Prince, Parasocial Heartbreak, & The Sacred/Profane Dichotomy
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- Опубліковано 18 жов 2023
- In Prince's own words, he was "something that you'll never comprehend." Most artists are. Here's how I learned to be okay with that - and also an analysis of the interconnected nature of sex and spirituality.
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Another great video. As a queer person who found Prince in my early teen years and felt like I'd just dug up the ark of the covenant, finding out more about his personal life was always a double edged sword. With every new bit of information that confirmed he was a genius, there would be another piece that proved he wasn't someone I'd want to stuck in an elevator with. I highly recommend Sinead O'Connor's book just in general, but especially the disturbing chapter about her encounter with Prince.
Yesss, if we take away any definitive answer from this discussion, it’s to read Sinead O’connor’s book!
Great video. It’s something I always think about with my fav artists. Prince in particular, I half jokingly credit him for me realizing my gayness at 5 or 6 when I first saw the when doves cry video. But as I got older and saw how prince treated fans in the 2000s it made me wrestle between what is the artist vs the person. This is even more critical to dissect given the rise of so many musicians and actors who are being exposed for questionable actions. How does one separate the art from the artist; separate the effects had on oneself vs reconciling the fact they’re all, at times heavily flawed, human beings. I personally think that’s a very intimate and personal discussion one has to have internally and no one should control that for you. I’m gonna have to read that book!
"how Prince treated fans"? I always thought he treated fans exceptionally well - i mean how many other artists would give you a 3 hr show if not longer and then give fans another 3 or 4 hr show at a club on the same night? Answer? none.
@@julianciahaconsulting8663 that’s not what I’m referring to. He’s infamously sued or sent cease and desist letters to fan sites and people on UA-cam for using his music or likeness. Two major moments come to mind. Sending a take down notice through universal to a mother who posted her baby dancing to a prince song. A cute moment that would be GREAT PR but prince being prince wanted it taken down even though the quality of the audio isn’t great so it really wasn’t harming his bottom end.
The other incident was preventing uploads of prince covering creep by Radiohead at Coachella so much so Radiohead told prince to stop doing that cuz it’s their song and they actually were finding it difficult to find a clip to see how he performed it. Funnily enough Radiohead had more authority over prince in that instance but they won’t have blocked it.
Prince performing for hours is definitely a treat for fans but these other aspects must be considered. This is what the author of this video is getting at.
Rick Beato has argued that artists that prevent music of theirs from going on UA-cam or streaming kills their legacy because it limits people from discovering the music. Hardly anyone is going to spend money to buy a CD or download before hearing it first to see if they like it. To be honest , he’s right. If it wasn’t for prince’s music coming back to streaming I won’t have been reminded how much I loved prince. So much so I have bought most of his 80s catalog on vinyl.
The baby video incident actually sparked a long legal battle one what fair use really means.
Valid points but one must remember that when those incidents happened (i think anyways could be wrong) it was in the wake of Prince learning just how exploited and owned he was by the music industry - i mean I recall an interview with him up here in Canada on our version of MTV at around this time and the pain on his face and in his voice when he told the story about the day he found out that he didnt even own the copyright of Purple Rain was so apparent you could tell he had some serious PTSD or whatever going on from that experience alone - so i think (or maybe i like to think) that the incidents you refer to was Prince in the wake of the profound shock he had about his lack of ownership of his creations that he went over board maybe trying to not let that happen again, overly protective? I mean we are not dealing with a normal predictable individual here when talking about Prince so at best we can only speculate as to why he did whatever or made whatever decision....other artists i respect alot like The Beatles were also pretty draconian about people using their music for whatever reasons - and again like Prince i think that came from being totally ripped off their ownership of their music earlier in their career
I should add this very issue of Prince's zealotry towards use of his music became a real ethical question for me personally when in the immediate days and weeks after his death there was this explosion of Prince material here on youTube and elsewhere that one had never seen or heard before ...I agonized (but not very long to be honest) about the ethics of downloading the material for my personal enjoyment and then took 2 months off of work to do exactly that and in the end downloaded over a 1000 hrs of footage of Prince in concert and other rare amazing stuff - i justified it (ofcourse) by thinking that if left to the lawyers it would take 250 yrs for all that stuff to be released if it would ever all be released , long after l was dead and justified it by the fact that i paid 40 dollars for the dreadful Graffiti Bridge when it came out so the Purple One owed me !.@@seraph58
Love your content so much. Thank you 🖤
god i love your videos so much
Prince was hands down the most talented musician of his era and perhaps of any era. As a live performer he had no equal. I still encounter bootleg concerts that i have never seen in which there are moments that literally stop me dead in my tracks of what i was doing and make me sit down and watch and listen and replay a few dozen times... Also .one has to have great admiration for a young poor skinny black kid from a place like Minnesota go out and make the color purple as his own - and by doing so essentially re-claiming royal purple from kings and queens in the sense that when one hears the word "purple" or sees the color purple it is that skinny kid from Minnesota that is far more likely to come into your mind than any member of any royal family anywhere....i dont think Prince gets credit for pulling that offf
to me, Prince is the greatest of all time. Unparalleled artistic growth and musical prowess. Only person in history to have had the #1 album, #1 single and #1 film simultaneously. Recorded multiple five-star classic albums by himself. Gender-fluidic icon. He was more provocative by accident than most other pop stars were on purpose. "If I Was Your Girlfriend" is practically a hyperpop song in 1987. There's no Usher without Prince. I'm not even sure there's a Beyonce without Prince. The man's best work is unimpeachable.
The trade-off for immersing yourself in that incredible body of work is coming to terms with the fact that Prince was... not really in touch with reality, or most things outside of (as Kevin Smith put it) Prince World. If one thing particularly took a bit of shine off of him for me personally, it was his litigious behaviour in the 2000s where he and his legal team went after fansites, UA-camrs, you name it, with this ridiculous protectiveness of intellectual property that would make Lars Ulrich blush. It took until Radiohead (of all bands) showed him up publicly that he cooled off, but oof, that was a rough time to love Prince. He wasn't at ALL ready for the current streaming landscape.
A lot has been said on Prince converting to the Jehovah's Witnesses, not all of which I feel qualified to comment on, but by all accounts of people close to him, he made that particular life decision out of grief, when his only son wound up dying within two weeks of birth. Call me soft, but whatever that religion made him into, that part always made me feel really sad for him.
Thanks for all the hard work you put into this channel.
Being reminded of that intellectual property striking era just gave me Nam flashbacks
very well said. Regarding his litigious behavior back then at the time i too was a bit taken back about it all. However i watched a documentary about him where some musicians and some lawyers who worked in the music industry at that time claimed that the whole symbol thing (which i thought was silly at the time) was actually a totally brilliant legal move because it freed him from past exploitative contracts; so that there was very much a well thought out "method" in the "madness" - and that legal loophole was not an idea told to Prince by some lawyer but one that he independently thought of.....while all that was going on at the time - and dumbasses like me thought he was being absurd going as a symbol he was actually blasting the record companies by name and in songs in his live performances so much so he got himself blacklisted by the record industry and on the big radio networks and given no promotion of his new material - and his reaction to that - hitting the road and just showing up anywhere he felt like playing and selling out 30,000 seat venues with a day or two notice and selling his music at the shows directly to fans was brilliant and gave fans the chance to see him live again in great long shows and after shows too...but you probably know all that...as i said somewhere else i think the greatest Prince material is to be found in his live shows that one can finally see or many of them here on youtube , usually shot by fans on their phones so quality varies but many of them are remarkably good..well worth exploring and taking the time to watch because its in the live shows where you see just how brilliant Prince was as a musician, without equal in my opinion as a live performer.....
A very interesting discussion, Izzy! While I acknowledge that there might be some misogyny at cosmic levels in a ton of his music, his talent and virtuosity and ability was beyond dispute. He was absolutely always drunk off his own ego, and that works as both a compliment and a condemnation. He was a walking contradiction in every sense of the phrase. It’s also very interesting with his blatant religiosity and how he always struggled with his own christian guilt and how he found out near the end of his life that those beliefs didn’t help him out of the hole that he dug for himself.
The other thing, and this is the silly thing that I finally have a chance to rant about: I don’t think Purple Rain is his magnum opus, but within his catalog is very much overrated. I really dislike how aggressively 80s it sounds (and bias alert: I’m already not a big fan of that sound lol). Now, there’s definitely some great stuff on it; I adore The Beautiful Ones, it’s my favorite song from the album, and I also love I Would Die 4 U and of course When Doves Cry is legendary (even tho I never need to hear it again. I like Let’s Go Crazy fine, it’s fun..but also way too much, and I love Computer Blue. But the rest of the album I just don’t like at all. Take Me With U is lame, I don’t like Darling Nikki at all, setting the misogyny aside for a moment: yes, it is very raunchy and filthy and explicit and it’s basically the reason the [Parental Advisory] sticker exists…but that’s pretty much all it has going for it; it’s not very melodic or tuneful, there’s no real hook in the song, and it kinda just stays in the same place the whole time and never changes or goes anywhere. Baby I’m a Star is a throwaway track.
And finally, the closing title track…
Pitchfork (of course they did) ranked Purple Rain the album as the number one greatest album of the 1980s and listed Purple Rain the song as the number one greatest song of the 1980s….and yeah, no. It’s just kinda hokey to me, sorry.
But yeah, in short: Purple Rain is overrated and his best work is actually Sign "☮︎" the Times! 🖤
Thanks love! Can't say I agree with your take on Purple Rain, but I definitely respect where you're coming from and always enjoy your takes on these discussions
@@AGrrrlsTwoSoundCentsYeah, I kinda knew that you wouldn’t lol, but thank you! I’m glad you think so! 🖤
I agree , Sign O the Times is his greatest masterpiece in terms of albums - and the accompanying concert film is one of the very few band concert films that30 or so years later i can still watch and enjoy. I think however the best Prince to be found are in his live performances- that is where you really see just how amazing a musician the man was...right up to the end his live shows were fantastic and so very different the music was from year to year and even within a year...when he died there was a flood of concert footage that came on the internet -usually of entire concerts filmed by fans on their cellphones but unseen stuff from european television and the like as well; i spent the next 2 months everyday downloading all that stuff thinking it would soon be taken down once his estate got settled and it did get taken down but now i see here on youTube most of that stuff is now available to the public again which is great...i actually created a channel to share the stuff i had managed to download - well over a thousand hours of his concerts and rare TV gigs but unfortunately youTube wouldnt let much of the best material go out because of copyrights....regardless I dont regret taking those 2 months of time off from work to get that stuff due to the immense enjoyment of seeing so much live prince footage i had never seen before yet all the time feeling immensely sad he was gone; it was a real emotional roller coaster ride...if you want to see what i did manage to post on youtube let me know and i will tell you the channel but i dont wish to plug it and take away or distracf from the great content that this channel here gives.....
Thank you for this heart warming tribute to the true king of pop. It's been speculated that after prince contracted aids he felt betrayed by LGTB community and saw it as a curse and punishment by God. He suspect he didn't want to be remembered as the spokes person for the gay community, after all he was more than just bi-sexual. he was an explorer of Music, sexuality and controversy.
@gera3667 wait what! When was it reported that he had aids?!?! During his death announcement they didn’t report that he had aids, when did this happen?
@@mcart2735 All you have to do is google it for yourself. Several tabloid newspapers exposed the story. Prince couldn’t sue them for defamation because it was true. However it’s alleged he paid millions to keep the story buried. I believe that even Warner Brothers had a stake in keeping the story buried to protect his legacy. He knew he was dying after he received a prognosis it was full bloom, which is why he began touring as a solo act, to play his music before committing suicide on pills…
Never proof of bisexuality or aids....this is queer propaganda crap
Is that verified that Prince had contracted AIDS? I have read much about Prince and watched tons of documentaries/interviews about him yet never had heard that about AIDS....when it comes to his death and if someone has to be blamed i put that blame on the greedHeads of Big Pharma for their fraudulent rigging of clinical trial data of fentanyl (and oxycontin) to support their Big Lie that those two drugs were safe low addictive pain killers and then bribing thousands of doctors to prescribe those 2 drugs to unsuspecting patients and thus creating the opiate drug crisis that continues to this day - if not has become even deadlier now killing tens of thousands of americans every year - with Prince being just one of those casualties. I found it very sad that he died alone and found it very eerie it was in an elevator a place where he said that Spooky Electric was often to be found. I hope if there is life after death that where Prince is now that the great love so many millions of people around the world has for him somehow travels to him so he knows the positivity he brought to so many lives. There will never be another guy like him again with all his ups and downs, his vast idiosyncrasies, his great sense of humor and above all his genius in his art . I miss him every day to be honest.
When did he have aids?! plus how do you even know hes bisexual?Istg so many weirdos are still forcing labels on people.