![]() But for two-and-a-half hours that night, he made us pop believers.Īhmad Coo is a producer and copy editor for the Global Business America show on CCTV America. We didn’t know it would be one of the last few stadium shows he’d ever play. And all of us shook our booties, swooned, cried, sang our hearts out to one of the biggest sing-alongs we’ve ever been to. There were teenagers, middle aged fogeys like me, and what seemed to be octogenarians. The makeup of the sold out show’s audience just highlighted how wide his appeal is. The last time I saw him live was in 2011, at a show at the Oakland Coliseum. This was also when I learned that he was a genuine ax-man. He had the whole stadium, about 10,000 of us, spell bound. His shows are some of the best I’ve ever seen. I first saw him in the mid to late 90s when he unfortunately became “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” This was the time he dropped his nom de guerre and went by an unpronounceable symbol (even the greatest ones slip every once in awhile).įor me, it cemented his reputation as one of the greatest musicians of all time. One of my literary heroes, Jonathan Lethem, wrote about Prince’s pop sensibilities at length in “Motherless Brooklyn.”īut it was ultimately his live performances that made me the rabid fan that I am. Bret Easton Ellis made his protagonist/sociopath Patrick Bateman debate the merits of Prince and his influence on music. I’ve always been an avid reader and I can’t count the times Prince was written about in some pretty prominent pieces of fiction. His influence extended beyond music and continues to permeate the Western cultural landscape. Another song from it that I still listen to regularly is “ Forever in My Life,” in my opinion, probably the most tender of his ballads. The title track with the same name dealt with drug addiction, racism, and the difficulties of growing up in today’s world. In “Sign O’ the Times” he rocked, he partied, he danced, he loved, he got off, he was even socially conscious. Nobody saw this one coming: arguably the greatest live performer of his generation, freewheeling inside the Rio for a few months in late 2006 and early 2007. I’d be hard pressed to find a recording in that era that’s just as influential. It was a rock and roll album, a jazz and blues masterpiece, a perfect set of pop recordings, etc. However, that album proved he transcended any kind of genre and explained why I thought I’ve never seen or heard anything like him. Yes, there were artists that helped define pop music. But it was his 1987 album “Sign O’ the Times” that changed everything for me.
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