"He was the first serious entertainer, in the sense of Hollywood, Vegas, and Broadway, in the age of spectacle."




A comment on one of these points out that none of these would be up if he were alive. He kept a tight control over everything.

I got in a twitter fight with Luc Sante over Prince and neoliberalism. He thought I was associating Prince with "the death of millions of people".  I ended up having to ask him if Sinatra was a Marxist. He deleted the tweets.

Prince was a sort of American genius, egotistical and isolate. He was a pop control freak like Kubrick and Cameron, but he was an instrumentalist. He was a mixture of seriousness and the theater of bullshit, of gospel and glam, musical sophistication and vaudeville. America is a strange country.
I used to describe David Murray as Prince without the commercial dreck attached. But what's dreck if it becomes a medium?