Then for no apparent reason we started talking about Prince... (1 Viewer)

hoochmonkey9

Art should be its own hammer.
Reaper Crew
Moderator
Founding member
sigh. I miss pre-1991 Prince.

good times.

you know, before he found God and started hating gays.

sigh. remember when Prince was a heathen and loved lesbians? me too.


ok, that's the second time I've sighed in this thread. someone tell Prince to straighten the fuck out so I can stop sighing. someone tell him to do more of this. then I'll be just fine.

someone tell Prince lesbians are gays too. jesus help me!

great. now it's snowing. a lot. that's what I get for pissing off Prince.
 
ok, that's the second time I've sighed in this thread. someone tell Prince to straighten the fuck out so I can stop sighing. someone tell him to do more of this. then I'll be just fine.
Prince is a talented person who has always been more interested in form/image than in substance. From what I have seen, he appears to be, along with being a decent songwriter and performer, a good guitar player. However, he has consistently used a disgustingly wet sound for so long that the notes are barely perceptible.

Reeks of fraud, I'm afraid. If you can't do it with a clean sound, you're just blowing smoke if you only do it with a wet sound.
 
I wish I was with you watching the overpass and drinking. without the snow.

they're saying one to one and a half feet of snow.

shit.

we normally don't get snow until January.
 
someone tell him to do more of this. then I'll be just fine.
That's funny, we're just home from a Sandra Bernhardt show and she closed with Little Red Corvette, as she has been known to do (though last time we saw her she closed with "Sometimes It Snows In April").

Reeks of fraud, I'm afraid. If you can't do it with a clean sound, you're just blowing smoke if you only do it with a wet sound.
I would argue that the sound of a guitar cannot be wet, soggy, warm, cold, foamy or furry. Those words do not describe sounds and I usually hear third rate engineers using them to cover up the fact that they can't accurately describe what they want.

But "reeks of fraud"? That's kind of like saying Mozart "reeked of fraud" because his lute playing was pedestrian and squishy (yeah, I am comparing Prince to Mozart). Playing the guitar is about 5% of Prince's job. But really, whether he's a "fraud" as a guitarist, an anti-gay Jehovah's witness, a vampire or worships Sarah Palin doesn't matter.

He changed popular music forever, for better or worse, whether you like it or not, and he's written and recorded more music than any ten bands you can name - combined.

Of course he has a commercial shtick, and you have to buy into that schtick to appreciate the character he's created (and to appreciate the humor that is everywhere in his work). Some do, some don't. But looking at the music objectively, as a lifetime body of work, and then to suggest that he's in any way a fraud is laughable. Reeks of snobbishness and elitism to me.
 
He changed popular music forever

I agree with most of your post, but this? I don't know what you are basing this on.
I love most of Princes music but he's hardly what I'd call revolutionary.
He's used some very interesting studio techniques and he doesn't mind varying the forms he uses but "changed forever"?
He took the standard pop music resources and fashioned them to his needs. He didn't change anything except perhaps peoples tolerances for hearing men sing in falsetto.

Can you explain more what you mean by changed?
 
I would argue that the sound of a guitar cannot be wet, soggy, warm, cold, foamy or furry. Those words do not describe sounds and I usually hear third rate engineers using them to cover up the fact that they can't accurately describe what they want.

As a guitarist, you know exactly what I mean. Thin distortion from a pedal. An overdriven amp would sound better, but at the end of the day, it's still a disguise for poor technique. Come on, mjp, don't play dumb.

But "reeks of fraud"? That's kind of like saying Mozart "reeked of fraud" because his lute playing was pedestrian and squishy (yeah, I am comparing Prince to Mozart). Playing the guitar is about 5% of Prince's job. But really, whether he's a "fraud" as a guitarist, an anti-gay Jehovah's witness, a vampire or worships Sarah Palin doesn't matter.

Mozart composed and played piano. No lute player's ineptness could reflect poorly on Mozart. Although I would call him overrated. There are far better composers in my shitty opinon.

As for Prince, I find his music horribly annoying, and his thin guitar playing is the only chance he had for me to redeem himself; instead, he buried himself deeper with his mask of ability. So, the fraud comment is solely related to his thin, fake guitar tone.

He changed popular music forever, for better or worse, whether you like it or not, and he's written and recorded more music than any ten bands you can name - combined.

More than Roger Whittaker, Zamfir and Nana Mouskouri? If Prince changed popular music forever, it's only for the worse. John Lennon is flipping you off right about now. ;)

Of course he has a commercial shtick, and you have to buy into that schtick to appreciate the character he's created (and to appreciate the humor that is everywhere in his work). Some do, some don't. But looking at the music objectively, as a lifetime body of work, and then to suggest that he's in any way a fraud is laughable. Reeks of snobbishness and elitism to me.

If disliking the absolute drivel that Prince has produced makes me a snob and an elitist, then I will wear that banner with pride. Thank you.
 
As a guitarist, you know exactly what I mean. Thin distortion from a pedal. An overdriven amp would sound better, but at the end of the day, it's still a disguise for poor technique. Come on, mjp, don't play dumb.
I'm not playing dumb. I wouldn't, nor would anyone I ever met or worked with, call pedal distortion a "wet" sound. When you said "wet" I thought you were referring to reverb, which just goes to show that that is not the way to talk about sound.

I prefer amp overdrive to a pedal too, who wouldn't? I used a Marshall 50 watt 2x12 combo with a Les Paul Special and/or a Junior and no pedals at all for 15 years. But I have an MXR Distortion + from the 70's that I could run between a Les Paul Junior and a solid state amp today and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and the guitar plugged into a Marshall with the preamp cranked all the way up (or "gain" or whatever they call it now). Come on over, I'll show you! ;)

It's not good to get mad at each other over musical taste. We're all in the same gang. Music is music. If my comments were too snarky, forgive me. Dodging gob and beer bottles in all those stinky little clubs effectively beat the propriety out of me, and in the 30 years since I have not been able to gain any of it back.

I agree with most of your post, but this? I don't know what you are basing this on.
I love most of Princes music but he's hardly what I'd call revolutionary.
Can you explain more what you mean by changed?
ROC, how old are you? Did you listen to any pop or funk music before Prince became popular? The pre-Prince and post-Prince dividing line is quite obvious. Maybe it's hard to see in retrospect, but every record - literally overnight - came out sounding like a Prince record. It was kind of weird and shocking, and if you didn't listen to Prince before it happened you might just think, "oh, people sure are making different sounding records these days."

Being in the twin cities at the time we were well aware of Prince, and when something like Michael Jackson's Thriller came out, we immediately noticed how obviously he was lifting bits of Prince, vocally and thematically from Dirty Mind, Controversy and the first Time album (all three of those records were all Prince, with the exception of Morris Day singing on The Time). Jackson's pre-Thriller album Off the Wall, sounds slick, tame and predictable. Thriller is hard and jarring in comparison. What happened between the production of those two records? Prince happened. And Jackson is only the most obvious example in that shift, that stripping of the left over disco-gloss and return to hard funk. There were many others who also altered their sound radically at the same time.

The whole sound of the pop/r&b/funk of the 80's has it's roots in that handful of Prince and Time albums made between 1980 and 82. All of it. When he turned that corner with Dirty Mind, you have to remember, people (and reviewers) were saying, "What the fuck is this?" People laughed at him. He was booed off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones. But the people who made records were listening, and they must have liked what they were hearing, because everyone turned that corner right behind him and the sound of pop music abruptly changed.

That's what I meant.

And I don't necessarily like what that change lead to either. Pop music today is all shine and no substance. But technology would have caused that shift eventually no matter who or what happened in the 80's.
 
I'm not playing dumb. I wouldn't, nor would anyone I ever met or worked with, call pedal distortion a "wet" sound. When you said "wet" I thought you were referring to reverb, which just goes to show that that is not the way to talk about sound.

I prefer amp overdrive to a pedal too, who wouldn't? I used a Marshall 50 watt 2x12 combo with a Les Paul Special and/or a Junior and no pedals at all for 15 years. But I have an MXR Distortion + from the 70's that I could run between a Les Paul Junior and a solid state amp today and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and the guitar plugged into a Marshall with the preamp cranked all the way up (or "gain" or whatever they call it now). Come on over, I'll show you! ;)

It's not good to get mad at each other over musical taste. We're all in the same gang. Music is music. If my comments were too snarky, forgive me. Dodging gob and beer bottles in all those stinky little clubs effectively beat the propriety out of me, and in the 30 years since I have not been able to gain any of it back.

I wasn't mad; just responding vehemently. ;) Snarky? A bit. Forgiven? No need. I have very strong tastes in music; to a fault, I suppose. But there you go.

As for the "wet sound" comment, all I mean is an overly-processed sound that can be used to either good effect or bad. It can also be used to make a seemingly technically challeging lick sound like it's being played by a virtuoso when, in actuality, the notes could not be reproduced using a clean sound. Interestingly, I've used Prince as a prime example of this with friends for years. But enough about him.

Anyway, I'm a bass player, so what do I know about sound? ;)
 
As for the "wet sound" comment, all I mean is an overly-processed sound that can be used to either good effect or bad.
Speaking of over-processed sound, NPR had a long piece this morning on the Auto-Tune.

This thing can "correct" the pitch of a vocal or anything else, and they estimate it is used by 60% of today's pop artists in their live concerts, and even more than that (virtually all, apparently) in the studio.

http://www.antarestech.com/products/auto-tune-evo.shtml
 
That's the first I've heard of that particular program/hardware. But given today's digital technology/digital recording software, and the expense of studio time, I can see that it or other similar products have been used in studio. Live? I don't care for that. Live should be live. Zits and all or not.

And yes, I've had digital splices used here and there in my recent studio recordings, if that was what you were looking for.
 
ROC, how old are you? Did you listen to any pop or funk music before Prince became popular?

39.

So, no, not when it was happening.. but afterwards.

I guess we would have to disagree on our definitions of changed.
I would agree that he made an impact... perhaps changed some approaches or elements to pop music (for better or worse).

But I would not say he changed pop music forever.

He is a current in a very big pool. Not a different kind of water.

(Sorry about that crappy simile)
 
He was booed off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones.

I was at that concert. It was at the LA Coliseum. I missed Prince though since I didn't bother showing up until J Geils played just before the Stones came on. Just wasn't interested in any of the bands that played first (I think there were 5 bands including the Stones). I heard that people were also throwing stuff at him while he was playing.
 
Yeah, they pelted him with garbage. Dez Dickerson had to convince him to come back and do the show the next day. Prince had already flown home to Minneapolis. Ha.
 
This thread- or where ever the Prince conversation started,- got me to put on the Mp3 of all of his stuff today. That guy did grasp the attention of the right people at the right time. It doesn't surprise me about his Rolling Stones episode. Whoever put him out there way off base for sure.
Okay I've heard enough Prince to last another 4 or 5 months, unless he puts something else out.
 
I saw Prince during the Purple Rain tour and it was one of the best shows I've ever seen.
I think to apreciate Prince you have to first say you like Funk (PFunk in particular)-if you don't then it's going to be a hard sell.
I watched Joe Jackson get pelted with stuff at a Who concert. (it may have been the third final tour). He was so cool. He stopped and said "look I wrote the songs not the band so if your going to throw stuff aim for me-then he pulled out a camera and said I just want to get this shot cause I've never seen this many assholes in one place.
 
Wow, that's more than a thousand songs...must be some mp3! ;)

It's only about 4 hours worth so that's all of the Prince in my little world, besides I put it on for the corgi when I go to work. You can see it in the dog's style that it has an affect.;)

Prince is Italian.
 
sigh. I miss pre-1991 Prince.

good times.

you know, before he found God and started hating gays.

Prince hates gays? You know, I remember seeing Prince at one of the ridiculous awards shows and each time they put him on the camera he would sit there with a poker face while the rest of the crowd was laughing like morons at the stupid jokes of the host. I liked him when I saw that.

Damn it. I can't find the Black Sweat video. Probably because Prince owns Youtube.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top