Ways of Not Seeing + Prince Rogers Nelson + David Lee Roth
substack.sashafrerejones.com
This Ian Penman piece on Prince in the LRB—of the “hang a life’s thinking on two new books” genre—is enjoyable and bonkers and insanely wrong when it’s wrong. Parade is not better than Sign o’ The Times in any sensible reading. Sign is perfect because it shows that Prince can do anything and that Anything was his genre. The fruit salad overload of “Hot Thing” and “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man” and “Housequake” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” and “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”—Jesus, even writing the titles makes me dizzy. Penman thinks the album closing—“The Cross” followed by “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”—is a failure, but it’s an important segue. Prince was constantly at war with The Rock Canon and that sequencing was his reminder that the funk was going to win, and it did. Climactic guitar anthems are not necessarily important enough to be climaxes.
Ways of Not Seeing + Prince Rogers Nelson + David Lee Roth
Ways of Not Seeing + Prince Rogers Nelson …
Ways of Not Seeing + Prince Rogers Nelson + David Lee Roth
This Ian Penman piece on Prince in the LRB—of the “hang a life’s thinking on two new books” genre—is enjoyable and bonkers and insanely wrong when it’s wrong. Parade is not better than Sign o’ The Times in any sensible reading. Sign is perfect because it shows that Prince can do anything and that Anything was his genre. The fruit salad overload of “Hot Thing” and “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man” and “Housequake” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” and “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”—Jesus, even writing the titles makes me dizzy. Penman thinks the album closing—“The Cross” followed by “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”—is a failure, but it’s an important segue. Prince was constantly at war with The Rock Canon and that sequencing was his reminder that the funk was going to win, and it did. Climactic guitar anthems are not necessarily important enough to be climaxes.