Me: Makes a station for "Prince"
Pandora: Did you mean Michael Jackson? Here's a half dozen MJ tracks.
Me: Pandora, play Purple Rain
Pandora: Did you mean Billie Jean?
Me: ... fuck it, Billie Jean is fun to listen to, even if it has a horrible moral.
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None of Prince's music is online, or very little of it. At his insistence.
ReplyDeleteGiven treatment by studios, that makes way too much sense.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that'll change now.
ReplyDeleteI suspect, given his iron grip on his recording in his life, his will is going to have provisions to destroy every recording he ever made.
ReplyDeleteNah, what he was doing was trying to nail down rights and royalties for his heirs. There's also a vault full of unreleased recordings that will be released, either by his heirs, or on a schedule to provide for them.
ReplyDeleteI realize the truth is much less entertaining.
Also, KEXP.org is playing all Prince right now. You can stream it online from anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI'm a moron.
ReplyDeleteI turned on the radio. It is always on NPR. First thing I hear "Let's listen to a little of that ... "
And then: Purple Rain.
Goddamn NPR. So perfect.
Ahh Fair use, I love it!
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols, the current is doing non stop prince right now. I know you're not here in mn but you can stream it on their website. (Also I was just talking with a coworker last night that Billy Jean was my favorite Jackson song)
ReplyDeleteBillie Jean is MJ all over, right?
ReplyDeleteRemarkably good music, really awful message.
Maybe. Some of MJ'S songs were incredibly autobiographical (such as leave me alone), and he did have a problem with people searching for ways to attach themselves to his success. This could have been him working out his frustrations through music and of course having no filter to reserve personal feelings from the public eye. If you look at the song out of that context then it does sound like him being a deadbeat dad, but for Mike I think he really believed that Billy Jean was not his lover.
ReplyDeleteDavid Rothfeder Maybe!
ReplyDeleteThoughts:
1. MJ is a tragic figure, mostly. He (probably) did bad things, and I don't think was malicious about it. That's sort of where I'm coming from, important in a discussions about him.
2. How much a piece of art relates to the artist matters, sure, but what really matters is what is caused from it. So, if you've got a song about denying the parentage of a kiddo, then we gotta ask what people do as a result of it. And if that is to knock up ladies, then claim they never got together? Not so good.
3. Its really easy to forgot that MJ was ridiculously successful, in a way and scope I can't even really comprehend. There's a reason he was able to buy the rights to all the The Beatles music, and its not because they were more famous than him.
So, yeah. Was Billie Jean MJ's lover?. Probably not. Do the facts of his biography matter? I'm not sure! Does it matter that his songs may have given impressionable young men a bad idol? Probably!
Those things are hard, and would need more than a quick thought for me to be comfortable with the results.
I know of no such objections to Prince, so let's delight in that instead.
In a lot of ways, Prince is the opposite of mj. I think Jackson had no ability to seperate his public personal and life from his personal. It was like he didn't know who was his personal and who he was. I think that's why he became reclusive, because he knew no other way to protect himself from the public. I think that really shows in how he had his children wear masks while out with them. He was so affraid that they would get stuck in the public eye and knew no other way.
ReplyDeletePrince on the other hand is well known to be very private and quiet. I heard today he did not allow recording devices in interviews and he stayed of social media. Prince was his music and his stage act, but the rest of who he was was never put on display.
I do agree that Jackson was flat out irresponsible in many ways. He would put out any music he thought was good regardless of meaning. This allowed for misinterpreting meanings that could hurt others, such as Billy Jean, or himself such as Leave Me Alone (which convinced a lot of people he was insane). The one song of his that I can remember being about more than an image or a personal feeling was Black or White, which wasn't very big. To me it says Jackson didn’t know how to talk about bigger and more complicated issues in ways other than the most basic ways.