| Author | Message | ||
     Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 1294 Registered: 09-2006 |
...against gay marriage. Or does he? http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/6189738 7 I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until it's made clear (if it ever is), but those quotes do rather sound like him, especially given his hateful comments about Wendy and Lisa in the past. He's an all-around musical genius, one of the five funkiest fellows on the planet, writes some excellent love and sex lyrics (when he doesn't let his meanspirited streak get in the way), but get him going on sociology, politics, religion and he can come off wackier than a rightwing shockjock. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 2470 Registered: 05-2005 |
Allen, who are the other four "funkiest fellows on the planet". I used to be in a hip-hop troupe called Four Funky Fellows. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 1296 Registered: 09-2006 |
Now isn't that a coincidence - you named them, right there... | ||
| Mark Leydon Member Username: Mark_leydon Post Number: 203 Registered: 05-2005 |
It all went wrong for Prince when he became a Jehovah's Witness a few years ago - so this doesn't surprise me. | ||
| Ewan Talisker McEwan Member Username: Ewan_mcewan Post Number: 543 Registered: 02-2008 |
That's pretty backward of him, but I'm just not into having my artists pass some kind of PC litmus test, before I deem them safe to listen to. Trust the art, not the artist, as the saying goes... Long as he still be funky, I cut him a lotta slack. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 1299 Registered: 09-2006 |
Whereas I'm more of the feeling that though it goes without saying that he has the right to say what he wants and make his art any way he wants, but if he did a song expressing those sentiments he expressed in that interview, even if the music was his most killer jam ever, I wouldn't listen to it, no. I find myself avoiding stuff like "Billy Jack Bitch" these days, for that reason. As I mentioned awhile ago regarding a lot of misogynist/homophobic hiphop, it's about somebody spewing their hatefulness, no matter how obviously confused it is, and implying that if you don't want to listen to it you're being a wuss, or *gasp* PC. IMO, PC and PI are two sides of the same false, extreme coin. MC Paul Barman: "The term arose on the Columbus Day Quincentennary when the republic was honest about the conquest/and wouldn't party as previously promised/If someone uses a nonoffensive vocabulary that person is considerate, not PC/If someone has a heavy-handed agenda that person is narrow-minded, not PC/Unless you mean Providence College, PC is as meaningless as the president's apology for slavery." | ||
| joe Member Username: Dogmansuede Post Number: 591 Registered: 07-2006 |
thank you allen! i can't stand all of this "too pc" rot. in the vein of the existentialists - some things just can't be made explicit, but that makes them no less relevant. the entire notion of the term pc makes me gag. when someone's being a c*nt, i think it's obvious enough. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 2476 Registered: 05-2005 |
I despised it in the early to mid 90s when a friend of mine started playing Shabba Ranks records. I could not square my friend who was not homophobic, buying and listening to records by a homophobic asshole. Ragga music is woeful shite anyway, but even if it wasn't the lyrics would mean I never gave it the time of day. | ||
| Randy Adams Member Username: Randy_adams Post Number: 1838 Registered: 03-2005 |
Yeah, "PC" was invented by the right-wingers to disarm the point being made. If you use the term you reinforce their agenda. I find Prince grossly overrated as an artist. He can say what he likes; it'll cause no dissonance in my record collection. I do find it amusing that he is one of that handful of performers--like Jagger and Bowie--who got himself into the public eye in the first place by flashing signifiers of fagginess. He was always bogus. The only real one in that pantheon is Little Richard. | ||
| Randy Adams Member Username: Randy_adams Post Number: 1839 Registered: 03-2005 |
I want to clarify something in the above post. I do NOT equate Prince with Jagger or Bowie, neither of whom would ever say such crap. And that distinction among them is reflected in the music too, especially Bowie who seems to have always been fundamentally a gentleman. | ||
| Ewan Talisker McEwan Member Username: Ewan_mcewan Post Number: 544 Registered: 02-2008 |
Only thing is, musically speaking, Prince = Genius. Little Richard, too. Jagger and Bowie, much as I've enjoyed what they do, not so much. Yeah, I think people absolutely have the right to believe what they believe and make the art they want to make, end of story. As we have the right to listen to it or not. | ||
| Rob Brookman Member Username: Rob_b Post Number: 1314 Registered: 08-2006 |
"Signifiers of fagginess." If that's not a band name in training, I don't know what is. I'm a huge Prince fan - I think he's an immense talent - but I'd just as soon not hear from him unless he's singing into a microphone. I guess I believe in the "judge the art not the artist" thing but if Bruce started, say, railing again illegal immigrants, I'd put every last one of his CDs in the trash compactor. Prince, of course, has never had Bruce's moral clarity, but I still don't want to hear him spout stupidity. (For what it's worth, he claims he was misquoted.) | ||
| Ewan Talisker McEwan Member Username: Ewan_mcewan Post Number: 547 Registered: 02-2008 |
Re: that phrase that rolls so trippingly off the tongue, "signifiers of fagginess", arguably Bowie, Jagger and Prince come by them honestly. Bowie, it's widely known, is bisexual, and I think that there's a lot of evidence that Jagger has, too. Prince, don't know if he was ever gay, but he sure went through a pretty deeply androgynous phase that seemed pretty heartfelt. But y'know, the artist's persona while performing is much like his art - it's a separate issue that should be judged on its own merits. I suppose one could dream up some nightmare scenario that would be put me off of the Boss, but unless he actually starts stealing babies out of prams and eating them, I'm still going to enjoy his music. Chuck Berry - another one I'd use the G word to describe - supposedly covertly filmed women peeing in the restroom of a restaurant he owned, and, in many ways, is a fairly heinous person. But listening to his music, it detracts not one iota from my enjoyment of it. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 1303 Registered: 09-2006 |
Rob, agreed regarding about only wanting to hear from the guy through a microphone, which is why I should probably have ignored my impulse to click on that banner headline and gone about my day. If I'd done something similar way back when I also wouldn't have read the aforementioned noxious things he said about Wendy and Lisa when they came out as a couple. The problem is, of course, that loopiness slips into the lyrics, too, and though there are times ("America," "Ronnie, Talk to Russia") where I can just sort of shake my head and say well, he never was a font of wisdom, when it gets virulent I'm finding it harder and harder to do it. | ||
| Allen Belz Member Username: Abpositive Post Number: 1304 Registered: 09-2006 |
As to his androgyny I do think he comes by it honestly - if it was just a phase he would've been over it by now. Being pretty androgynous myself, that was one of the things that drew me to him back then, and his talk about "no rules" and overturning arbitrary societal norms pulled me in even more. Delving deeper, though, his ideas quickly started looking pretty vague and/or simplistic, and the Revolution/New Power Generation/etc. like so many other quasi-utopian groups: "Yeah, we love and accept everybody, all people...oh, except of course you ______________ (insert name of group or groups of people). Things would be better without you around." And though it's always been nice that he's presented a somewhat wider picture of what constitutes "masculinity," I don't think it's ever embraced bisexuality, let alone homosexuality. "When You Were Mine" was as close as he came, and there it was more of a blurry flirtation where he stresses that he put up with his girlfriend's other lover sleeping in the same bed with them, but never went into details about what might've went on. And to counter that we got "Bambi" where he lectures a young lesbian, with a chorus that goes "Can't you understand/it's better with a man." I've heard him referred to as "chronically confused," and I think that nails it to some degree. We're all confused to some extent or another of course - life can be an overwhelming, complicated business. But often, instead of trying to make his way through that confusion he seems to cling to it...again, a pretty common thing: cruddy though it might be, confusion can sometimes be all we know, so it can be a weird kind of comfort zone. But if we stay there nothing ever changes, and while musically he's opened himself up to embrace just about the whole universe, in many other ways he often doesn't seem to have grown at all. His androgyny often seems to him like a war within rather than an integration, something I first noticed in sex tunes like "Let's Pretend We're Married" and "Do Me, Baby," where, in the midst of things he'd come out with these sarcastic, sometimes downright mean lines, uttered through clenched teeth, aimed at his partner - not the kind of rough talk that can, at the right moment, heat things up considerably, but the kind that had we wondering "What the hell is going on with this guy?" OK, this is way too long already...if you made it through the whole thing, thanks for the time. |