Prince, Musician and Iconoclast, Has Died at Age 57: The Two-Way | Hacker News Reader

Prince, Musician and Iconoclast, Has Died at Age 57: The Two-Way

npr.org

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Purple Rain in the Saharan Desert: How a remake of Prince’s cult classic became the first-ever Tuareg-language fiction film

Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai

(“rain the color of blue with a little red in it”)

The alcoholic, wife-beating father character from Purple Rain is swapped for a pious Muslim who bans music in his household and burns Moctar’s guitar for the sake of his son’s soul (“only drug addicts and alcoholics play guitar,” the father declares). Instead of the protagonist ordering his lover to “purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka,” Moctar tries to woo his love interest by driving her into the middle of the desert and pretending that his motorcycle has run out of gas. And, instead of one-upping Morris Day in a showdown on First Avenue, the Tuareg six-stringer squares off against his real-life rival Kader Tanoutanoute at the Agadez branch of the Alliance Française, a French language and cultural center.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/pur...

For some reason these stories keep getting demoted from the frontpage :(

Good. This is very off topic stuff.

An extremely popular and innovative musician, media presence, and successful businessman whose success can be said to be boundary breaking in lots of ways and whose views on technology as it relates to the musical business has often been contentious, has died.

And it's off-topic for hacker news because?

Because prince has done nothing in the last 25 years; his best stuff is closer to the moon landings than to today, and because when people look back at the '80s they're not going to longer too long on his music.

Best description I ever read was "probably a reincarnation of one of Jimi Hendrix's pubic hairs".

You are uninformed.

Look up Musicology on Wikipedia. My company at the time supported Prince's webmaster in innovating an astonishingly ambitious online fan club UX, giving he and fans a direct dialog, that sold tickets through his own web site (not ticket master) for a package of interaction with him, digital downloads, intimate concert venues, and physical album, so innovative his approach garnered a lifetime "Webby" award in 2006.

Here's press from the beginning of NPG Music Club:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/business/mediatalk-prince-...

Yeah, I know about that but I'm not interested in businessmen unless they also make interesting music, and Prince only released a couple of songs I didn't dislike.

Also, he wasn't the first to do what you describe, and had a confused attitude to the internet, including the whole radiohead thing which revealed him to be something of an idiot.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/21/11480830/prince-obituary-l...

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/prince-death-music-streaming...

He published his first interactive CD-ROM in '94, so built electronic user experiences pretty early.

You betray your preferences with the second paragraph.

I haven't really followed him in the last 25 years but I have to assume, just on things I've read from people who are more musically accomplished than I am, that his best stuff might be more recent than that.

Also I've seen videos in the last day that are also highly convincing to me that he has done some good stuff more recently.

Finally I did not focus exclusively on his music in my comment as I think there is probably a lot of worth about Prince - as a businessman and as an innovator (production techniques etc.) - that might be good to have the hacker news community analyze.

case in point about stuff he did that had nothing to do with music that might be really relevant to Hacker News https://www.facebook.com/DJJayTre/videos/1019733794773492/ but some reason not front page material.

NYT material though:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/arts/music/prince-music...

There's usually a bunch of off topic stuff on the front page at any given moment.

What the hell is the matter with you?

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