Photo by Scott Penner , via Wikimedia Commons Uptown Here, we’re taking a look at every Prince album, in honor of the Minneapolis royal. He thus stands, rightfully, in peerless distinction - a living god in the pantheon of popular music. Very few singular artists have managed to achieve such longevity in their careers, and even fewer have reached the plateaus of significance that Prince has. At this cross-section between commercial appeal and stylistic diversity, Prince’s music opened up whole worlds of possibility for popular music, some of which have been recapitulated ad nauseam in the decades since and some of which have laid dormant, more or less, until recently. In the ’80s alone, Prince completely revolutionized popular music more than once, with albums such as Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign “O” the Times all respectively dominating the scene in spite of their willfully challenging and experimental nature. And exert he did.Ĭombined with his prodigious facility in all three of these areas, these characteristics have resulted in a massive catalog - 25 studio albums and counting - that houses a handful of masterpieces, a bevy of hits, and a whole trove of songs that nobody has ever heard. The fact that he adopted a DIY approach (composing, performing, and producing his own music) from the beginning only facilitated this further, enabling Prince to exert utter control over his music. However (unlike those two), Prince also possessed a restless creative drive which allowed him to cover much more ground and engage more comprehensively with musical trends over time. Like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone before him, Prince offered a unique synthesis of “white” and “black” music (meaning, really, anything he cared to incorporate) that challenged both the structure of the biz and the sensibilities of his listeners at every turn. ![]() The incomparable Prince Rogers Nelson exploded onto the American music scene as a teenager and never looked back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |