9 May 2:51pm
At the launch of Prince's tour - if you can call 21 gigs around London a tour - there was a lot of waffle about his general magnificence. The likes of Salma Hayek and Maceo Parker (unlikely bedfellows) testified to his genius through video footage, with Joni Mitchell calling Prince 'the most amazing performer I have ever witnessed'. Fair dos. But in among all this, there was a lot of talk about Prince's influence and someone from the BBC grabbed me for a soundbite about the singer's enduring legacy.
This left me stumped, and reminded me of a review in the New York Times of Everett True's new Nirvana biography.
In the review, Benjamin Kunkel confesses that he hasn't listened to the band much in recent years, and deftly deconstructs the impact that their frontman had on the wider culture. 'He was often very earnest, but never in the warm-hearted, frequently sentimental way of many of the bigger indie acts today,' Kunkel writes of Kurt Cobain. 'And when, still more often, he was sarcastic, he was viciously and pointedly so, rather than - in what seems the more widespread generational style - glibly and meaninglessly so.' None of which is necessarily to diminish Cobain's greatness of an artist.
I've always loved Prince and - she'll be pleased to learn - fully agree with Joni Mitchell. But has he been influential? Sure, there are elements of what he's about in the work of OutKast, but they could equally point to those same acts that influenced Prince, like Hendrix and James Brown. I'd rather argue that - certainly once you factor in the sexual politics and the baffling religious business- Prince is sui generis. In other words, it's actually very hard to trace his influence.
The question is, who else might qualify to join this list of major figures who - in the wider scheme of things - meant diddly squat?
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