Prince

Planet Earth

18 Year Anniversary

Released 15th July 2007

This is a great album. Like his previous 2 albums Musicology and 3121, this is a blend of Prince old and new. There are retro-prince sounding tracks and ALL the tracks are excellent. Listen to it and ask yourself who else could produce such a superbly produced/written/played range of pop/funk/soul/rock music over a whole album. 'Mr Goodnight', ‘Guitar' and ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ are classic Prince songs and the album shows like he’s always done, the genuine diversity of his talent as a songwriter and his prowess as a guitarist. It isn't 'Sign o the Times' or 'Around the World in a Day' or 'Lovesexy' or even The Gold Experience but it doesn't have to be to, it is it’s own little special unique thing and that’s why most of us love it.

Happy Kiss Day!💋

International Day of the Kiss.

The New Yorker delivered an unexpected treat to Prince fans in the September 9, 2019 issue of the magazine in anticipation of the release of The Beautiful Ones memoir on October 29th.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/the-book-of-prince

In The Book of Prince, his collaborator Dan Piepenbring reveals Prince’s vision for the book and details some unexpected conversations that have us longing for what could have been. The candid comments about his childhood and parents are probably the first time that we see Prince ready and willing to set the record straight about an early life that fans have speculated about since he first arrived on the scene. Prince also opened up about race in America more candidly than ever before. Most of us already know that Prince was unapologetically black and that the ownership of his intellectual property was important to him. He certainly didn’t go to war with Warner Brothers, write “Slave” on his face and become the butt of industry jokes because he had nothing else to do. According to Piepenbring, Prince believed that black artists needed ownership of their creativity to fight racism and restore wealth to the black community. We imagine that’s why he wanted to give readers a little known history lesson about the thriving Greenwood community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was known as “Black Wall Street” and one of the most successful and affluent black communities to ever exist. Sadly Greenwood would be the scene of a devastating 1921 race riot that left 300 black residents dead. They were massacred by white residents of Tulsa who sought revenge due to a young white woman’s unfounded rape accusation against a black shoe shiner.The Book of Prince is probably the best damn thing that’s been written about Prince since his passing and it has ramped up excitement for the book’s release.

It’s interesting that this piece dropped after we learned that Ava Duvernay was no longer involved in the Prince docuseries for Netflix. As some fans tossed around names of other directors that could capture an accurate picture of Prince as a man and a musician, a few over at Prince.org breathed a sigh of relief that Ava was gone. They didn’t like the idea of Ava possibly portraying Prince as “woke”. Let that sink in. Prince didn’t need to be portrayed as woke, HE WAS WOKE. Why would it be problematic to highlight a black musician’s blackness and all of the things that come with it? Prince had no problem reminding people that he was still a black man in America despite his success and diverse fan base, yet this very notion makes some people uncomfortable.

https://prince.org/msg/7/460534

As you can see, one Orger even called Ava a feminist and a lesbian. As if the possibility of Ava being either of those things is somehow worse than being a bigot. It’s perfectly fine to not be a fan of Ava’s work, but comments like this hint at the same sad story. It’s also extremely telling that someone would view Spike Lee’s use of footage from the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in BlacKkKlansman as a “gimmick” or attempt at relevancy. Interesting. With the film’s subject matter and today’s racial and political climate in the country we find it strange that someone would feel that a nod to Charlottesville had no place in the movie. What they really mean is that Prince’s version of Mary Don’t You Weep had no place in the movie because there were some unhappy campers that felt Spike was politicizing Prince. Mary Don’t You Weep  is commonly referred to as a freedom song and considered to be one of the most important Spirituals ever written. We won’t spoil the ending for you if you haven’t seen the movie, but we’ll just say that there aren’t many songs that Spike could have chosen that would have been more appropriate for the film’s final moments than Mary Don’t You Weep.

We have never quite been able to figure out why Prince’s larger than life persona attracted non-black fans with a need to place ownership over him as if he were an object and not a real person. There’s that pesky “thing-ification”.

thingification. Noun. The fact or process of turning something into a thing. reification.

Do they need to force him to be a colorless character that transcended race in order to feel better about their admiration? Or is it because they just can’t accept that a black man was a musical genius? Why the push to disassociate Prince with racial topics that you have disdain for because it doesn’t affect you personally? These same fans are clueless about why it’s extremely important to Prince’s black fan base that his entire story be told when there’s a long history of white people hijacking black culture and it’s icons without showing respect to the originators. It’s the height of white privilege to ignore Prince’s own words about racial dynamics and how it affected him because you don’t want to face your own biases and are exhausted with the conversation. If your immediate reaction to any of these statements is outrage, then this post is probably about you.

Since 2016 two glaring issues have emerged with the discussion of Prince’s legacy. It’s hard to ignore that the loudest voices and talking heads that have been trotted out to discuss the music are non-black and/or distinctly tied to the 1980s when Purple Rain catapulted him into full crossover territory. While we realize that nostalgia is powerful, Prince didn’t stop producing excellent material after he disbanded The Revolution despite what former band members like Wendy Melvoin and some fans might have you think. Susan Rogers may have been present for many great moments in Princes history, but how many times did he have to tell us that Susan knows nothing about his music? Prince told Chatty Sue to mind her business in the 2015 Ebony Magazine interview, but here’s one more for the road from The New Yorker article:

The book would allow him to seize the narrative of his own life. Once, he said, he’d seen one of his former employees on TV saying she thought it was her God-given duty to preserve and protect the unreleased material in his vault. “Now, that sounds like someone I should call the police on,” he told me. “How is that not racist?” People were always casting him—and all black artists—in a helpless role, he said, as if he were incapable of managing himself. “I still have to brush my own teeth,” he said.

Racial issues aside, Prince never managed to outrun the 1980s no matter how hard he tried and on Tuesday we found ourselves in the time machine again. Here’s a head scratching and now deleted biography from The Revolution’s official website.

Pure Drunk History. So they’re just going to forget about Andre Cymone, Dez Dickerson and Gayle Chapman? It wasn’t long before the band swooped in to apologize for the error on their Facebook page and official Twitter account, but this is an example of past associates with over inflated egos rewriting history to overstate their importance. Some genius also spelled Gayle’s name wrong, but we digress...

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