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The Artist you better not call Prince | page 1, 2, 3
Perhaps it was a reaction to the name change, perhaps not, but Warner Bros. pulled the plug on Paisley Park, saying Prince's -- whoops, the Artist's -- side projects weren't profitable enough. A tug of war ensued. The Artist, growing ever more prolific, wanted to get his music out faster. Warner Bros. said no, the fans can't handle more than one album a year. The Artist scoffs at this attitude. "I used to ride my bike to the record store and I bought every single James Brown put out," he told Addicted to Noise. "He'd have a new single every three months. No one said James Brown was too prolific. I wasn't mad if James Brown put out 'Lickin' Stick.'" For his part, the Artist convinced the label to let him release a single independently. "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" ended up at No. 3. "I wrote that song the day after some suit at Warners told me I no longer 'had it,'" the Artist years later told the Netherlands publication Nieuwe Revu. The conflict roiled further when Warners wouldn't release "The Gold Experience" on the Artist's timetable. He started showing up in public with "slave" written on his cheek. "It was the worst period of my life," he told the British newspaper the Sun. "I was being made physically ill by what was going on." Soon enough, though, thanks to some powerhouse legal help, the Artist wriggled free of his contract. The deal was, Warner Bros. would release two records of material already in the can. The first, "Chaos and Disorder," came out in early '96; the second, "The Vault -- Old Friends 4 Sale," recently hit the stores. So now the Artist was free, beholden to no corporation. And he promised something truly audacious: a self-financed three-hour-long 36-song triple CD of mostly original material. It was called "Emancipation," and it fulfilled his promise beyond anyone's wildest expectations, selling more than 2 million copies. All the Artist's standard themes were accounted for: dance, music, sex, romance -- plus dreams, marriage, procreation, e-mailing, race, slavery -- and all of it seemed galvanized by liberation and matrimonial love. He dipped into the bottomless well of inspiration that has always been available to him, but this time he focused, creating arrangements neatly tailored to each song's profile. "Emancipation" was the Artist's '90s "Sign 'O' the Times," and as on the earlier landmark, he did it all by himself. How can one man come up with so much music? The Artist addressed the question in one of his hometown newspapers when Emancipation came out: "I am music. I feel music. When I walk around, I hear brand new things. You're almost cursed. You're not even its maker, you're just there to bring it forth. You know, Can't I go to sleep? No. You can't. But, OK, now you can. And you go to sleep, and you don't hear it, and then you're lonely. No one wants to be on Earth alone." The Artist had promised his fans product, and there was still more to come. In a novel marketing concept, he announced that he would make available a five-CD set of "previously bootlegged" and unreleased material by mail order only through his Web site or by calling (800) NEW-FUNK -- once 80,000 pre-orders came in. Unfortunately, he proved less than adept as a businessman, and this sales pitch ended up buying him a whole lot of disgruntled fans. The Internet chat venues became wailing walls for people who paid for "Crystal Ball" but never received it, or only received three of the promised five CDs, or who called the phone number to get information about their order only to be told there wasn't any. Anyone who successfully acquired the set, though, couldn't really complain: It had enough deep grooves, crucial jams and sheer fun to keep a fan occupied for years. One of the discs, "The Truth," featured the Artist alone on acoustic guitar, playing funky folk and pulling it off with total conviction. It's a treasure. But no sooner had the Artist ironed out the glitches in his retail arm than he picked up another bargeful of bad will last February by threatening to sue any Web sites that A) sold Prince bootlegs, B) used images of him and C) used the supposedly copyrighted symbol that stood for his name. No one could argue with point A: Bootlegs are illegal, period, and the Artist is one of the most heavily bootlegged musicians in the world. On point B, the Artist may have had legal standing, but he was flying in the face of Internet tradition. There are thousands of Web sites devoted to celebrities, they all use photographs and 99 percent of the time the celebrities accept the sites as free publicity. On point C, though, the Artist was just plain whack. As many of the lawsuit-threatened fans screamed to the high heavens, the Artist had given them the glyph and urged them to use it. In fact, discussing his name change with the Knight-Ridder news service in '97 he said, "A computer font of my name is available for those who wish to respect my choice." It's unclear how Prince thought he could make a legal claim to a symbol he'd distributed for use with no apparent restrictions. Indeed, when he tried to sue the fanzine and Web site Uptown, a highly respected 8-year-old English-language publication from Sweden dedicated to his works, Uptown countersued, claiming, among other things, that the Artist was attempting to stifle free speech. On July 29, the parties settled, Uptown agreeing to only one demand: that it no longer publish discographies of Prince bootlegs. It would still be permitted to use the glyph, not that it has any intention of doing so: "We used the Symbol as a sign of respect, at Prince's request, but then Prince sued us for using it," said one of Uptown's editors in a press release. Most likely, if you tallied the number of people offended by the Artist through his Internet adventures it would constitute a minuscule percentage of his fan base. But in the electronic age, bad news spreads fast, and bad will lingers. The Artist may not care that he's no longer a pop-culture darling, but he needs to care about his fans. What the fans have to look forward to is the Artist's first album of brand-new material in over a year: "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic," due in November. Their appetite has been whet by the bluesy, jazzy "Vault," which, while pretending to be nothing more than an outtake package, still has the master's dance-inducing touch on three or four of the cuts. The Artist's hype for the forthcoming "Rave" has been typically eccentric. At first he said the disc would be produced by an outsider, "someone the Artist worked with extensively in the '80s." Well, that would be a first. But now the producer has been revealed, and it will be ... Prince! Not "the Artist," mind you, but the good old-fashioned name his mommy and daddy gave him. Ach, it's all so confusing. What the Artist needs to do now is let the music do the talking. As he said in "Housequake" many years ago: "Shut up already, damn!"
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