The 8 Ball 01.16.12: The 8 Most Unnerving Prince Moments

Posted by Wyatt E. on 01.16.2012

From changing his name to a symbol and declaring the internet to be "over" to releasing his own diss song, his dealings with Kevin Smith and more, 411's Wyatt E. counts down the top 8 unnerving Prince moments of all time!

Wendy?

Yes, Lisa?

Is the water warm enough?

Yes, Lisa.

Shall we begin?

Yes, Lisa.

The 8 Ball

This Week's Topic: The 8 Most Unnerving Prince Moments.


And now the whole Janet Jackson thing doesn't seem so surprising, does it?

Let's see if I can not swear during this article.

Prince is a genius. Of this, there can be no dispute. The guy is (or at least was, for about a decade and a half or so) capable of tying together funk, rock, R&B and pop into an unbelievable, cohesive sound. He had a serious flair for playing guitar. He played all the instruments on his albums and produced them all himself as well. He was such a big player in the 1980s that some consider him the only real rival for Michael Jackson (again - in the 80s). Dude's a legend.



He's also insane. Nuts. Off his rocker. Loony. Mad as rabbits. Nutty as a fruitcake. Cuckoo. Round the twist. Has a screw loose. Not right in the head. Wacko. Loco. Bonkers. Daft. Kooky. Tweakin'. As George Carlin once put it: "The cheese fell off his cracker a long time ago."

Dirty Mind 1980 by samsarax

He is all those things, and I say that as a huge fan of his work. I mean, you'd have to be intelligent to come up with such high concepts and blend them with so much music, but you'd have to be right out of your mind to do it with the frequency and adeptness of Prince. Sometimes, though, as much fun as his music is, you occasionally come across moments that remind you full well that the Purple One isn't quite in touch with reality. This column is devoted to those moments, the ones that make you wonder how this guy could have spawned Purple Rain. And never forget: This guy wrote Purple Rain.

Please enjoy this article before Prince shuts this down too.

(By the way, fun fact - Justin Bieber's "One Time" has a sample from Prince's Dirty Mind album. As in, one of the smuttiest albums of all time. Does Justin even know about this?)



Honorable Mentions: The song "Sister."


"Incest is everything it's said to be."



8. The song "Temptation."

"I'm not just talkin' 'bout just ordinary temptation..... I'm talkin' 'bout the kind of temptation that-a make ya DO THAAAANGS...."

Oh, boy, "Temptation." As far as Prince's official albums were concerned, Around The World In A Day was probably among the first major signs that Prince's ambitions extended well beyond the realm of reality, and right into cartoonish fantasies and religious-themed melodrama. Actually, lemme be more specific - it was this song that said all of that. The song is exactly what the title implies.


You'll be dreaming of this guy tonight.

First off, not that I'm saying songs about lust have a high standard of lyrical eloquence anyway, but wow, the lyrics on this song are terrible. "Everybody on this earth has got a vice, and mine, little darlin', mine is the opposite of ice." What. It doesn't get much better from there, and it's also an early peak for Prince's over-the-top vocal delivery. Prince shrieks, moans, whimpers and annoys on this track, driving home his message with a sledgehammer when a few soft-spoken words would have done. At the climax is an instrumental section where Prince tries to hiss and mumble his way into some girl's panties, when suddenly, a low, distorted voice shows up, apparently as the voice of God, informing Prince that "U have 2 want her for the right reasons" (yeah, uh, God uses Prince's spelling, it's weird). Prince's response? "NO!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! AAAAAAUUUUUUUUUGGGHHH!!!" By the end, I'm sure even God-fearers are wondering what just happened.

"Oh, darling, I can almost taste the wetness between your..."



7. "Bob George."

From The Black Album, the single most bootlegged album of all time (outside of maybe the sessions from the Beach Boys' Smile). For those not in the loop: Prince had grown from an underground rhythm-and-blues/funk audience to a mainstream, predominately white audience, and this obviously was back when people cared about that sort of thing, for some reason. So during the late-80s, Sign O The Times era, Prince decided to work on something filled with hard-driven funk and R&B, and the result was infused with some of the darkest humor Prince had unleashed on record.



Prince had long used tape speed to alter his voice and create different characters. One of which was Bob George, the jealous, woman-beating, gun-toting maniac who suspects his girl of sleeping around with Prince, amongst other guys. Over the course of his eponymous track, the spare, uncomfortably one-note funk gives way to a spoken-word satire of male chauvinism, taken to mentally disturbed extremes. Sirens are heard by the end, and it's made pretty clear by the end why the increasingly religious Prince wanted the album shelved. Interestingly, it was finally released in 1994, seven years after its original recording, as a way of getting out of his Warner Brothers contract.



6. The cover of Lovesexy.

Uh... hmm.



Hey. Remember Tommy Wiseau's nude scene in The Room? Remember how obnoxious that was? Yeah.



5. The Kevin Smith story.

This really needs to be seen in full to be truly appreciated.



Kevin narrowly avoided getting any legal action for this one, and it serves as one of the nuttiest stories about a musician ever told. Wow. This story would be passed down through fans of both camps for years afterward, as not only an example of what a great storyteller Smith is, but it shines a spotlight on Prince's own self-absorption. Man, if all of that is true, Kevin has the patience of a saint.



4. Crystal Ball.

Prince screwed up big time here. First of all, Crystal Ball was originally the title of a triple album Prince would've released in 1987, but was pared down to a double album (fans know this album as Sign O The Times, which is highly recommended). So Prince revived the title for something fans had been waiting on for years: a collection of unreleased recordings from the "vault." That's a big word with Prince fans. Not only has Prince recorded hundred if not thousands of songs, but he's kept a good amount of them locked up somewhere in Paisley Park. You have to love those artists that let little details like that slip, as if they have a secret weapon hidden somewhere that'll rock everyone's socks off. Free from his Warner Brothers contract, Prince decided to unleash those secret weapons on his own label, to be released in a casing shaped like an actual crystal ball.



Well, let's see how that turned out, shall we? This was an idea slated for late 1996. Well, fans who made a pre-order on the internet didn't get their copies in the mail (which was to include a t-shirt and a bonus, acoustic record titled The Truth) until over a year later. The "crystal ball" was... well, do a Google Image search and you'll see how pathetic the resulting packaging looked. But the ultimate slap in the face was that the album, after it was supposed to be a limited, internet release, showed up in stores, for ten dollars less than the internet order would've been. Prince tried to add a disc of new age music to the preorders, but the damage was done. To say fans were irked would be like saying Lady Gaga's meat dress raised a few eyebrows. And I gotta be honest with you: most of the set isn't even all that great, in terms of quality.



3. "The internet is over."

"The Internet's completely over. I don't see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won't pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can't get it..... I really believe in finding new ways to distribute my music..... The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers, and that can't be good for you."

Prince, I love you, man, but..... you're wrong. I mean, I understand as to why some musicians would get a little irked at pirating and all - Gene Simmons in particular has thrown some hissyfits of the first order on the subject - but Prince undoubtedly took that attitude to new heights by decrying the entire internet. That's like finding out a girl in Penthouse has been airbrushed, so you stop checking out girls for the rest of your life. It's an overreaction that was just one more story that made fans wonder exactly what kind of man they've given so many years of devotion to.

This was just after the Purple One decided, in a misguided effort to better protect his copyrights, to try giving his music away with newspapers in Britain. This is a strange method of wide distribution to put so much effort into, and of course it failed miserably at its goal. Why is all this a particular sore spot with yours truly? It's not just the sheer lack of perspective being shown by a former innovator who was once on the cutting edge of this sort of thing. It's the fact that his methods are dangerously diminishing his legacy. If he takes his music away from so many now-common sources like Youtube and that Spotify thinger that us Canadians can't use (yeah, still grumpy about it), then how is a new generation going to fully appreciate the man's legacy? There'd certainly be no Usher, amongst other artists, without Prince.

(Note: judging by the embedded videos in this article, you can rest easy knowing there's SOME good Prince stuff up now.)

But hey, opinions change over time, so maybe he might.....

NEWS: Prince Won't Record New Music Until Internet Piracy Is Under Control





2. "PFUnk."

Prince fans don't take all this stuff lying down; they fight back. They get Dragon Ball Z levels of mad and unleash a Final Flash of justice. So fans got together in 2007, after having enough of Prince's litigious practices of having any trace of his music and likeness removed from websites. Prince Fans United (PFU) was formed by various fans who claimed Prince was doing this to avoid facing criticism, which is such a Vince McMahon-like move. It's only natural that a fanbase this devoted would take a stand. So how did Prince respond?



A diss track. "PFUnk" also known as "F.U.N.K." is a hell of a pop/funk number, displaying that he's one of the few men in music nowadays keeping traditional funk stylings alive. It's the lyrics that make this frustrating. They're a muddled, directionless mess, sung in his sped-up "Camille" voice seeing him undermine the real concerns of fans ("ho, hum, listen to that drum"), call them "big fat punks" and generally being a total egomaniac throughout much of the song's seven-minute running time. It's incredibly condescending, and awesomely funky. Seriously, even PFU liked the music itself. There's surely some irony lying somewhere in the fact that Prince attempting to shut them up wound up wildly entertaining them.


1.

You weren't expecting any other choice, were you? I mean, this really was an unprecedented move. Not because it was a clever innovation in self-marketing, but because changing your name to an unpronounceable symbol is likely the stupidest idea in all of 1990s popular music outside of Hammer pants and LFO. And the dude actually stuck this one out. For most of the 1990s, there was no real way of saying his name. The press had to come up with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, much to his chagrin. For once, I'm with the press. What are you supposed to call the guy?



This confusing idea was born out of Warner Brothers.... well, as Prince says it: "Prince is the name that my mother gave me at birth. Warner Bros. took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music that I wrote. The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros... I was born Prince and did not want to adopt another conventional name. The only acceptable replacement for my name, and my identity, was the Love Symbol, a symbol with no pronunciation, that is a representation of me and what my music is about. This symbol is present in my work over the years; it is a concept that has evolved from my frustration; it is who I am. It is my name."

This just reeks of going out of your way to retain one's mystique. It's roughly on par with Jim Hellwig legally changing his name to Warrior so he could continue being the Ultimate Warrior in public. Why is this number one? Simple: this changing of the name was perhaps the biggest sign to the record-buying public that the once unstoppable force in pop had become so wrapped up in his own weird, self-contained universe that he'd begun to lose touch with the real world. I mean, you know that guy in the news a little while ago named Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-bop-bop? Would you buy an album he put out? Hell yeah, I would. But he doesn't exactly sound like a guy you'd borrow a cup of sugar from. Somehow it kinda distances yourself, personally. Knowwhutimean?



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Thanks for reading. Well, I'll see you guys later.