As part of our newly updated survey of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, we’re publishing a series of pieces on the making and impact of key records from the list. Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain came in at number eight. The following piece was originally published in 2016, following Prince’s death.
It didn’t make any sense. He was a young artist with just a couple of pop hits and not much mainstream recognition beyond the kids who watched MTV, which was only two years old.
It didn’t make any sense. He was a young artist with just a couple of pop hits and not much mainstream recognition beyond the kids who watched MTV, which was only two years old.
- 9/29/2020
- by Alan Light
- Rollingstone.com
Graham Nash has plenty of experience with the vagaries of rock & roll documentaries. Take Woodstock, for one: "There were three days of really good music and the movie was three hours," he says, "so there are a lot of great performances that have never been seen apart from bootlegs." No one knows that more than Nash, since Neil Young refused to be filmed during Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's career-making set at the festival. In the film, you'll hear an announcer say, "Crosby, Stills, Nash" – but no Young. "Neil threatened to deck anybody who filmed him,...
- 6/28/2016
- Rollingstone.com
When the news broke that Madonna was slated to honor Prince at the 2016 Billboard awards, the reaction was … mixed. For example, someone started a Change.org petition decrying the choice, and news of the outcry apparently reached Billboard executive producer Mark Bracco, who defended the decision to have Madonna perform on Tuesday to the Associated Press. Madonna and Prince had something of a tangled relationship, to put it mildly: Consensus seems to be that they dated in the mid-'80s. They collaborated in 1989 for "Love Song," from Madonna's album Like a Prayer. At some point, their relationship soured, to...
- 5/20/2016
- by Alex Heigl, @alex_heigl
- PEOPLE.com
For a while, it looked like D'Angelo was going to become R&B's Axl Rose. The parallels are easy to spot: Both individuals are massively talented perfectionists whose personal struggles threatened to drown long-awaited follow-ups to early successes. In Rose's case, that would be Chinese Democracy, a Guns N' Roses album so delayed it became a running joke ("We'll have democracy in China before we have Chinese Democracy," for example), and for D'Angelo, it was the follow-up to 2000's Voodoo, which was eventually released in Dec. 2014 as Black Messiah. On Monday, Black Messiah quickly earned two Grammy Awards - Best...
- 2/15/2016
- by Alex Heigl, @alex_heigl
- PEOPLE.com
While James Brown fans already got the opportunity to see Chadwick Boseman as the Godfather of Soul in this summer's Get on Up, Alex Gibney (Finding Fela, Taxi to the Dark Side) tackled the real thing in HBO's Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, a new documentary on the singer that premiered Monday night.
More hagiography than warts-and-all bio — the film omits Brown's arrests on weapons charges and only mentions one instance of many domestic abuse allegations in passing — the Mick Jagger-produced film still enlists many of Brown's former musicians,...
More hagiography than warts-and-all bio — the film omits Brown's arrests on weapons charges and only mentions one instance of many domestic abuse allegations in passing — the Mick Jagger-produced film still enlists many of Brown's former musicians,...
- 10/28/2014
- Rollingstone.com
Prince is notoriously tight with press access, disallowing interviewers from recording or even taking notes. Full-scale biographies of him have typically relied on the same bunch of stories and quotes found in a couple of places—usually, Per Nilsen’s definitive ’80s sessionography, Dance, Music, Sex, Romance, for which Nilsen spoke with a large number of old bandmates and associates. Ronin Ro’s Prince: Inside The Music And The Masks features a handful of new quotes from some of the same folks (Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin, former tour manager Alan Leeds), but is otherwise little different from any number of ...
- 12/7/2011
- avclub.com
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