Oh, my God. So shocking. So sad. I knew he'd had the flu. Such a great, talented star. He was 57. What a terrible loss.
I'd embed something, but I know he didn't like people putting his things up on YouTube.
ADDED: John collects some video and quotes Rolling Stone:
He played arguably the greatest power-ballad guitar solo in history ("Purple Rain"), and his solo on an all-star performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" during George Harrison's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2004 had jaws on the floor. But he can also bring the nasty funk like Jimmy Nolen and Nile Rodgers (listen to the groove magic of "Kiss") or shred like the fiercest metalhead ("When Doves Cry").... Prince gets a lot of Hendrix comparisons, but he sees it differently: "If they really listened to my stuff, they'd hear more of a Santana influence than Jimi Hendrix," he once told Rolling Stone. "Hendrix played more blues, Santana played prettier." To Miles Davis, who collaborated with the Purple One toward the end of his life, Prince was a combination of "James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye... and Charlie Chaplin. How can you miss with that?"AND: Just last month — when we heard Prince had signed a deal to write his memoirs — Meade and I were discussing the meaning of "Just look for the purple banana 'til they put us in the truck":
I say it was what was a typical Prince message: Live it up because you're going to die. The banana is obviously the man's penis and the truck is the hearse that takes you away. Meade says the truck is the vagina. He agreed about the banana.The song was "Let's Go Crazy" — the one that begins like a funeral:
Dearly belovedPrince sang about "the after world/A world of never ending happiness/You can always see the sun, day or night." And "instead of asking... how much of your time is left," you should ask "how much of your mind" you've got left. That's the song where he said "if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy, punch a higher floor."
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life
He punched a higher floor.
AND: I wrote that before seeing that Prince was found dead in at his home in the elevator.
PLUS: I blogged about the elevator lyric and the afterlife back in 2011, in a post titled "'And if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy (Punch a higher floor!)'":
Prince lyric, which just occurred to me in the context of the feminist-in-the-elevator-at-the-atheist-convention incident. Prince was telling us to live now, because we're all going to die, which he sometimes said clearly — "You better live now/Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door" — and sometimes said absurdly — "Let's look for the purple banana/Until they put us in the truck." He also expressed a clear belief in the afterlife. ("In this life/Things are much harder than in the afterworld/In this life/You're on your own.") He's no atheist. How he behaves in an actual in-this-life elevator, as opposed to a metaphorical elevator, I have no idea. I bet he silently occupies his corner and avoids eye contact, in classic elevator etiquette, and waits for his floor.
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209 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 209 of 209Connell McShane hosting Imus says all the news networks went into full Prince mode yesterday. It's another Diana. How long can it be milked?
McShane's concern, he said, as a Fox news guy, was constantly being cancelled for segments to make way for Prince coverage. It's a rough day at the networks.
A Prince bumper played just now used exactly three chords. I IV and V.
@rhhardin, not surprising, the comparison to Diana. One Princess, one Prince.
"A Prince bumper played just now used exactly three chords. I IV and V."
Here's Guitar Player's analysis "10 Ways to Play Like Prince."
Why couldn't the guys from Rush die?
Very few people have that kind of prodigious natural talent and make it look that easy: He played many instruments well, guitar very well, arranged, led the band, sang very well, danced well; wrote lyrics well, fusing songs with all of these elements into moments. A simple joy comes through. That gets you to highly talented artist, groundbreaking in many respects. Precocious.
Maybe 1/1000 among musicians, perhaps, not just the general pop.
I get that many people on here only see the raw sexuality of the performer and the weirdness of the persona he chose to become, but that partly comes with the territory of funk (James Brown anyone?) and r & b which comes out of part of who he was.
Not your thing and/or morally problematic for you: Fine!
But at least appreciate the fact that the man could move from funk to r & b, to soul, to later on jazz, to paying a mean blues/rock guitar, to crafting excellent, lasting pop songs in his head in a day.
He also was quite humble despite the persona, and stayed true to a lot of his music and fans, from what I hear. Part of the reason he was so stingy about his songbook is because he was that talented that he wanted to stay true to the art and that meant taking on a lot of the industry (some very shitty people and bad deals).
R.I.P.
Good comment Chris N. You describe me....not a big fan because of the weirdness and raunchiness, but I can still appreciate the huge talent. Plus, he was part of the soundtrack of my youth.
It's sounding more and more like it was a drug overdose, which is sad. He never seemed like he was immersed in the usual drug culture of the music business though, so I wonder if he had developed an addiction to prescription opiods for pain treatment.
CStanley
You may be right on the opioids. If so, old performers often run into not being able to stop, but their bodies can't handle it
He didn't have flu. It was some kind of a drug overdose, and he nearly lost his life but they saved him. The doctors wanted him to stay overnight, but he didn't want to. They told the public it was the flu. That was Friday last week. What happened now is not clear, but it seems he tried to go to the hospital himself, and got in an elevator but died in the elevator.
The only thing I knew about Prince is that hechanged his name to an ideograph. It wasn't even clear to me he had changed back. But I read this was the result of a contract dispute with Warner (Q. How did that help him>) and he used that as his name from 1993 to 1999. I didn't know what kind of an artist he was.
It's too bad but unbelievable I suspect a faked death. It appears he chose to disrespect white people in his career as his studio was white colored, and he claimed to be romantically involved with whites. I find that highly offensive.
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