[themawt71]

Originally Posted by Severian

We have the technology and knowledge of neurochemistry to handle long term chronic pain without the use of narcotics, by using microscopic brain and spine implants that use minor electronic pulses to do the same thing painkillers do without any risk of dependsncy, addiction, overdose or diversion/sale of controlled substances.

It's what our top scientists should be spending their time on — instead of developing new variations on the same opiate based chemical drugs, with this tweak or that tweak to make them sound safer.

yr definitely right about all of that. i know an older gentleman in this situation who says if only the doctor told him about the possibilities of addiction he never would have touched the stuff.

i wish you luck there. you seem to be on the right track with that stuff.

agreed. hopefully opioids for pain management will become a thing of the past sooner than later.

[The Soup Nazi]

 

Watch Paul McCartney Cover Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" in Minneapolis Last Night

[The Soup Nazi]

Couple of articles from The Wire online that had escaped me. First:

 

Prince 1958–2016: Rebirth Of The Flesh
The songs Prince made under a female alias are the pinnacle of his career, says Derek Walmsley

He made a remarkable 39 studio albums over a 40 year career, yet perhaps Prince's most complete album, what would have been the peak of an extraordinary career, remains unreleased – at least in the form it was intended. Most of its songs are in the public domain, but its key tracks emerged on what was, at best, a pragmatic compromise and at worst, a hurried botch-job. That compromise, paradoxically, is 1987's Sign 'O' The Times – the album most frequently declared to be his greatest work, containing some of the most sophisticated and multilayered songs in Prince's long catalogue.

Sign 'O' The Times was a double album pieced together from three ultimately unfinished projects Prince was exploring as his band The Revolution drifted apart: Crystal Ball and Dream Factory were sprawling concept works that never fulfilled their potential, but Camille was a short and sharp album with a new name and (literally) a new voice. The eight songs apparently planned for it, including "If I Was Your Girlfriend", "Strange Relationship" and "Housequake" from Sign 'O' The Times, as well as future B sides "Shockadelica" and "Feel U Up", featured Prince's vocals either sped-up or fooled around with as if to shift or escape their implied gender. Camille was shelved a few weeks before its planned release, which was to have featured a plain cover and no artist picture.

It would have been his most radical album of all. The opening track "Rebirth Of The Flesh", never released but circulating unofficially in several forms, sets the agenda (and scrambles it) in its title and its opening lines. "The rebirth of the flesh is at your door”, Prince announces over a shifting, pounding kick drum, to be answered by a chorus of "Let him in y'all!". But when Prince does re-enter, it's with a higher pitched voice which suggests a woman not a man. "It's a brand new day", the voice declares – as if Prince is now a brand new person – a lyric quoted, surely deliberately, from that most masculine of sex machines, James Brown.

Camille 'herself' is namechecked in "Shockadelica", a trademark Prince exploration of desire – and where desire crosses over into the wish to control, or to be controlled (or both): "The bed's on fire, your fate is sealed/And you're so tired, and the reason is Camille". She "must be a witch", the lyric runs, which sets up the tantalising set piece of Prince pretending to be a woman who is in control of a man.

On Camille, it's impossible to say who or what Prince is – the album thus takes the subtext of all Prince's work and writes it large. "If I Was Your Girlfriend", his greatest song (and one covered brilliantly by female trio TLC), dreams to move beyond gender and perhaps transcend conventional ways of having sex. In the song, supposedly inspired by Prince's jealousy of the closeness of his guitarist Wendy Melvoin and her sister Susanna, he asks (in Camille voice) if the object of his desire would "remember/To tell me all the things you forgot when I was your man", suggesting he has already left the male state behind. He rhapsodises on the difference between sex and orgasm, and then raises the question that lurks behind much of Prince's work: "Would that get you off?/Tell me what will". The song expresses desire, but then raises it to the power of imagination and fantasy, creating other dimensions of possible desire(s) underneath. Nothing is true; everything is permitted. "Feel U Up", meanwhile, which eventually emerged on the B side to "Partyman" in 1989, is a lavacious, almost threatening demand for physical contact, set to one of Prince's most playful and freaky beats. In the Camille voice, the chauvinistic creepiness of the lyric seems to be subverted – although it raises the possibility that the Camille voice could even be a ruse for Prince to get even closer to women.

The fluidity of gender notions on the album is reflected by the fluidity of the rhythms, which is unmatched in Prince's other work. Funk around the time of James Brown and later Parliament obsessed over 'the one', the kick drum at the start of the bar that rippled through the dancefloor. "Rebirth Of The Flesh", however, announces "kick drum pounds on the two and four", but to complicate matters further, the kick drum is hitting on the one anyway. "Housequake", the next track on Camille's projected tracklisting, is Prince's most far-out rhythm, with kicks and snares restlessly triggering throughout the bar like a restless itch. This is, in microcosm, what was so radical about Prince's music as a whole – it was funky as hell, yet deconstructed funk at the same time.

The importance of Camille is underlined by its place in Prince's discography. As his band The Revolution split up, his first album after them was set to be under a woman's name. Although Prince has played with aliases and pseudonyms his entire career (a predilection analysed by Joseph Stannard in The Wire's Deep Cover issue). Camille was set to be his boldest transformation yet, and he was still referencing this alter ego in discussion around the initially shelved Black Album, which he referred to at one point as the work of his "dark side". "If I Was Your Girlfriend" sees Prince striving harder than ever for a sense of fulfilment that both sex and faith have failed to deliver, and it's the highpoint of an album that might have given the whole picture of the (wo)man.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/...h-of-the-flesh

[The Soup Nazi]

...and:

 

Prince 1958–2016: Is The Water Warm Enough?
Cartoonist Hazel Newlevant discusses Wendy & Lisa's contribution to Prince's legacy. All images from Hazel Newlevant’s No It U Lover (2014)

If you can do it all, and if you have a singular vision that combines genres and pushes forward music, do you need anyone else? Who do you choose to surround yourself with? Prince was the most talented multi-instrumentalist in a generation, a prodigious songwriter and arresting performer. His reputation as a sole genius makes it easy to overlook the contributions of his collaborators. He masterminded entire albums by The Time and Vanity 6, playing every note on their records, and providing guiding tracks that Morris Day and Vanity had to follow exactingly with their vocals. Prince's hyper-controlled methods didn’t sit well with everyone; many musicians quit his employ over the years to seek creative freedom elsewhere.

Prince had a penchant for picking young, beautiful and unknown women to work with. Some he chose more for their looks than musical talent, such as Apollonia, whom he groomed to replace previous collaborator Vanity and to play his love interest in the 1984 film Purple Rain. Knowing this, it would be easy to mistake Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin, keyboardist and guitarist of The Revolution, his band of the era, for two such extensions of Prince's image. But the pair left their creative fingerprints indelibly on Prince albums from Purple Rain through Around The World In A Day and Parade all the way to the famously auteur-ish Sign 'O' The Times, released after The Revolution's breakup in 1986.

Understanding Wendy and Lisa, and how they affected Prince's music, is key to the conflict between Prince as a musical mastermind, who wanted absolute control over his sound and image, and Prince as a collaborator.

Lisa Coleman joined Prince's band around the time of 1980's Dirty Mind, and her breathy vocals can be heard on "Head". Her father was a session musician, and she had already played on one flopped Partridge Family-esque album as a child, making her a seasoned pianist despite being fresh out of high school. Prince was so impressed when he heard her demo tape, he invited her to Minneapolis to audition. When they jammed, Lisa says, "from the first chord, we hit it off."

Thrilled as Lisa was to join Prince's band, it was painful to leave behind her sweetheart Wendy Melvoin. "I had fallen in love with Wendy, my childhood friend, and suddenly we were looking at each other differently, but I had to leave on the road all the time. It was always just torture." Prince heard Wendy's guitar playing during her frequent visits with Lisa, and when Dez Dickerson left the band in 1983, Wendy was a ready replacement. The "are they or aren't they" aspect of Wendy and Lisa's relationship was the perfect complement to Prince's sexually fluid, multiracial vision of The Revolution: "Black, White, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin'!" With the final line-up of Wendy and Lisa, Brown Mark, Bobby Z and Dr Fink, The Revolution were at hand.

Wendy had a way of breaking tension in the studio with her playful, forthright tone. She could tease Prince as none of the other band members dared, and wasn't afraid to tell him when she didn't like something. When writing Purple Rain, Prince started to work with The Revolution more collaboratively. The members would often jam together until they found a groove they liked, or Prince would leave them to work on their own parts, rather than writing everything himself. Wendy and Lisa provided the sultry spoken word introduction to "Computer Blue": "Wendy?" "Yes Lisa". "Is the water warm enough?" "Yes Lisa". "Shall we begin?" "Yes Lisa". Their role in the Purple Rain film solidified their public image. Although they didn't contribute to the composition of the track "Purple Rain" as much as the film implies, the couple's fictional conflict with Prince about their creative input prefigured later, real-life conflicts.

Wendy shaped Prince's music in another way, by introducing him to her twin sister Susannah Melvoin. Prince was immediately taken with her, despite her being in a relationship when they met, and wrote the song "The Beautiful Ones" for her. He created a new group called The Family to showcase Susannah, along with former members of The Time. After the huge success of Purple Rain, Prince was ready for a new musical direction, and relied on Wendy and Lisa to help him get there – asking them for input, or to point out when a song sounded like something he'd done before. On tour, Wendy and Lisa played Prince records by white rock 'n' roll acts from their childhood – The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

Prince returned to the studio in 1984 to record the next album. Lisa's brother David Coleman, a talented multi-instrumentalist in his own right, got it rolling by composing "Around The World In A Day" for his sister. He used a wide variety of sounds – oud, cello, finger cymbals, darbuka. When the girls played the song for Prince, he liked it so much he made it the title track of his new album. He rerecorded the song with David's blessing, and used this wider sonic palette throughout Around The World In A Day. Wendy and Lisa lent their vocals to album hits like "Pop Life" and "Raspberry Beret". Critics were surprised by how quickly the new album came together. "It's true that I record very fast," Prince told MTV. "It goes even quicker now that the girls help me."

Parade, the next album, features more of Wendy and Lisa's songwriting. "Sometimes It Snows In April", a song about the death of a friend, has a spare arrangement, primarily framed by Lisa's signature jazzy piano playing, punctuated with Wendy's electric guitar strumming. Prince's voice soars over top on the verses, before they join him for the chorus, their voices harmonising. The whole song is by just the three of them. The song's elegiac tone seems even sadder and more beautiful in light of Prince's own death in April.

The collaboration became even more enmeshed while working on a projected follow-up, called Dream Factory. This album promised to be Prince & The Revolution's most sprawling and musically ambitious yet. It was never released – instead, Prince recycled many of the highlights into Sign 'O' The Times. Wendy described the process of writing "Strange Relationship": "We got a master tape that had Prince's vocals, piano and drums. He said, 'Take it and finish it.' So Lisa and I went back to Los Angeles and created the other parts to it. The sitar sound came from a sample from the Fairlight." Dream Factory also contained improvised, instrumental tracks by both Wendy and Lisa, recorded as they warmed up in Prince's home studio. These added a casual intimacy to the album, and Prince clearly cared about showcasing their musicianship.

The Dream Factory sessions were a period of deep creative and personal connection between the three. Prince asked Wendy and Lisa to be his surrogates in an interview with Rolling Stone, where Wendy described their relationship: "It's silly, us all being so intense about it and swooning over each other, but it's meaningful. Not that the rest of the band doesn't understand Prince – they do. We're just a bit more spiritual with him."

However, near the end of recording Dream Factory, Wendy and Lisa's relationship with Prince soured for a number of reasons: Prince still had an on-again, off-again romance with Wendy's sister Susannah – the lyrical inspiration for "Strange Relationship" – and it angered Wendy to see him womanising while he expected Susannah to remain faithful. If Prince arrived at the studio in a bad mood, they suspected he'd been fighting with Susannah the night before. He started changing their contributions without consulting them, and continued to expand The Revolution. It swelled to 12 members, including a second guitarist and backup-dancing bodyguards. Prince wanted everything bigger, more full of entertainment, while the women wanted to rein it in.

When the pair visited Prince to demand to be treated as creative equals, he instead decided to strip their contributions from Dream Factory. Wendy and Lisa remained to finish the Hit N Run tour with Prince, before The Revolution dissolved in 1986. Prince shelved many songs from Dream Factory, and on the ones he kept for Sign 'O' The Times, he rerecorded their parts. Lisa described hearing the final product: "We listened to it like, 'Oh wow... we are gone'. It was like a breakup and seeing your boyfriend with another girl."

[continues...]

[The Soup Nazi]

[...continued...]

This is not to take away from the artistic accomplishment of Sign 'O' The Times. But that record especially is lauded for being solely Prince's handiwork, and it's worth celebrating his collaborators. Wendy and Lisa went on to explore their creative impulses as a duo, recording albums together and scoring TV shows like Heroes and Nurse Jackie. Prince found new and different ways of being Prince. The three were never able to fully reconcile, due in part to Prince's Jehovah's Witness faith, which led him to reject the queerness he had once embraced, as a "sinful lifestyle".

In a 1989 interview with the UK TV programme TV:AM, when told that Wendy & Lisa's new single "Satisfaction" sounded like Prince, Wendy responded simply, "He sounds like us." Lisa elaborated: "You swap and barter and trade and learn and teach and steal and give."


Hazel Newlevant's graphic novella If This Be Sin (along with more comics about Wendy, Lisa, Prince and others) is available via her website.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/...er-warm-enough

[Severian]

Hell yeah Sign 'O The Times!!!

Best Prince album!

Though Parade has been really creeping into my psyche lately.

[pepper_green]

im not that big of a fan of Parade. it's ok.

Sign o the Times has "Starfish and Coffee" and "It" and "U got the Look" and "Forever in my Life" and "Strange Relationshit" and "I could never take the place of your man" and the rest of that killer album.

I really love the era between Dirty Mind and Parade the most. Around the World is underrated. Prince goes Ray Davis and "She's always in my Hair" is my fav b-side.

man, R.I.P. he deserves it more than David Blowie.

[Severian]

He deserves to rest in peace more than David Bowie does? What a weird thing to think. Weirder still to say. I'll admit, Prince's music has been more important to my life than Bowie's... I'm pretty much a Station to Station and Low guy when it comes to Bowie. I don't fuck with much else... at least not on a regular basis. While Prince has about seven albums that I don't think I could live without, and SO many individual songs that mean so much to me ina personal level that I can't even begin to count them up.

So I'm more affected by Prince's death than I was by Bowie's. I prefer Prince's music on the whole to Bowie's. But I still think Bowie was a brilliant man who left an incredible legacy behind.

But boy did they have it wrong when they said -- as so many did around the time of Bowie's death -- that he was the "last of the originals." People were thinking in very traditional, white, Beatles-derived rock icon terms when they said that. Prince is definitely a more original force than Bowie. And besides, there's still Dylan, Neil Young, Sir Paul, Mick and Keith, Iggy and all those other old ass fuckers.

But yeah, Prince > Bowie, for sure, all things considered. Though ★/Blackstar is so so so much better than anything Prince dropped in his last 15 years on this planet.

[Severian]

Sign is such a perfect album. It's on the level of Daydream Nation, Zen Arcade, and Disintigration in terms of '80s "definitive statement" or "[insert artist name]'s White Album" type records. Just monumental. And it's just as pivotal and influential to the underground as it was to the pop world. Probably more so. Which really does make it even better.

Michael Jackson did a lot of shit in the '80s, but he never accomplished anything anywhere near as vast and powerful and boundless as Sign "O." Or Purple Rain, for that matter. Or hell, even 1999 and Around the World in a Day.

I grew up with MJ, but the difference between Prince and Mike is the difference between Artist with a capital "A" and "performer." Comparing them isn't really fair to either man's legacy, but I think it's worth mentioning that the two are virtually incomparable on an actual musical level.

[Severian]

By the way...

did y'all know that one Chris Cornell (from Audioslave and those awful Chris Cornell solo albums, and the Earth 2 doppelgänger of the man who who actually made some kickass music for a few years with a pre-geriatric Soundgarden) recorded a cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" as a tribute to our boy here?

Well, he did. It's on iTunes. And — surprise! — It fucking sucks.

Here's a review:

Good intentions can't save this one
Artist: Chris Cornell
Song: "Nothing Compares 2 U" (Prince/The Family cover)

Before I rip this travesty apart, I would like to give props to Chris Cornell for making sure the world remembers that this is a Prince song. It’s a sweet gesture and I’m sure it will be taken as a nice tribute, but it lacks everything that was great about both Prince’s original AND Sinead O'Connor’s celebrated 1990 cover. Cornell’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” seems to be made specifically for non-Prince (and non-Sinead) fans. While I’m sure there are some folks out there who will dig this flaccid, artless snoozer, the truth is that this song fails as a tribute, and succeeds only in hucking a flashlight down into the massive, cavernous talent gap between Artist and “artist” (tell me when it hits the bottom).

Lacking the funky pulse of the original — released in 1985 by Prince side project The Family — Cornell’s solo acoustic take on this iconic ballad puts him in the unfortunate position of squaring off with O'Connor’s almost unfathomably beautiful 1990 cover in the mind of the listener. That’s a battle few singers could ever hope to win. Maybe Thom Yorke could pull it off — maybe PJ Harvey or Erykah Badu.
There’s a chance Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips could put a nice spin on it if they brought their A-game. But sadly Cornell’s cover sounds like the kind of purposeless rustic crap you’d expect to hear from Nickelback or Daughtry.

By opting for a sparse, singer-songwriter arrangement, Cornell makes the comparison to O'Connor inevitable. It’s sad, because he’s a very talented singer who's fully capable of pulling off authentically soulful vocal performances (see “Say Hello 2 Heaven,” “Hunger Strike.”)

It's hard to imagine "Nothing Compares 2 U" ever sounding boring. I've always considered the song to be such a force of nature that it would imbuing anyone who deins to sign it with temporarily Godlike musical prowess and charisma. Here, though, Cornell just plain phone's it in. His cover succeeds only in making this iconic and timeless song sound very basic indeed, which is actually something of a feat in itself considering the raw power of the source material. Cornell's cover is a failure as a tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson. The man was many things, but “basic” was never one of them. He didn’t have a “basic” bone in his body. In fact, I think a strong argument could be made that the acronym of modern slang’s “basic” is actually “Prince.”

The moral of the story is: If you’re going to cover “Nothing Compares 2 U,” you’d better have one hell of an ace up your sleeve, because in addition to being a brilliant Prince track, it's also, arguably, the most exquisitely covered song of all time. O'Connor brought something new to the track, but Cornell’s decision to essentially cover her cover pretty much hamstrings this instantly forgettable and wholly unnecessary, though surely well intentioned, tribute to The Purple One.

[tesla69]

Nearly 700 men and women from all over the United States have rushed to claim they are Prince’s long-lost half sibling as the dash to get a share of his fortune that could top $1billion heats up.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...fy-claims.html

[Severian]

Ugh.

[pepper_green]

well, seems that it's opiates/pills that might be the culprit. will it take Prince's death to finally get the nation wide coverage even when every 1 out of whatever reporter does these sick pills?

"gireal u got an ass like I've never seen". RIP.

[pepper_green]

"yeah, let me get a fruit cocktail, im not too hungry"

[pepper_green]

"my pants were wet, they came off but, she hadn't seen the movie cause she hadn't read the book first".

[pepper_green]

" I want to do it baby all time all right

"cause when we do it girl, it's so divine"

[The Soup Nazi]

 

From Uncut:

The truth about what really happened when Prince jammed with Miles Davis

As part of our Prince tribute in the current issue of Uncut, I spoke to a number of his former collaborators – including Eric Leeds, who played saxophone with Prince from 1984 up to 2003, making him one of Prince's longest-serving right-hand men.

In interview in the July 2016 issue, Leeds spoke in detail about exactly what happened with Prince met Miles. There was only space for a shorter version of this story in the piece, so here's Leeds' memories of the meetings between these two musical giants in full…

Were you there when Prince jammed with Miles Davis?

"I've got to tell you, I kind of was the midwife in that. Not that they wouldn't have got together anyway, because I already was aware of Miles' interest in Prince's music. Prince was into quite a bit of Miles' music also. I think they saw a lot of each other in their music. When I realized that Prince was reaching out to Miles to maybe do something, I made damn well sure I was going to be somewhere when that happened!

"The actual reality is that Prince and Miles were never in a recording studio together. That never happened. We did a track for Miles, for possible inclusion on what would have been Miles' first Warner Bros album, Tutu. Prince decided that he didn't think it was appropriate to be included on that album. He asked Miles not to include it and Miles agreed. Miles did overdub trumpet to it, but he did it on his own; Prince was nowhere around him when that happened. Finally, when we listened to that track, Prince came to me and Matt Blistan [trumpet] and asked my opinion of it. If Prince was going to ask me that, that meant Prince was not 100% sure it was that great. I agreed with him. I said, 'If you’re going to do something with Miles, this shouldn’t be it.' And he agreed.

"So we did a concert at Paisley Park. It was a New Year's Eve, 1987. It was an invitation only performance. Miles was a guest and came on stage with us and played with us on one of the songs. To my recollection and to the best of my knowledge that is the only time Miles and Prince were in a space together performing. They became friendly and certainly stayed in communication with each other.

"Several years later, Miles asked Prince to produce some other tracks for him on a subsequent album. Prince was at that point extremely busy doing other things and was just not able to do that. Prince actually came to me and asked me to do a couple of tracks for Miles. I told Prince, I said, 'Prince, Miles isn't asking me to do a couple of tracks with him! He wants to go in the studio with you!' He said, 'I know! I just can't see me doing that right now.' I said, 'Look, I'll be more than happy to go in the studio and cut some tracks' – which I ended up doing, but I have no idea whether those tracks were sent to Miles or whether he ever heard them. I really have no idea what happened to them. Obviously, I was very complimented! I had come to know Miles a bit, which was something of a dream come true."

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/revealed...es-davis-77011

[pepper_green]

isn't "Adore" the greatest song? the end all of all slow jamz.

[The Soup Nazi]

Spoon (just Britt Daniel and Alex Fischel this time) — "Under The Cherry Moon" [Mexico City, May 21, 2016]

[The Soup Nazi]

 

dearly beloved…amanda palmer & jherek bischoff mourn the passing of a mutual hero, prince, with this string quartet tribute.
recorded in the weeks after prince’s heartbreakingly premature passing in LA & NYC.
all proceeds of this download (until further notice) will go to the ELEVATE HOPE FOUNDATION, a non-profit that provides therapy through music for abused and abandoned kids...supported by prince and founded by sheila e. (more info about the charity below).

https://amandapalmer.bandcamp.com/track/purple-rain