Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism. I tried to calm my nerves by making as much eye contact as possible. Though his face was unlined and his skin glowed, there was a fleeting glassiness in his eyes. We spoke about diction. “Certain words don’t describe me,” he said. White critics bandied about terms that demonstrated a lack of awareness of who he was. “Alchemy” was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning base metal into gold. He would never do something like that. He reserved a special disdain for the word “magical.” I’d used some version of it in my statement. “Funk is the opposite of magic,” he said. “Funk is about rules.”ADDED: You can pre-order "The Beautiful Ones" at Amazon.
[Prince said h]e thought I needed to know more about racism—to have felt it. He talked about hip-hop, the way it transformed words, taking white language—"your language"—and turning it into something that white people couldn’t understand. Miles Davis, he told me, believed in only two categories of thinking: the truth and white bullshit...
"'Magic' is Michael’s word"—meaning Michael Jackson. "That’s what his music was about."
September 4, 2019
"Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules."
From "The Book of Prince/Prince had grand plans for his autobiography, but only a few months to live" (in The New Yorker), by Dan Piepenbring. This is about Prince's first interview with Piepenbring, whom he accepted as a collaborator for a memoir ("The Beautiful Ones," due out in October):
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23 comments:
Fentanyl is just a white word.
"'Magic' is Michael’s word"—meaning Michael Jackson. "That’s what his music was about."
By 'magic' Prince meant Michael was lucky enough to have Quincy Jones put together the music and serve it to Micheal on a silver plate: voila - magic.
By 'rules', Prince meant he built his music from the ground up himself, knowing the math of what pieces were needed and how the pieces needed to fit.
For Prince it wasn't alchemy, it was chemistry. Chemistry has rules.
I am Laslo.
Sounds like bs to me.
Can we have a dead celebrity social media feud? I can't imagine gun fights from these two even when they were alive.
Jackson did name at least one of his kids Prince.
Twelve tone scale and all of the music theory that Prince used his whole life, and loved so much? White bullshit arrived at analytically by the Greeks.
You get huge social advantages from acting white. Your choice.
I think Greek was white-key scales. The various modes only said what note the scale started with. Surviving modes today are mostly based on C (major scale) and A (minor scale).
The white keys imply the rest of the tones. If you start a classical Greek type major scale on G for example instead of C, you are going to get an F sharp. Keep going from different notes and pretty soon you have all of the black keys.
Great line in the title from Prince. Many people have made the observation that art is working within constraints, not freedom from constraints. Did Prince think Michael Jackson was different?
I've never listened to a Michael or Prince song all the way through, so I was hoping the post's title referred to George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic because I've been trying to find one of their songs they issued sometime around 1970 but they cranked out so many songs and also the band names and personnel are themselves amorphously funky, but I do recall that the album had an ugly Zappa-style (an influence!) drawing on the cover, which doesn't narrow it down very much.
In the car, I flip the channel when a MJ song comes on now.
Fern, was that "America Eats Its Young"?
My fave Funkadelic song is "One Nation Under a Groove" (Getting down just for the funk of it).
Prince: happy to make his millions by playing to the tastes of teenage white girls, but doesn't want to hear your "white bullshit". Got it.
If I could turn base metal into gold, I would. I guess I'm not as evolved as the corpse formerly known as Prince.
Narr
Limited all my life by lack of melanin
Actually the white keys weren't even tempered then, so there's no inclination to fill in the rest of the tones. Most of the intervals were wolf intervals, nowhere near simple whole number ratios. They didn't use the twelveth root of two as a compromise.
Fern, was that "America Eats Its Young"?
My fave Funkadelic song is "One Nation Under a Groove" (Getting down just for the funk of it).
Yeah, I'm hearing all those right now, and I *think* I found the one I wanted, Funkadelic - Cosmic Slop (Hardcore Jollies Album version)
Live version 1976.
I was just rereading some Planet Pluto wackiness in Dylan’s Chronicles and it sounds exactly like this but whiter.
Well that was an interesting dive through the history of music theory...
We just recently passed 40th anniversary of the release of Prince's first hit single, "I Want To Be Your Lover." Hard to believe that much time has passed.
Incidentally, here is the first song I ever heard by Prince- Soft and Wet, though I didn't know it was Prince at the time, and only remembered 4 years later when I bought his first album, "For You." On that album, it is stated that Prince wrote, performed, and produced every single on it- as a 19 year old kid.
Well, Prince rode a (small) motorcycle. So he had some positive qualities.
Just cannot see the appeal of Prince. I have a 70's Funk Pandora station and like most of it, but I was in another room and some song just struck me as dull, boring, and monotonous and when I went out to Thumbs-down it I saw it was Prince.
Everyone says he was an awesome guitarist, but apart from one song where he does a reasonably wicked solo, I just don't see it anywhere else.
Germans used to be the dominant influence in music, but blacks supplanted them in the 20th century. The Germans can, however, take some comfort in the fact that they invented most of the modern musical instruments. Their position is analogous to the British who invented most of the popular modern sports, but whose teams rarely make the finals.
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