Prince has died, at the age of 57. So sad.
Very few details as yet.
Discuss, remember, pay tribute. No trolls,.
Categories
Prince, RIP: Open Thread
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothPrince has died, at the age of 57. So sad.
Very few details as yet.
Discuss, remember, pay tribute. No trolls,.
Such sad news 🙁 he was a true legend.
We have lost too many great talents lately, David Bowie, Lemmy, Chris Squire. I was already sad to hear of the loss of the hilarious comedian Victoria Wood – she was a fantastic and funny woman. RIP
Goddammit. So far this year, I’ve lost both of my parents, a dog, and like half a dozen musicians that helped me get through the (previously) hardest parts of my life.
I don’t think we ever really had Prince, though. His funkiness cannot be contained by our ordinary universe. No one will ever convince me he was a human man, and not an avatar of the Eternal Funk.
I’m glad I got to share a planet with him for a while.
Shit, @thatbear, I’m down one parent so far myself. Also recovering from back surgery (almost ready to find a job!), and other general health fuckery.
What did we do?
Hugs for anyone who needs or wants them
http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/dog-likes-cats-ginger-pit-bull-bubba-loves-rue-15.jpg
RIP Prince. Just another reminder that any one of us can go at any moment. Get out there and live life to the fullest.
Damn right, @saphira. Write that book, practice that guitar, make a comic, bake some bread. Do stuff, that’s the best way to honor him. The man hated wasted time.
This just popped up in my twitter feed:
I was lucky enough to work with Prince during my roadie days. I won’t bore you with the anecdotes. Suffice to say, in an industry that can attract some real aresholes, he was a genuinely sweet guy with a wicked sense of humour and a knowledge of music that was quite literally encyclopaedic. A true prince amongst men if you’ll forgive the pun.
http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-compassion-is-an-action-word-with-no-boundaries-prince-81-70-04.jpg
Hey! 2016? Taking all the great people was 1967’s schtick, knock it off!!
Alan, please do bring anecdotes. All I have is knowing every note of Purple Rain and Batman inside out. As a crappy (but well educated!) musician myself, i’d love to know more about him as a person.
For me this really compounded the pain of Bowie — two sides of the same coin to me — sex and weirdness and talent. I can’t say which hurt worse, but I have been crying off and on for the past 24 hours.
Indeed very sad; there was also Tony Conrad a few weeks ago. 2016 is an awful year to be a pioneering musical figure.
Anyway, some links:
“Time Zones” by Negativland:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCu4e_1MSCI
“Transit of Venus” by Tony Conrad and Hangedup:
Alan, I’d love to know more. I’m sorry that you lost someone you actually knew. God knows it’s been hard enough to hear about all these losses when I’ve never met any of them.
I think Prince has a lot of relevance to this particular blog, because he made people think about what being a man means, about sex and sexuality, and on and on. I have to figure he made a lot of MRA fellow travelers’s heads explode, and that can only be a good thing.
He also exemplified some things that might surprise a lot of people: he was extraordinarily dedicated to his craft, working hour after hour in the studio, playing the instruments, mixing the tracks until it sounded the way it was supposed to sound. The problems he had with his label (Warner Brothers) stemmed from the fact that he was TOO PROLIFIC, that he produced too mch work, of such high quality, that execs feared he would glut the demand. Amazing, elusive, weird, achingly talented, I don’t believe in an afterlife, but for Prince I’d make a special request.
Did I mention how broad-based his musical skills were? How he could rock the house, play a ballad, a searing rock solo, or a blues number with the best of them? His own colleagues, guitar gods of the day, talk in awe of his skills. Gonna miss that guy.
Nothing seems appropriate for me to post, except for some of his music of course.
Good night, Prince.
I want to make a comment on this thread, but I need to insert an image from my computer’s Pictures folder into that comment and either don’t know or forget how to do that on this site. Is there anyone here who can help me?
Rambling anecdotes warning!
Back in the early 90s I was making a bit of extra cash for law school by working as a roadie (I’d bummed away a lot of my youth doing that).
One of my contacts is the trade asked of I’d be interested in doing some work for his purple majesty. You’d have to invent a time unit smaller than the Planck Unit for how long it took me to say ‘yes’.
Prince was a bit obsessive about performing. So whenever he did a major gig, like Wembley, he’d do another smaller gig afterwards with a scaled down band. That’s what he wanted us to crew; so there was a little gang of six of us to take care of that.
The first time we met the conversation went as follows:
“So what do we call you then?”
“You can call me anything you want except Prince or nigger”
“Can we call you Frank then?”
“If you like”
So Frank it was. He was such a cool chap. He’d turn up every evening before a gig. “Evening ladies”, and then we chat.
“Fuck man, you know a lot about music”
“What else is there?”
(Fair enough)
His band were amazing, and so friendly. Like I say, we got to meet a lot of arsehholes in that job. These guys were lovely though. And they were all equally obsessive about music. We used to lurk at the side of stage, quite often we’d just be chatting to the band as they played away. We got to a little routine where we’d come up with some soul or R&B song. No matter how obscure, we’d just yell it out. The band would all look at each other, then Prince would nod and they’d go straight into that song without missing a beat.
We got talking about the music scene generally. Prince explained about the club scene in the US and how he got started and we told him about Working Men’s Clubs. He was quite fascinated and amused by the concept. At one gig (Emporium, Oxford Street) he paused in th middle of his set to read out the tomobola numbers and the meat raffle. Cue lots of trendy punters wondering why they’d not got raffle tickets.
He was a bit contemptuous of people who came to the gig just to say they’d been to a private Prince gig rather than for the music. Combine that with a wicked sense of humour and we had some fun. At one gig he’d sealed off a section of the bar for us (he really took care of us). We had that velvet rope thing and everything. Later he came over with his then girlfriend and asked if he could come in.
“Sorry mate you can’t. But she can.”
He then wondered off pretending to look disappointed. Cue lots of stares from people wondering who the bunch of scruffy herberts were that Prince wasn’t cool enough to hang with.
(News of that incident spread round the world. Coincidentally a friend of mine was on holiday with the guy who owned the club and even they got to hear about it.)
Most of the memories though are just lolling around chatting about music. The guy’s knowledge is/(was 🙁 ) encyclopedic. Music seemed to be all he lived for (notwithstanding that he was very sociable). He said he was at his happiest in his recording studio just laying down tracks. Even at that stage he reckoned he had enough material for another 20 albums. Gawd knows how much there is now. I have mixed feelings about whether it should ever be released though.
Oh, and all the cables for the band’s equipment were wrapped in purple velvet. How cool is that! 🙂
Test
@Nikki
I’m not sure if that can be done.
@ Nikki
I think you need to upload the picture to a file hosting service and then link to that. I used to use photobucket but that just showed a link rather than the full picture (and now it won’t even do that) but I think people have mentioned that there’s a service that shows the actual picture.
Rambling anecdotes warning!
Back in the early 90s I was making a bit of extra cash for law school by working as a roadie (I’d bummed away a lot of my youth doing that).
One of my contacts is the trade asked of I’d be interested in doing some work for his purple majesty. You’d have to invent a time unit smaller than the Planck Unit for how long it took me to say ‘yes’.
Prince was a bit obsessive about performing. So whenever he did a major gig, like Wembley, he’d do another smaller gig afterwards with a scaled down band. That’s what he wanted us to crew; so there was a little gang of six of us to take care of that.
The first time we met the conversation went as follows:
“So what do we call you then?”
“You can call me anything you want except Prince or n*gger”
“Can we call you Frank then?”
“If you like”
So Frank it was. He was such a cool chap. He’d turn up every evening before a gig. “Evening ladies”, and then we chat.
“Fuck man, you know a lot about music”
“What else is there?”
(Fair enough)
His band were amazing, and so friendly. Like I say, we got to meet a lot of arsehholes in that job. These guys were lovely though. And they were all equally obsessive about music. We used to lurk at the side of stage, quite often we’d just be chatting to the band as they played away. We got to a little routine where we’d come up with some soul or R&B song. No matter how obscure, we’d just yell it out. The band would all look at each other, then Prince would nod and they’d go straight into that song without missing a beat.
We got talking about the music scene generally. Prince explained about the club scene in the US and how he got started and we told him about Working Men’s Clubs. He was quite fascinated and amused by the concept. At one gig (Emporium, Oxford Street) he paused in th middle of his set to read out the tomobola numbers and the meat raffle. Cue lots of trendy punters wondering why they’d not got raffle tickets.
He was a bit contemptuous of people who came to the gig just to say they’d been to a private Prince gig rather than for the music. Combine that with a wicked sense of humour and we had some fun. At one gig he’d sealed off a section of the bar for us (he really took care of us). We had that velvet rope thing and everything. Later he came over with his then girlfriend and asked if he could come in.
“Sorry mate you can’t. But she can.”
He then wondered off pretending to look disappointed. Cue lots of stares from people wondering who the bunch of scruffy herberts were that Prince wasn’t cool enough to hang with.
(News of that incident spread round the world. Coincidentally a friend of mine was on holiday with the guy who owned the club and even they got to hear about it.)
Most of the memories though are just lolling around chatting about music. The guy’s knowledge is/(was 🙁 ) encyclopedic. Music seemed to be all he lived for (notwithstanding that he was very sociable). He said he was at his happiest in his recording studio just laying down tracks. Even at that stage he reckoned he had enough material for another 20 albums. Gawd knows how much there is now. I have mixed feelings about whether it should ever be released though.
Oh, and all the cables for the band’s equipment were wrapped in purple velvet. How cool is that!
@Nikki
I use imgur as an image host for that purpose. After uploading the file to your image host, you’ll have to right-click and select open image, then copy the url from the address bar. Just paste it into your post on its own line and it will automatically show the image.
This is so sad. When I found out Thursday, I saluted him by listening to several of his songs (including “Manic Monday,” which he gave to the Bangles) and by adding purple raindrops to my usual Thursday look: blue Muse 2nd Law tour t-shirt, matching blue eyeshadow, and hot pink lipstick.
If anyone’s interested, I can write a how-to post on my blog for the makeup look (tentatively called Purple Rain on a Blue Sky) and post the link here!
“If anyone’s interested, I can write a how-to post on my blog for the makeup look (tentatively called Purple Rain on a Blue Sky) and post the link here!” Please do! I’m interested!
I’m very sad for Prince. As this is an open thread however, I choose to distract myself with other things. For example, I rewrote the song “I’m Still Here” from the musical Follies to be as if it were being sung by Hillary Clinton about her life. The lyrics I kept the same are in bold, those I changed are not. Each line of my rewrite has the same amount of syllables as in the original, so it should be able to be sung to the same tune.
Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all
And, my dear, I’m still here
Cattle futures scandal
Clinton Foundation one too, but I’m here
It Takes a Village had critics
Some said my pantsuits made them sick
Seen all my dreams disappear but I’m here.
I’ve washed the dishes, at work during one summer, but I’m here
Slimed fish in Valdez
Got fired from that to boot, but I’m here
I have been slandered by the best
Watched while the headlines did the rest
In the recession was I depressed?
Nowhere near, I kept on working through it and I’m here
I’ve been through Limbaugh, I failed the bar exam too, and I’m here
Travelgate scandal, Filegate, talk about my hair, and I’m here
Got through Whitewater, Bernie bros, Hillarycare too, Benghazi
Two thousand eight election, got through and I’m here
Got through the email scandal, and I’m here
I’ve gotten through Ken Starr and Lucianne Goldberg
Gee, that was fun and a half
When you’ve been through Ken Starr and Lucianne Goldberg
Anything else is a laugh
Been through Lewinsky, I’ve been through Paula Jones too, and I’m here.
Gennifer Flowers, fracture, concussion and clot ,and I’m here
Been called a ‘Pinko’, commie tool, got through it and I’m here to rule
I should’ve gone to an acting school, that seems clear
Still someone said, “She’s sincere”, so I’m here
Sec. of State one day, next day my cough’s in the news, but I’m here
Up in polls Monday, Tuesday, campaign has the blues, but I’m here
First I’m another First Lady
Then I have a shoe thrown at me
I have careered from career to career
I’m almost through my memoirs, and I’m here
I’ve gotten through, “Hey, lady, aren’t you Bill’s wife?
Wow, what a doormat you are”
Or better yet, “I thought you were feminist
Whatever happened to that?”
Good times and bum times, I’ve seen ’em all
And, my dear, I’m still here
Cattle futures scandal
Clinton Foundation one too, but I’m here
I’ve run the gamut, A to Z
Three cheers and dammit, C’est la vie
I got through all of last year, and I’m here
Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here [there in this case referring to the White House]
Look who’s here, I’m still here
Now I rewrote the song “I’m Still Here” from the musical Follies to be as if it were being sung by Queen Elizabeth II about her life. The lyrics I kept the same are in bold, those I changed are not. Each line of my rewrite has the same amount of syllables as in the original, so it should be able to be sung to the same tune.
Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all
And, my dear, I’m still here
Plush velvet sometimes
Sometimes dull ceremonies, but I’m here
I have had keyhole surgery
Been Queen the longest in Britain
Seen all my dreams disappear but I’m here.
I’ve seen my little sister die before me, but I’m here
Met the Saudi king
He’s an oppressive jackass, but I’m here
Visited dozens of countries
Even had some eggs thrown at me
In the depression was I depressed?
Nowhere near, I then became the next queen and I’m here
I’ve been through taxes, Windsor and Wally’s affair, and I’m here
House broken into, fake news, and the Sex Pistols, and I’m here
I got through Diana’s tell-all, fire at Windsor, Crawfie too
Had heebie-jeebies for Kate and Will’s wedding
I got through republicans, and I’m here
I’ve gotten through Charles and even Camilla
Gee, that was fun and a half
When you’ve been through Charles and even Camilla
Anything else is a laugh
I’ve been to Oman, I’ve been to Zimbabwe too, and I’m here.
Had blanks shot at me, had to open the palace, and I’m here
Been called imperialist tool, got through it and I can still rule
I should’ve gone to an acting school, that seems clear
Still someone said, “She’s sincere”, so I’m here
Popular one day, next day it’s all on the rocks, but I’m here
Give a speech Monday, Tuesday, you’re laid up and ill, but I’m here
First you’re another cute Princess
Then someone’s mother, then you’re Queen
Then you career from booking to booking
I’m almost through my memoirs, and I’m here
I’ve gotten through, “Hey, lady, aren’t you whoozis?
Wow, what a looker you were”
Or better yet, “Sorry, I thought you were whoozis
Whatever happened to her?”
Good times and bum times, I’ve seen ’em all
And, my dear, I’m still here
Plush velvet sometimes
Sometimes dull ceremonies, but I’m here
I’ve run the gamut, A to Z
Three cheers and dammit, C’est la vie
I got through all of last year, and I’m here
Lord knows, at least I was there, and I’m here [there in this case meaning before she was Queen]
Look who’s here, I’m still here
The second one has some of the verses smushed together, but I’m sure you can figure it out by counting the syllables.