Prince: The Man and His Music
By Matt Thorne
3/5
()
About this ebook
The newest, most updated book on Prince available today—now updated with information about the afterlife of his work following his untimely death.
Famously reticent and perennially controversial, Prince was one of the few music superstars who remained, largely, an enigma—even up to his premature death on April 21, 2016. A fixture of the pop canon, Prince is widely held to be the greatest musician of his generation and will undoubtedly remain an inspiring and singular talent.
This revised and updated second edition of this meticulously researched biography is the most comprehensive work on Prince yet published. Unlike other Prince books, this one eschews speculation into the artist's highly guarded private life and instead focuses deep and sustained attention exactly where it should be: on his work. Acclaimed British novelist and critic Matt Thorne draws on years of research and dozens of interviews with Prince's intimate associates (many of whom have never spoken on record before) to examine every phase of the musician's 35-year career, including nearly every song—released and unreleased—that Prince has recorded. Originally released in the UK in 2012, this revised and updated second US edition of Prince includes updated content regarding work released and made available after the artist’s death..
This astonishingly rich, almost encyclopedic biography is a must-have for any serious fan of Prince.
Matt Thorne
<p><b>Matt Thorne</b> (Bristol, 1974) es un novelista británico. Autor de seis novelas, entre ellas, <i>Eight Minutes Idle</i> y <i>Cherry</i>, esta última nominada al Man Booker Prize, colabora con los principales periódicos nacionales ingleses donde publica reseñas literarias y cinematográficas. Es, además, profesor de escritura creativa en Brunel University (Londres)</p>
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Reviews for Prince
12 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Matt Thorne's Prince bio is a very personal account. Which is inevitable in a music book: what one person sees as a masterpiece, another dismisses as trite. And for a while the book does manage to find a balance between facts and opinion, even though the tale he tells is vastly uneven, often going deep into flimsy material while almost skipping over Prince's career highlights.
It's understandable that he rushes through the 1980s, since that period is covered in numerous other books (most importantly Per Nilsen's unsurpassed "Dance Music Sex Romance -- Prince: The First Decade"). But after completing the book I felt that he had an ulterior motive: propping up Prince's vastly inferior output from the second half of the 1990s and onwards. It doesn't help that numerous pages deal with an in-depth account of every concert and aftershow of Prince's "21 Nights" run in London.
Thorne has interviewed many of the "usual suspects", the dozen or so former band members and other associates who have told their side of the story plenty of times in the past two decades or so. It is disappointing that after all this time so many of the other friends/employees still remain unwilling to open up.
The only real surprising eye witness is Hans-Martin Buff, an engineer who worked with Prince during the 1990s. He provides insight into a period that so far has remained somewhat under-reported, but Thorne is too eager to extrapolate Buff's testimony to the whole of Prince's career, when it should be clear that Prince's working habits have shifted somewhat.
There are some jarring theories in the book. Thorne seems eager to dismiss the tracklists of unreleased projects as merely snapshots, when his is already clear to any Prince-fan who cares to use his head: if there are half a dozen known tracklists for a single project, it stands to reason that perhaps we should not regard these as set in stone.
The book also wildly hops throughout time, and fails to tell a linear and consistent story. One moment you're reading about a late-1990s Prince album, and the next Thorne is discussing Carmen Electra's album from years earlier. I can understand the urge to group side projects into separate chapters, but in the end it just doesn't work.
In the end, Thorne is too much of a fan. It is telling that he dismisses Kevin Smith's legendary tale of his weeklong documentary filming at Paisley Park, while this account is absolutely consistent with numerous other stories about Prince (which also remain unmentioned in the book). It is far from a must-read, and the best thing that can happen to it is if someone enters Buff's information into the Princevault website and this book is mentioned in a footnote as the source. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5From his cover bio it seems that Mr Thorne is a novelist, not a musician or music journalist. That may explain the curious approach he takes to his subject, which is to focus not on Prince's ground breaking and peerless music, but rather on his, err lyrics. Which unsurprisingly turn out to be largely about one subject only. If you are looking for stimulating discussion of Prince's uniquely virtuosic guitar playing or the revolutionary arrangements you will find on his classic albums, you will look in vain. If you want to find out how many tiresome variations one man can come up with in singing about the theme of sex, this is the book for you.