Sailer on Prince
News of an epic documentary about Prince that will likely never be widely seen led me to write up my 40-year-old views.
Netflix has paid a fortune for a 9 hour documentary on Prince, but his estate is blocking its showing.
From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Second, Prince was not cool.
Most famous rock stars became famous in part because they had the cultural winds at their backs. For example, while the Beatles definitely accelerated the trend for longer hair on boys (a huge issue in the 1960s for reasons that are hard to explain today), it would have happened anyway, whether six or twelve or twenty-four months later.
In contrast, Prince tended to be behind or just out of step with his times. His gender-bendery would have been cool in the 1970s, but by the 1980s it was old hat: Yeah, okay, you know, dressing like that’s what rock stars do.
Other Prince innovations, such as changing his name to a nonverbal hieroglyph combining the male and female symbols and a horn—“It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency”—tended to be lame. Granted, he was about 20 years ahead of the world in using emojis, but when I look up “Prince emoji” today, it’s a white boy with a crown.
And let’s not talk about purple paisley.
Third, all that nonsense aside, Prince was a great American.
It wasn’t just his unworldly musical talent, but also his considered judgment on what was best for American popular music, which was healthy and true. …
Read the whole thing there.
I liked Prince...at least his greatest hits...and your YouTube link shows off his talent with the guitar. It is a tragedy what's happened to black music since the 80s. My teenage years saw the emergence of Tamla Motown; ‘commercialised’ blues and gospel with a scattering of gems in its back catalogue of punchy love songs written by (recently deceased) Lamont Dozier together with the Holland brothers. Tamla laid the foundations for the exquisitely engineered Dance and Disco music of the ‘70s and ‘80s. I Wanna Dance with Somebody sung by Whitney Houston (but engineered by Narada Michael Walden) is an example as good as it gets. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/imagine-theres-no-muzak
While My Guitar Gently Weeps....I'll maybe get hung out to dry here but George Harrison was the great underrated Beatle. In fact the best of the four for my money. All Things Must Pass.
Very enjoyable column, Steve.
Prince was surprisingly popular in my upper-Midwestern 1980s high school days. I'm not sure how much my peers appreciated his supreme funkiness, but lots of them were Vikings fans, and since Prince was an MSP local who was obsessed with the main Vikings uniform color, it all somehow resonated as a fun purple-themed regional sub-culture mashup.