Tag: saturday night live

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#PrinceTwitterThread: “All the Critics Love U in New York”

Last Friday night, I broke my self-imposed hiatus to contribute to the latest #PrinceTwitterThread series on 1999. I used this opportunity to expand on one of my favorite posts I’ve written, “All the Critics Love U in New York,” zeroing in on the themes of Prince’s reciprocal relationship with Detroit DJ the Electrifying Mojo and, by extension, the early techno scene. I’ve been wanting to do a project around the Detroit-Prince connection for years, and to be honest, when I decided to do this thread, I didn’t think it would fill that gap for me; but I’m actually very happy with how it turned out, so if this ends up being my last word on Prince and Detroit, then I’m surprisingly okay with that.

In fact, I’m so happy with this thread that a part of me wishes I’d centered my paper at next (!) weekend’s #TripleThreat40 symposium around it, so I could already be mostly done with my personal projects this month instead of only half done. But that’s Burnout Zach talking; I have every confidence that by the time the symposium runs around, I’ll be glad I decided to pursue two cool ideas instead of just one. For now, please enjoy Cool Idea #1; hopefully I’ll see some of you when it’s time to unveil Cool Idea #2.

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Prince Track by Track: “Mr. Goodnight”

A little Spanish--well, French--man offers you wine and Moet; Hervé Villechaize in Fantasy Island, © Columbia Pictures Television.

One more bit of housekeeping before I get back to proper posts–here’s my latest appearance on Darren Husted’s Prince: Track by Track podcast, where I got to talk about what has, in what feels like an escalating series of bets with myself, somehow become my favorite song on Planet Earth:

Prince Track by Track: “Mr. Goodnight”

Also, given the obvious overlap between fans of Prince and Chaka Khan, I thought there might be some interest in my review of her very good latest album for Slant magazine:

Slant: Chaka Khan’s Hello Happiness Runs on Good Vibes

This is actually my last Slant review for a while, as I’m trying to focus my extracurricular writing time on this blog. And on that note, the next time you hear from me, it’ll be with a new post on “All the Critics Love U in New York.”

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Reviews

Review: Musicology/3121/Planet Earth

Prince presides over his domain on the cover of Planet Earth, 2007; © NPG Records.

It’s been a little bit of a crazy week, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait a while longer for my next real post on “All the Critics Love U in New York”; but I haven’t been completely lax in my Prince-writing duties. Over at Spectrum Culture, where I occasionally lend my pen, I reviewed the new batch of vinyl reissues from Prince’s mid-2000s “comeback” era:

Review: Musicology/3121/Planet Earth

These weren’t my favorite albums when they came out, and to be frank they still aren’t (though 3121 aged pretty damn well); but they cover a period of great historical interest, and I’m glad they’re being made available for a new audience.

On a somewhat Prince-related tip, I also wrote a piece for Spectrum this week about Beck’s Midnite Vultures, which is turning 20 this year in what I can only interpret as an act of personal aggression against me. You can read it here and find out why I think it actually owes less to Prince than to David Bowie, specifically 1975’s Young Americans:

Holy Hell: Midnite Vultures Turns 20

Next week, I’ll finally have a little more time to do some writing for himself (a.k.a., this blog). I’m also recording another batch of Prince: Track by Track episodes tomorrow, the first of which you should be hearing very soon. Perhaps, at some point, I will also get some sleep.

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Controversy, 1981

Do Me, Baby

Prince, Kim Upsher, and André Cymone, early 1980s; photo by Sylvia Amos, née Anderson. Stolen from Neon Rendezvous.

Around the same time Prince was co-opting Flyte Tyme for his project with Morris Day, he was also falling out with another of his oldest comrades: the co-founder of Grand Central and his closest musical partner, André Cymone.

André’s and Prince’s musical fates had been linked since the moment they first locked eyes in the Bryant Junior High gymnasium. Both were budding multi-instrumentalists, the children of talented jazz musicians: André’s father, Fred Anderson, used to play bass with Prince’s father, John L. Nelson. Both, too, possessed a preternatural drive far beyond their age and circumstance. “There was a sixth sense between the two of us,” Cymone told Billboard in 2016. “It’s something that doesn’t happen, I don’t think, very often where you find two people come together who are really passionate about what they do at a time when they’re both growing and learning” (Cymone 2016).

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Ephemera, 1979-1981

Everybody Dance

Prince and Lisa Coleman on stage at Sam’s Danceteria–later known as First Avenue–March 9, 1981. Photo by Duane Braley of the Minneapolis Star, stolen from the Current blog.

During the lull between the first and second legs of the Dirty Mind tour, Prince’s relationship with publicist Howard Bloom began to bear fruit. Bloom had been hired by Prince’s manager Bob Cavallo at the end of 1980, in advance of the artist’s first headlining tour. Their goal was to finally achieve what Prince had been trying to do since 1978: break out of the music industry’s R&B “ghetto.”

Bloom, as he would be the first to proclaim, was the right man for the job. At the time, he told biographers Alex Hahn and Laura Tiebert, “it was incredibly unhip for any white person to work with any black artist. There was a wall, and it was segregation to the nth degree” (Hahn 2017). But Bloom, a White man of Jewish descent, had a reputation for flouting this segregation: “I was considered the leading ‘Black’ publicist in the music industry,” he recalled to K Nicola Dyes of the Beautiful Nights blog. “I worked with more Black acts and I learned more about Black culture than anybody else in the PR field” (Dyes 2014). Bloom, then, was one of the few in the music industry who took notice after Prince’s second album went platinum without ever “crossing over” from the R&B charts. Now, all he had to do was harness his client’s obvious star power, and make it impossible for the rest of the world to ignore.

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