Tag: met center
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The Dawn: How Prince’s Troubled Followup to 1999 Almost Became His Feature Film Debut
After the runaway success of his breakout album 1999, Prince had carte blanche to do almost anything he wanted. So, typical of his vaunting ambition circa 1982, he decided to follow up with both an album and a major motion picture. Sadly, the world never got to see the fruits of his cinematic vision; but…
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Baby I’m a Star
“Baby I’m a Star” has the familiar air of Prince self-actualizing through music: projecting himself toward a celebrity status he was still years away from achieving.
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1999
What set Prince apart from his early-’80s peers was his insistence on greeting Judgment Day, not with solemn gravity or mordant gallows humor, but with a seemingly irony-free display of millenarian ecstasy.
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3 x 2 = 6
Just as he’d done for his own Controversy, Prince put the finishing touches on the Vanity 6 album at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. The last song he recorded for the album, on April 5, 1982, was also the last song on the track list: a gauzy synthpop ballad arithmetically titled “3 x 2 =…
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If a Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)
“If a Girl Answers” brings to mind the sense of queer kinship, recalled by author Hilton Als, among “the colored queens I had known growing up, who called Prince ‘Miss.’”