Prince
Rogers Nelson was truly one of a kind, in terms of style and vision as well as
music. While he was never afraid to cross musical genres, for me he will
forever be defined for doing more with funk than anyone other than James Brown,
whom he cited as one of his main inspirations, along with Marvin Gaye and Jimi
Hendrix.
I believe
the first Prince song I heard was “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, which was his first
hit to cross over to the mainstream pop charts, but he made much more of an
impression with “Little Red Corvette” (which I initially misheard as “Pay The
Rent Collect”) and the classic “1999”. Then of course there was 1984, dominated
by Purple Rain and Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. (Certainly the
commercial edge went to the former, which topped the album sales charts for 24
weeks as opposed to Bruce’s 7.)
When I was
listening to “Let’s Go Crazy” this morning, I paid a little more attention than
usual to the spoken intro, when Prince describes the “After world” as “A world
of never ending happiness | You can always see the sun, day or night”. Seems
like a good thought for today.
Favorite
songs:
Thieves In
The Temple
1999
Sign ‘O’ The
Times
When Doves
Cry
Little Red
Corvette
Alphabet St.
Let’s Go
Crazy
Kiss
Purple Rain
Raspberry
Beret
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