroying any perception of value around recorded music. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behaviour like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores. And I say that to all the other artists who may be tempted to dally with the Mail on Sunday.”

So, what’s the transgression that made this guy lash out at Prince, and threaten “artists who may be tempted to dally”? Prince is giving away free CDs with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. Oh, the humanity! And he’s done this before, of course; His 2004 CD Musicology was given away for free at all of his concerts that year, though U.S. retailers were a lot more quiet with their grumblings. I do like that the tension between the death of the record industry and the decline in circulation of print has pitted these two behemoths against each other, however.

Keep in mind — this isn’t some low-level spokesperson for this industry group, this was the co-chairman of the organization, one of the guys in charge. Thus, when I read this story, I realized the only one who could possibly be cackling more loudly than me was Prince himself. Aside from performing, I think his greatest joy in life is to make stodgy old guys so mad they get flustered and start sputtering.

Oh, and the new album Planet Earth features the return of Wendy & Lisa and will probably actually have some good songs, too. I am tempted to dally with it.

This one's sublime: "What's your favorite kitchen sound?"

This one's the truth, finally. The most eloquent dismissal of User Generated Discontent (or in this case, nominal competitor-generated discontent) yet written:

It does, however, drive me nuts that you guys clearly take the influence and then blast us every chance you get...[T]he slamming, hyping up the dreams ... none of that is necessary. It's destructive. And what you don't seem to get is that it doesn't even help you at all...

One of my personal missions in life is to help people express themselves creatively because I think that the expression of human creativity is one of the things that gives purpose to the universe. In one sense, I think that's what we're here for. And that mission applies to you two as well.

You hear that, kids? Intellectual dishonesty doesn't pay! I couldn't have articulated it better myself, even when I tried to.

This one's just for me -- Prince: Perfumer, Macy's Shopper, and Verizon Subscriber. This may be the very first time Pitchfork's ever made something I had even a vague interest in reading.

This one's a shame: Brittney Gilbert leaves "Nashville is Talking". The pioneer of bringing traditional local media into the brave new world of social media has had enough of the bullshit. Brittney Gilbert found herself the victim of stupidity for highlighting someone else's stupidity on a TV stations' blog. While some of the User Generated Malcontents might see this as a victory, I've learned from experience that's better to take care of one's own sanity than to try to prove that you're tough enough to withstand an angry mob.

This one is still the one-and-only manual that can explain exactly how to get a number one single.

And then this is fair warning that next week is all about mangoes, minus some diversions into Best of LOL.

Sasha Frere-Jones bears witness to Prince's ageless funk in this week's New Yorker. As much as I admire Prince's gifts, it's Sasha's job I want.

Always trust the guys at The Smoking Gun to ferret out the good stuff. "Thanks CBS for turning my son GAY." This, of course, is the substance of one of the complaints filed to the FCC about Prince's Superbowl performance.

Okay, these are the links you should be reading on the Internet today.

• A smart diagram is the new clever writing: LeisureArts charts out my favorite snowclone. I covered similar topics before in The Story of America and Do you love words? The diagram is excerpted here.

• The New York Times reports on Justin Timberlake's new audience. "Unlike his former boy-band colleagues, Mr. Timberlake has even won over musicians who prefer lo-fi thrash to the slicker sounds of mainstream albums." These hipsters could have been five years ahead of the curve if they'd just have listened to me.

• Misidentified Black Person of the Week. A disturbingly familiar story about mistaken captions, which references my post about the same topic a couple of years ago. Somehow this really stuck with me, perhaps because I was reading this cogent explanation of the problem with "articulate" at the same time. "It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them 'articulate'." So, two notes for editors: Get people's names right, and be respectful. Not so hard!

• Speaking of respect, Why didn't Prince get electrocuted while playing electric guitar in the rain at the Superbowl? Because he's Prince, people!

• So it turns out there actually may be some Hunanese origins for General Tso's chicken. I've been using General Tso's chicken as the definitive example of how I became clueful about eating good food ("It's not even a real Chinese dish -- I'm a dummy!"), but I like this story of how it's a creation of cross-cultural entrepreneurism even better. I wonder if my family members in Taiwan have ever tried the "delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced sweet-sour sauce".

• I'm hoping danah won't be offended if I call her defense of walled gardens articulate. It's also thought-provoking, which is high praise indeed.

• On the flip side of the walled garden conversation is PB's ongoing onfocus series about getting off the grid. The technology here is interesting, but I'm enjoying watching the thought process behind the coding that Paul has been doing.

• And finally, Google is going to start to charge some businesses for Google Apps for Your Domain. I find that refreshing and reassuring.

Update: I put up a setlist and mini-review of Prince's Superbowl performance on Vox, and as I find videos of the performance, I'll put them up there, too.

Most everybody who knows me well knows that I've been a fan of Prince for pretty much my entire life. So when casual fans or non-fans hear that Prince is playing the halftime show at the Superbowl this year, they ask me, "What's up with that guy?" or "Is his name still a symbol?"

So I figured I'd put together a quick primer on Prince, at least what he's been up to since he was at his most prominent back in the 80s.

• Prince's name is Prince. Legally, it always has been, but he did go by the symbol (which is usually typed out as "O(+>") from 1993 until 2000. But his public name is now again the same as his legal name.

• Though he's not commercially or culturally dominant like he once used to be, Prince is not a has-been, either artistically or on the charts. His "3121" album last year debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, and followed the success of his Musicology tour and album in 2004, which had a great run on the charts and grossed over $90 million dollars as the most lucrative tour of the year. And his single, "Song of the Heart" from the "Happy Feet" soundtrack won a Golden Globe for best original song just the other day.

• 3121 is also his most consistently interesting and listenable album in years, so if you have his greatest-hits box set with b-sides or the recent, excellent "Ultimate" collection, it's a good place to start. Oh, and buy "Sign O' The Times", if you don't have it. There's just no excuse not to.

• Overall, Prince has had dozens of top 10 singles, he's released over 20 albums with almost all of them going at least platinum, he's made 3 or 4 films with nearly 50% of them watchable, and even as he nears 50 years old there just aren't any live acts that are better than him. Maybe, now that he's slowed down a bit, somebody who's at their prime can be as good in concert as Prince. But since James is dead, nobody can beat him.

Since most of my readers are geeks who like technology, and care about issues ranging from DRM to artist's rights to the tyrrany of the RIAA, there's some other things that might appeal to you about Prince's career. A short list of highlights:

• Prince has distributed much of his own music independently since 1994, and his major label deals since then have largely been promotion-and-distribution deals where he retained ownership of his master recordings.
• Prince is the first artist not signed to a major label to perform during the Superbowl halftime show, not counting accessory marching bands and child choirs.
• He's had a continuous presence on the web since 1995, and last year won a Webby for his work online
• There are a number of really great prince fansites like prince.org, though Prince's control freak tendencies have resulted in a lot of stupid legal threats towards them
• Prince distributed an online-only album back in 1997 with the liner notes available as a website
• Prince published an interactive CD-ROM in 1994, and it didn't totally suck
• He has distributed several albums' worth of material exclusively online through his own music label (though much of it was DRMed) as well as a number of videos and some really bad poetry
• Prince's webmaster maintained a now-defunct blog, largely ghostwritten by Prince, starting back in 2000.
• Prince and some of his studio staff used to actually join in on AOL chat room discussions with fans as late as 1995, talking about recording work in progress
• His current official site, 3121, should have a song available for download today

There's a lot more trivia I can spout, and I love the man's work because it's funky, not because he's been a pioneer in digital distribution. But my geek friends are always surprised to find out that "that guy who wrote Kiss" is also seriously on the edge of technology and tech culture in many ways.

If you want a sneak peek at what he's going to be performing at the Superbowl this Sunday, ther are some great video clips from the CBS affiliate in Miami. Prince had told reporters he'd be answering some questions in a press conference, but played 3 songs for them instead. The station then staked out his rehearsal stage (shaped like the symbol!) with a helicopter and shot footage from the chopper. Judging by the lighting and choreography, since there's no sound, it looks like we'll see a medley of 5 or 6 songs, with Purple Rain thrown in towards the middle. There's a marching band, the Florida A&M University Marching 100, and if they actually release doves then he'll probably have to play "When Doves Cry". And Tipper Gore will have to apologize to us all for saying he was offensive, because Prince isn't offensive, he's cheesy.

I get excited about this stuff because I forget most people have never seen him play. (From a jaded reporter: "I've never been to a Prince press conference before, but after Thursday, I would recommend them to all my friends. In fact, I'd give it a 9 out of 10 because you can dance to it.") Anyway, I have a pretty exhaustive storehouse of otherwise-useless Prince knowledge, so feel free to ask any questions if you want in the comments.

Sure, everybody's linking to Ironic Sans' (admittedly entertaining) Celebrity Patents, since Waxy pointed them out, but did you know Prince actually has a real patent?

Patent D349127 is for a portable electronic keyboard musical instrument. But Prince prefers to call the monstrosity the Purpleaxxe™.

It's a horrible 80s-style keytar, though it wasn't created or actively used until well into the 90s. Prince, of course, didn't inflict the ungainly shoulder-mounted funk launcher on his own frame -- he made his then-keyboardist Tommy Elm play it. But no, this sort of humiliation wasn't enough for Prince to inflict on the young man, he also renamed the poor fellow Tommy Barbarella, after -- you guessed it! -- the 1968 Jane Fonda sci-fi cheesecake flick. As you might guess, it's one of Prince's favorite movies.

Though the Purpleaxxe™ has fallen into disuse in the interceding decade and a half, Elm is still saddled with his unfortunate sobriquet (joining such stalwart Prince-named talents as Carmen Electra). And you can find mention of the Purpleaxxe™ in various liner notes on Prince's albums, as well as the lyrics to a b-side remix on an out-of-print CD single from 1992. You know, if you're in to that sort of thing.

...and you put links in your browser, and that's what makes the web work.

• Last October, Reason published an interesting look at bloggers' overreactions and even downright misrepresentations of an attack at the University of Oklahoma.

• Michael Fitzgerald has a nice piece in CIO about starting a business blog. I'm in there, briefly, but it's worth reading anyway.

• Prince is going to play halftime at the next Superbowl. Farkers (surprisingly!) rejoice.

• FAQs and Walkthroughs for New Super Mario Bros. I've got three stars, I've done Challenge Mode... now I'm just wandering around looking for things to do.

• Data structures as culture. I love this stuff: "Microsoft emphasizes tree problems because their culture puts a high value on the kind of mental gymnastics often necessary to solve such problems, while Apple emphasizes hashtables because its aesthetically-oriented culture prizes their combination of zen-like simplicity and seemingly impossible speed."

• The Chicago Tribune published a list of the 50 best magazines a while ago. I love magazines, so I have nothing but objections to this list, but I'd say that Baseline is a glaring omission.

• Are The Oaktree and The Bird the same dance? Could be! If only Morris had someone to hold up a mirror to his dancing, so he could judge.

I enjoy links myself, so I thought you might want some too. Here, then:

• Graphs as art: Werner Vogels picks up the site graph meme with some nice visualizations of Amazon and A9.

• Knowing enough to be dangerous: Bad advice about Windows tweaking, debunked by Dr. Jason, who's never happier than when he's correcting misinformation.

• Flickr tag count comparison, where Nelson finds out what doesn't influence interestingness. Highly recommended if you enjoyed infographics about Flickr massages.

• The response to the Mumbai bombings has been rather hushed. Both the attacks and the lack of discussion have been on my mind, Sepia Mutiny covers the topic well.

• Bomani Jones on Prince's best work. I find myself in violent disagreement with the some of the assertions, despite being in complete agreement over the conclusions.

• Tim O'Reilly with four big ideas about open source. Especially compelling to me because, improbably, I'm O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland next week.

• And then, finally, Concerning the platinum bitch. I've been meaning to write a post about Khia for about two years; Stephen beat me to it and now I don't have to.

It's no great revelation that popular music has largely shifted to a producer-centric culture, and though this is true not just in hip hop or house music, as discussed earlier, those were certainly two of the biggest influences. If you want to talk about great producer-centric music of the last twenty years or so, though, you owe it to yourself to visit the catalog of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. (Sadly, the best web resource on the duo, an old fan club site, is now offline. There's a web archive record of it.)

There's way too many of their songs to get into a full overview of their catalog (I have at least 250 of their songs in my collection), but at least I've got good starting point for n overview now. George had sent me a link to Stylus magazine's forum on Jam & Lewis' singles, which is like a link directly to my iPod's cold little heart. I love Jam and Lewis because they're such obvious and talented culture vultures, appropriating and approximating virtually every style of pop music. Sometimes it's in service of an artist whom they're producing, but honestly sometimes it sounds like they're doing it just because they have the guts and chops to make it work.

So just to append my two cents to the Stylus overview:

• Sounds of Blackness' "The Pressure" is still one of my favorite songs any time I'm trying to feel motivated. I was always self-conscious about that because it's the ultimate cheesy house song, but fuck it. It's just a good song.
• It is of course impossible to mess with Janet's "Rhythm Nation". Jam and Lewis clearly see the "Thank U Falettin' Me Be Mice Elf Agin" as the funkiest backing track ever, and if it ain't, it's certainly tied for first place. They sampled it here, they sampled it on a remix of Michael's "Scream" (see below) and they all-but-explicitly reference the track in nearly all their production on the Rhythm Nation album. I'm pretty sure that, the song dating to 1989, they didn't clear the sample. That means that Janet denied her brother some royalties, since he owned the publishing to the song at the time. He still owns half, so maybe he gets a nickel when you buy the record.
• I had always mistaken Michael's "Scream" for merely overproduced until hearing the instrumental made me realize how well-produced the record was as well. All this depite the fact that "Scream" sounded dated right out of the gate, a thin retread of "Jam" from Dangerous. You kind of can't listen to the song without hearing the sound of a video that cost too much. Much better is "Scream Louder", Jam and Lewis' remix of Scream built on top of, you guessed it, the rhythm track to Sly's "Thank U".
• "Go Deep" was the first Janet single since before Control that wasn't a total ass-kicker. Frankly the song was boring, and with Velvet Rope having tons of really interesting production, a song that sounded like Janet trying to sound like Aaliyah was a weak way to go.
• Johnny Gill still scares the shit out of me, and his signature single sounds more like a threat than a come-on; Please, Johnny, don't hurt 'em! Rub them correctly!
• Now this is a Janet single, "Someone to Call My Lover". The Jermaine Dupri remix is stupid but stil catchy as hell, but the original single with its America sample over Miami bass beats is still just too smart to ignore. The drums on this track were done by Alan Richbourg, who did a lot of the beats on Velvet Rope, and listening to that album, you could almost hear him saying "I've been listening to Björk lately." Which is a good thing. I was very happy to hear him get a chance at going to bat on a single, although sadly the promotion on the record was kinda weak. With pop artists, you always want the single to do well because that means you're more likely to get some cool remixes or b-sides. Plus Janet finally stopped her series of Great Samples From Adult Contemporary Female Singer-Songwriters of the Seventies.
• The SOS Band always kind of messes with my mind, and I think the Stylus comments on "Just Be Good To Me" capture that sense nicely.
• "Cherrelle - I Didn't Mean to Turn You On" I saw this song mentioned on the page and actually said "Haaaaaaaay" out loud. That's how I feel about this song. How great is this song? Not merely great enough that even the late Robert Palmer could make a hit out of it, but that Mariah Carey's Prince-style cover of it in 2001 made for the only listenable song on the Glitter soundtrack. Now that means you've got a good song. And the best part? Jam and Lewis themselves produced that cover. Jam and Lewis, of course, started their careers working for Prince. It all comes full circle. Need to continue the circle further? Ponder the fact that Palmer's version of "Addicted To Love" inspired Prince to create "U Got The Look" on a dare, to see if he could make his own version but still chart as a pop single. Prince tends to win his bets.