Sad news, RIP.
This is really sad. I once heard on a radio show in the 90s that compared Prince to Mozart. They said that just like Mozart, he had an obsessive need to keep producing more music. They said that this meant that he already had so much music written down that he could release a new album every year for the next dozen or more years.
I don’t know how true that was, or if he really had a backlog of unreleased material or not. I never did any verification. But that was a American Top 40-type show that I heard that on. Does anyone here know if that was true? And does he still have a backlog of unreleased material?
Oh no, terrible news!
RIP.
IIRC, there was a whole thing on This American Life where they interviewed people who had worked on several of his unreleased albums. He’d apparently been working hard on albums for years with no plan to release them.
EDIT: not finding the TAL, but there’s a whole wikipedia entrydedicated to his ~50 unreleased projects.
This is what it’s like when the doves cry. It’s gonna be hard to listen to the Purple Rain soundtrack now.
Awful - What a great man, and what great music he produced. His was the second album I ever bought, and still have.
I’m sure it will all find it’s way into print eventually. The heirs usually aren’t as precious about releasing stuff as the artist.
Holy crap how awful. Prince was definitely a formative artist for me - early on he was kind of like the musical equivalent of thumbing through Playboy except, you know, the music was amazing. And he kept getting better and more interesting as time went on. I’m not a judge of genius but I’d have to say he must be in the running for such a title. I will miss him, and will put his albums on constant loop for, I don’t know, as long as it takes.
At the rate we’re going, there’ll soon be more musicians from the 60’s still alive than from the 80’s.
Ugh. I really wish Prince hadn’t just died!
This is sad sad sad.
The guy was a genius. I know he was flaky and his earlier work is what most people like but I still think he was a genius.
Oh man. Summer of '84, living in a college town away from home for the first time and seeing Purple Rain and, yeah it wasn’t a classic movie, but the music blew me away. I’ll always have a place in my musical heart for him.
I’m a mostly unapologetic music geek. So…it’s natural to have a little era-envy. It’d be so cool to have been in NYC for the rise of bebop jazz. Or to be a teenager for the British Invasion, or Motown, or Stax-Volt. It would have been so cool to be in California in the late 1960s for The Byrds, Janis, Jimi, and Love. I was too young for Punk in the 1970s, too.
But fuck all that.
I got to be a teenager and young adult in the era of Prince. Those other eras can envy me for a while.
Was never really a fan besides his hits. RIP though.
1999 and Purple Rain were two of the unalloyed joys of my adolescence. And then he got interesting.
Shocked and sad. Such a powerful, confounding figure, to just go like that…
odd, but it’s the first celebrity death I can remember that instantly brought real tears to my eyes instead of generic sorrow at the loss of a life.
This didn’t really hit me. I like Prince. Purple Rain, in particular, was more or less the soundtrack for a very good part of my life. But “middle-aged man dies of natural causes” has limited shock value.
I queued up “Let’s Go Crazy,” my favorite Prince song. I didn’t even get through the opening note before starting to choke up.
Fuck.
He unquestionably was. I was always half a step out of phase with his music, which wasn’t my thing (other than the hits; I was tweens and transitioning from heavy metal to new wave in the early 80’s) but listen to any interview and it was plainly obvious Prince himself was an artist in the truest sense of the word, one who demanded appreciation and respect. His skill extended to every facet of music: Writing, production, and performance, and he made a number of others stars along the way. May he RIP, and my condolences also go out to those here whose lives were touched by his presence and his passing.
Beat me to it. I probably like around only 20% of Prince’s catalog, but he was pretty damn talented. And 57 is too young.
Wow. Not quite the gut-punch of hearing about Kurt Cobain, but pretty damn close. One of my favorite musicians of all time and definitely the one I have seen live the most. I was lucky enough to catch four of the 21 consecutive shows he did in LA a few years ago. He was totally at peace with his fame and played his hits with enthusiasm in shared joy with the audience. Sad to think about that never happening again.