Salon.com > Prince

Prince is not a baby boomer

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of Generation X is real. It’s not a false grouping imposed from the top. We can argue about the name. Many in my generation hate the name and that’s fair; it’s not a great name, but we’re stuck with it. However, some of that hate is wrapped up in hating the presence of a name and the attempt to explain who we are in a pithy way, so no matter what name we had, it would be hated. Even if we had a different name, the touchstones would still be there, and that’s what shapes us. It’s indisputable that there’s a large group of Americans who are molded by the cultural, political, economic and sociological things that happened in the 1970s and 1980s and as the result of being the small, apathetic generation that followed a large, optimistic generation that attempted to revolutionize America. Denying that is futile. And Gen X Americans have lived within a negative political climate our whole lives, causing widespread alienation, disaffection and apathy. This, against a backdrop of events like the rise of a mysterious sexual plague and a powerful drug ruining society and harbingers of the end of American global dominance: All of that had the feel of the beginning of the end of days. So, it makes sense that the first Prince song to capture a giant audience and become his first monster hit was a song about apathy and apocalypse.

Sign o’ the times: The return of Lovesexy

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:56:00 +0000

It must have been an interesting meeting when a bunch of the biggest names in music got together and decided that springing surprise new tracks on the fans was going to be officially a thing this January. So far already this year, David Bowie has celebrated turning 66 with his first new single in almost a decade, and a promise of an album in March. Then, right around the time Destiny's Child came back after eight years to go "Nuclear," Justin Timberlake broke his six-year musical silence with a return to "that thing I love called MUSIC" -- and a record-breaking new single and a promise of an album. And now, His Royal Badness, Mr. Lovesexy, the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince has unleashed his latest single in a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere move.The new track, "Screwdriver," appeared after a mysterious Twitter account called 3^rd Eye Girl -- which happens to be the not-so-secret identity of Prince guitar player Donna Grantis -- posted a link to it Tuesday. Kapow!

Frank Ocean’s sexuality is beside the point

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:21:00 +0000

Nineteen-year-old Christopher Breaux fell hard for another straight-acting boy who wouldn’t love him back, confessing his love in a car parked in front of the girlfriend’s house. Like many a millennial, he took to Tumblr to share his feelings about a love he described, with portentous adolescent drama, as “malignant.” But the queerest song released so far by the artist now known at Frank Ocean hasn’t been an ode to boy-on-boy love and lust but a corrosive satire of “traditional” American marriage in the era of Kim Kardashian and Newt Gingrich. If hip-hop is the CNN of the ghetto, then “American Wedding” aims to be its TMZ as well, replete with celebrities and courtroom hijinks, muscle motors, and divorce settlements, with Ocean ruefully rubbernecking at all the car crashes en route to the good life.

“American Wedding” has attracted the proprietary attentions of paleo-rockers the Eagles, whose radio staple “Hotel California” the track is based on. But the real story here isn’t about the sampling wars. It’s about a scapegoat generation struggling to find a path through the crumbling infrastructure of the American dream.