Switched on Pop - Why U Love 2 Listen 2 Prince (with Anil Dash)
Episode Date: October 22, 2019Anil Dash is obsessed with Prince. Since he’s the host of the tech podcast Function, he has a unique perspective on the Purple One’s complicated relationship with technology. Anil joins the show t...o break down the many ways that Prince predicted the sound and science of modern pop, from drum machines to online distribution to internet culture. We’ll discuss how Michael Jackson jacked Prince’s electronic experimentation for Thriller, why Prince liked to lurk in fan chat rooms, and how he found ways to change his sound without ever sacrificing his integrity. We’re only beginning to understand Prince’s legacy, but Anil takes us one step closer to fully appreciating the ahead-of-their-time talents of a once-in-a-century artist. Songs featured: Prince - 1999 Kraftwerk - The Robots Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message The Human League - Don’t You Want Me Baby Prince - Little Red Corvette Michael Jackson - Thriller Santana ft. Rob Thomas - Smooth Prince ft. Eve - Hot Wit U Prince ft. Ani Difranco - Eye Love U, But Eye Don’t Trust U Anymore Prince - How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore Prince - Black Sweat Prince - THIS COULD BE US Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Welcome to Switched On Pop.
I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.
As you may know, my co-host Charlie Harding is off on parental leave, which means we get
to have an all-star rotation of guest hosts, and today is no exception.
I'm so excited to be joined by the host of Function, a show about the way technology influences
culture. This person is also a major Prince fan. Anil Dash, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for
having me. We are really excited to have you here because function, your show about technology and
culture, is doing an episode about Prince's complicated relationship with technology. I want to get there,
but first, I want to ask you a question. Why Prince? I mean, I feel like if you like music,
You know the answer, right?
If you have ever had, that's somebody you made a mixtape for.
Are you ever wanted to drive with the car at the windows down?
Like, I don't, you know why Prince?
I do.
I do.
It's like, if you've ever been like, for five minutes, I feel sexy, that's why Prince.
But, you know, the other part is if you're a music nerd, no matter how deep you want to go,
who's somebody that's a virtuoso guitarist, who's somebody that's incredible on the keys,
who somebody is an unbelievably good producer, who's top 10 all-time rhythm guitar.
Yeah, right? Yeah. And every single one of these categories, he's on the list. And so you can't find
Elaine either you're going to love him or you're going to love somebody who is directly influenced by him.
I love that. Let's cast back now. Let's take an example. Maybe we want to start with an album
that captures so many ahead of their time kind of tech ambivalences that you're talking about.
But this would be Prince's album 1999, which was released in 1982.
I mean, the year thing gets confusing there, but what he was clearly saying is this is the future.
So first of all, you know, if you're a more casual fan, you probably know the title song, 1999.
And you hear it played at a wedding reception or whatever it is.
1982 in the world is height of Reagan America.
It is the year that Time magazine said the person of the year is the personal computer.
Wow.
So that's this moment.
Like the IBMPC had just come out.
People were like, oh, it's going to be a computer in your house.
That's kind of wild.
So there's this moment going on.
And the things that a lot of people are listening to, including Prince, that were sort of evolving the sound of the time, where craft work was talking heads.
Very, very early hip hop.
An even new wave.
So many different sort of approaches to.
Yeah. Technology and production are all happening at this moment. And then Prince in his own career,
what's not obvious, this is the record where he sort of breaks big into pop. The other second
biggest hit on the record was Little Red Corvette and he becomes a mainstream pop star,
really on the strength of Little Red Corvette taking off on MTV. Yet, this is five albums into
his career. Like, we can't conceive of that in the modern world where people drop a single and
disappear forever. He's five records into his career before he has an inarguable pop hit.
with a red corvette.
It's a slow burn.
Oh, for sure.
For sure.
But, of course, with Prince, five albums is five years.
Like, he was just, you know, always cranking stuff out.
So he puts out this massive double album, 1999, and this is back in the days of vinyl.
So it's like two records, and it unfolds, and it's got, you know, great artwork and photos and all that stuff.
And the sound of it is like basically nothing anybody had ever heard.
And if you've ever listened to the beginning of 1999 and that drum machine right at the top.
Part of the reason why that was so striking, and then the synths that come in are so dramatic is nothing on radio sounded like that.
Nothing around sounded like that.
These were brand new sounds from brand new machines, brand new instruments.
I love listening to this record, not with my modern 2019 ears, but with a pair of 1982 years.
hearing this song about technology, about the future, and trying to put myself in the place of
someone who, like you said, has never heard some of these sounds before. So not only is it a song
about the future, it is the sound of the future. Yeah, exactly that. And I think that was so striking
because, you know, I'm going to nerd out here a little bit. I'm a tech guy and I love to hear them.
Finally, yes, yes. This is a safe space for nerding out. I'm going to go there. So there's a guy
named Roger Lynn, who's one of the most important inventors of drum machines in history. And
later he'd work on the MPC, which everybody used in sampling for like every song in hip hop.
But this is the moment where he is, like he's having his prince moment. Like I'm a genius and I
can only think of, you know, brilliant things. And he comes up with his first drum machine,
which was called the Lynn Machine one, LM1. You know, there's a lot of history of drum machines.
The short version of this is it is the first one to use a digital sample of the sound. And what that
means is before that you were using basically tape loops that were triggered by a machine.
But this one is like it's recorded onto a computer chip. And, you know, just from tech standpoint,
that's kind of cool. What it means for a musician is you could manipulate the sounds in the machine.
You can make them sound different. Ironically, like Roger Lynn, and I talked to him a little bit about
this, his goal was, you know, the most faithful sound. It's going to sound like the realist of real drums.
Nobody's ever done this kind of high fidelity. It looks.
the same thing they told when the CD came out, right?
Like, this is perfect digital reproduction, right?
Right, right.
And what Prince does is he's like, screw all that.
I'm going to turn the knobs way past where Roger Lynn says I'm supposed to put them,
which is the same thing as autotune where you, like, you turn the knob further than you're supposed to turn it.
And it starts to sound synthetic.
What happens is you turn a digital knob past where the creator thought you were going to put it,
and you get these otherworldly, very electronic, very digital.
sounds. And when you start
1999, the record, the song
and he'd that, it doesn't sound like drums.
It doesn't sound like it's from Earth. It sounds like it's from the future.
And it was literally Prince as a computer programmer,
being an early adopter of a new hardware device, like he got the new
iPhone, but it was this new Lynn drum machine.
And honestly, I don't know for sure. And I hope to go to
the one tour at Paisley Park at his studio where they are going to show the drums.
I think you actually had to do it with a screwdriver.
So he might have really been back there in his home studio with this drum machine,
tweaking these knobs past what they were supposed to do.
And you get this sound that nobody had ever had before.
And that to me is like the most sort of definitive encapsulation of what Prince was about,
which is like, and he said this later.
He's like, I use drum machines because then I don't have to call my drummer to show up at
three in the morning when I'm recording and get them away, you know, of doing this thing.
So he's like, you could hear the sound in his head, he could capture it there really quickly, he could automate it to be able to do what he needed to do, and he'd like that it sounded different. He'd like that it sounded like, you know, whoever he was listening to, whether that was, you know, craftwork or Gary Newman or whatever, that it sounded a little bit like the future. And then that theme just kind of replicated. So you had that happen to drum machines. He had a early Oberheim synthesizer that he was doing. And then he builds this entire record where, you know, these songs are seven and eight.
minutes long on the 1999 album. And he's really sort of saying, like, how can I stretch? How can I go past
the boundaries of the songs I made before, the audience that I had before? He was making very
intentional play at the mainstream, at pop crossover, at white rock crossover. What's extraordinary,
I think the one sort of example that epitomizes the impact there is, so 1999, the album
comes out in 1982. And through the summer, it's like, it's got hits. And,
You got the record starts to climb, especially, you know, initially on the black charts.
But it leaves an impression.
And amongst the people who heard it in September of 82 are Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson,
who are at that time finalizing recording on Thriller.
Right?
Thrillic comes out in December of 82.
Yeah.
And there's a moment that's actually been well documented where Michael Jackson is like,
this record is trash, we're going to throw it all out, we've got to mix it all again.
And there are these early mixes of Billy Gene and all these records.
because you can hear where they're like,
we're doing it all over, right?
And you're like, how, I mean, this is, you know,
the biggest album of all time.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
And Quincy Jones has said,
they heard 1999.
They heard the song.
And they heard the wall of synths at the beginning.
And Michael, he doesn't say it this way.
It was like, Michael has a fit.
And it's like, we've got to be bigger than that.
We've got to be louder than that.
That competitive urge kind of comes out.
And the clearest example,
of that to me is the song Thriller, which Rod Temperton wrote. There's a demo of it. You can find it on YouTube
that was called Starlight. It's very like soft rock. I mean, Rod Temperton wrote amazing songs, but it's
pretty chill. And in that last set of sessions, they turned Starlight into the song Thriller, the title track.
And in doing so, two things are added to it. One is the Lind Drum, Drum Machine track. So the drums on
Thriller, you listen to them, you can hear them sounding like exactly like the production on 1999.
Same drum machine, same sound, same tunings for those different drum sounds.
And then what's the first thing you hear on Thriller when it starts?
A gigantic wall of synths.
You listen to the voicings on the chords.
You listen to the timbre of that synth, and it is the same Oberheim synth.
And this is just straight up, Michael Jackson being like anything you can do.
do, I can do bigger.
Like, this is straight up a response.
And once you hear that, you can't unhear it.
All of a sudden, you're like, oh, this is a pastiche of 1999.
And that sense of that interplay, that back and forth, I just think is like the definitive
example of like what Prince had done alone by himself in his home studio with this ugly,
and the, to you know, the Lindrum is a black box with wood panel sides.
This is what was hot back then.
So you had a wooden computer.
So, you know, this one guy geeking out in the middle of the night with a wood paneled computer in his home studio in his basement.
And a year later, the guy that's building the most popular album that anybody's ever going to hear is like, we got to beat that.
Anil, that was one of the most epic nerd outs I've ever.
I'm like, we're just getting started.
Yeah, I'm doing a slow clap right now.
That was so much fun.
Your story about the song itself, 1999, makes me think about something that is so unique.
prints his ability to be avant-garde and experimental while never sacrificing commercial appeal and
accessibility. Yeah, I think there are so few artists that bridge those worlds where they create a world
and everybody goes to visit them in it. I mean, I think you have David Bowie. I think you have,
you know, Bjork, I think you have a very short list where you're like, you're clearly on your
own thing. You're like, you're not coming to us. It's like, Stevie Wonder is a genius, but it was like,
this is a love song. And it, and this is a.
about how much you love that person, and you're like, I get it, I get it. I know what that is. Or my
heart is broken and you're like, yep, got that. I see what it is. And, you know, and Prince is like,
I'm in this purple Paisley's world and it's the end of the world. And you're like,
apocalyptic dance party. Exactly. Right. Like, I guess I'm, yeah, exactly. It's like,
okay, I'm going to go there with you. Like, that was not the norm. But there's these
echoes I see. Actually, it's funny to talk about Stevie. The opening bars in 1999, the lyrics
are sung by three different people.
And those were recorded as a harmony.
Huh.
As a sort of three-part harmony and the voicing of it.
And then as Prince often did, he sort of cuts the faders on the other parts.
It's like, I'm just going to use this so this melody line is going to change over time.
And it all stuck with me.
It's such an interesting choice because later on he puts them all stacked together.
It was a sort of conventional, you know, three-part harmony kind of thing.
And it took me years to realize this, but Stevie wonders, you are the sunshine in my life, starts the same way.
The first two voices you hear are not Stevie Wonder's voices.
They're members of his band.
And I have to feel like that's the kind of thing where Prince was so fluent and so smart about the way other artists and other geniuses produced their work,
that he was probably influenced by that in choosing to do the same thing.
I think certainly in the years before his death, one of the things he was best known for was the embargo of any YouTube videos, streaming platforms.
you couldn't find Prince's music hardly anywhere online.
But what's maybe surprising then is the fact that in the 1990s,
Prince was actually finding ways to pioneer the use of the internet to distribute music.
Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways that he did that?
Oh, very much so.
He was a geek in a lot of ways.
I mean, he was online from day one.
And I can rattle off just a quick list of greatest hits, any one of which was like, no way.
There's no way he did this.
Yeah.
I'll start with the weirdest, funniest one, which is in 93, he changes the name to the symbol,
almost immediately after, maybe early 94, he puts out a CD-ROM.
And this was the format of the time.
It's like you had this sort of interactive disk you'd put into your computer if you had a, like, a high-end Windows 95 computer or whatever.
And you put this in and it had this little video interactive game.
And the hot game at the time was called Mist.
It was like this sort of exploration puzzle game that sold millions of copies.
And he made a sort of purple mist.
He made his own version of that genre of game
where you're exploring this mansion
and the shape of his symbol
and you're going through the archives
of the catalogs of all the songs he's written
and all the instruments he's played
and all the videos he's made.
And it's this like 3D immersive experience
on your, you know, 1994 computer.
And so that was like a real sort of flag in the ground.
The theme song of the thing was called Interactive.
The disc was called The Symbol, like Prince Interactive.
And the song was called Interactive.
And the song is a song about,
You'll be able to download my music whenever you want, and I'll be interactive, and you can click on my name, and you can see what I've made.
I mean, it was just very, very forward-looking.
And then the next year in 1995, he launches his first website.
I mean, in 95, to my recollection, I think it was the same month Amazon launched their first website.
He did, too.
Wow.
And it's got, here's what I've been working on.
And, you know, it's very elliptical.
It's not this, you know, here's this straight updates from Prince.
But there were also, like, he was just talking about.
what he was listening to. I remember an update on the website at that moment. He's like,
these are albums you should be listening to. I remember him giving the nod to Bjork's Post was the
album that had come out and then an old Graham Central Station album. And it was just like,
okay, Prince had some recommendations. Let me go buy those records. And just to be clear, you're saying
this from memory. Like, you were there on the website. Yeah, I'm in the web browser hitting
refresh like, what's Prince going to do next? 100%. I wasn't like super employed. This is what I was
doing, you know. And so he goes on like this. And, you know, by the time you get to
1997, fans had formed their online communities. And what happens when you tell everybody
you've got to get a nice computer to run my CD-ROM game is all of a sudden you've got a whole
fan base that all have really nice computers, right? And so they start getting on AOL and they start
getting connected. And fans are doing fan chats every week. There was a Paisley Park room on America
online. And pretty soon, Prince started dropping in. And he has people in the studio saying,
we're going to be on the American Music Awards
and whatever it was February of 95
here's what we're going to play
and we're going to tell people Prince is dead
and that it's just the artist
formerly known as Prince now
and we're going to put Prince to bed
and we're going to show off like
five new songs you never heard before
and everyone's like this guy's
we didn't have catfishing back then
but we're like this guy's catfishing
he's full of it, whatever
this is a bunch of BS
and then he comes out
and it is like boom boom boom
every single thing and you're like
I think Prince was in this chat room with us
That was Prince.
Yeah, you know, and it was mind-bending.
And then two years after that, he does a crowdfunded record online, Kickstarter style, but 20 years before.
And he's like, as soon as I get 100,000 orders, I'm going to print up these CDs.
I'm going to put up three CDs worth of music.
It's all unreleased stuff from the vault that you've seen on bootlegs, but you've never been able to buy.
I put it all out there.
He gets 100,000 orders.
It's just like Kickstarter because it ships late and everybody's mad.
And it gets out there.
And then Target ends up distributing it because Target, you know,
all the record, those sort of record stores that were there around back in the day,
they're all based in Minnesota.
So, you know, that was when people bought CDs and stores.
And he partners with them or passed by or whatever, and they put the records out.
And he's like, I'm sorry, it was late.
I'll give you five CDs instead of three.
Unreal.
He's like, I just had a symphony line around.
And so I'll put that out.
And I have three, you know, albums of music.
Plus, I did a little acoustic record on the side with the acoustic guitar.
So I'll put that in there, too.
Don't play me.
And it's just on and on and on like this.
And so, of course, people are just like, it's surreal.
If you told somebody, you remember Prince, we were like, oh, I thought his name was a symbol.
Yeah, yeah, that guy.
He just put out five albums, and you can order him online, and you can buy it directly from him,
and you can download sample clips online.
And the liner notes, by the way, were websites made by the fans to list the lyrics for all the songs,
and that was the official websites for it, and on, and on.
All the way through to the late night.
So the mainstream world is like this guy has lost the plot, lost his mind, hasn't had a hit and forever has totally fallen off.
And the fans, you know, and I was one of them, are like, this guy is from the future.
We can directly download music from him.
We can, you know, pre-order albums and he'll create them for us.
We can buy T-shirts.
We can get tickets to the shows.
All stuff that's normal now, but you're talking about 20 years ago.
Yeah.
It's wild to hear you describe these things.
and then I can think of every kind of 21st century analog.
Once again, Prince is so ahead of the curve.
And I want to come back to what that might say about Prince's ambivalent relationship to tech.
But first we have to take a quick break.
And when we do, let's jump back to a year we've been discussing musically.
And now we'll discuss corporely in 1999.
I want to know what Prince was doing in 1999 after a quick break.
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We are back with Anil Dash.
We've been following Prince's career in terms of his musical and technological innovations up to the 1990s.
Now we're right on the precipice the year he musicalized in song 1999.
Anil, what was Prince up to in 1999?
You know, he was really at a career crossroads.
He hadn't had a hit in arguably five years at that point.
And it's sort of fallen off of the mainstream pop radar.
And, you know, people thought he had sort of lost it.
They're like he's got this symbol for a name and he doesn't make hit records anymore and maybe he's just done, you know.
And then for context, personally, he'd been through a lot.
So he had gotten married in 1996 and he and Maité Garcia, his wife had had a son who passed away after a week.
So it was really tragic and clearly left an impression and a weight and his life.
Until that point, he had put out an album every year for, you know, damn near 20 years.
And so it was this real inflection point.
And he went through sort of a personal loss is like this sense of like maybe he had permanently burned his bridges in the industry and would never come back.
And so it was a very clear moment of reckoning.
And then I think made even more acute by he was known for 1999.
And if the year 1999 and you don't have a hit song, you know, the absence is felt.
Like you sort of see it.
And again, for context, the year before 98,
Santana had had a big comeback with like, you know, smooth, Rob Thomas.
And it was this very sort of classic Clive Davis heiester Records thing where they're like,
we'll get you a bunch of modern guest singers, you know, to come play with you and you're going to get a big hit record.
And all of a sudden, Santana had the biggest hit of his career by a lot.
Right.
Nobody had been looking for Carlos Santana to be like topping the charts and certainly not with like the guy from Matchbox 20.
Clearly as Prince was figuring out what his next steps are going to be, he looked at the
that template. Clive Davis went to him and said, like, look, we can do this for you at Arista.
And so Prince made a record in 99 that was basically that same template. So it had a lot of guest
stars. Gwen Stefani was on it. Chuck D. was on it. Eve was on it. She was real hot then.
I can't honestly say this is the strongest record of his career. It was really, there was some
great tracks, some really weird single choices and things like that. You know, it was just like,
it felt a little perfunctory. It felt like he was like an ill-fitting suit kind of thing, which is
Prince's move at all. But amongst all of those things, there were one or two songs that really
broke through sort of classic Prince style where like no matter how weird he gets, how out there he was
amidst that whole weird sort of chaos, there's this breakout song for me on that album. And it was
never released as a single or anything. And it was clearly about the dissolution of his marriage.
He and Mai Tai would annel their marriage not long after. It was as plaintive and direct and emotional
as anything he'd ever released.
It was called, I love you, but I don't trust you anymore.
And really, the thing that it evoked most to me was
there had been a B-side to the song 1999
when it came out as a single.
That B-side was called, How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore?
Incredible track.
And that song is one of the all-time great Prince songs,
and it's just Prince and the piano and the blues and a broken heart.
I mean, that's all that track is.
And it is spellbinding.
It was great in concert.
almost every time I saw him, he played it live.
And so it was a staple of the show.
And I think he had to be aware when you say,
I love you, but I don't trust you anymore.
And it's just Prince and a piano.
You're just evoking that same feel.
And that is the song that Ani DeFranco was on.
She's playing these sort of very plaintive acoustic guitar
kind of chill chords behind it.
And, you know, it was heartbreaking
because it was one of the few times
where it was very explicit.
Prince wasn't singing about some sort of imagined relationship.
and it wasn't like, you know, the endless bevy of beauties of the 80s.
This was like, this had been his wife and the mother of his child.
To me, it was like the first hint we had of almost an emotional breakthrough,
the veneer of the image of Prince he'd created.
I think for so many years we'd been like,
what is Prince going to be doing in 1999?
I thought that was a really, really extraordinary answer to that question.
Yeah.
So this 1999 album kind of kickstarts his career.
And in the early 2000s, we find,
Prince working on a comeback. We can take a track like 2006's Black Sweat. This song is just a jam.
Of all the late era tracks of Prince's career, it's one where it's like, you just put it on
its own, not because you're like, oh, I fondly reminisce of the other stuff of his I liked. You're like,
this song just goes. So he had had this moment, like he said, of a comeback and had done, he'd open up
the Grammys with Beyonce for the 20th anniversary of Purple Rain and playing Purple Rain songs.
a lot of people have seen his rock and roll hall of fame induction where he's just ripping the face off of
you know everybody doing while my guitar gently weeps this incredible solo right and so there's this
there's this sort of energy building where it's like oh maybe he graduated as an elder statesman of the
industry or whatever you want to say like oh there's something happening here and in the context of that
you know that's cool but that's the old stuff what is he doing right now and this is also the
moment where, you know, the radio is just awash and tracks by, like, Farrell and the Neptunes.
Or, like, Timbaland and J.T. are having, you know, their big moment.
And in the crux of all that stuff where everybody is, well, to Prince's ear, doing his sound,
you know, he's like, let me show you how it's done. And Black Sweat is amazing because it is a very
contemporary sounding song. It's got this sort of a really different.
synth sound and things for him, but it's got that Lynn drum machine in it too.
It was the first time he had sort of really explicitly been like, all right, you want me to do
the Prince sound? Let me do the Prince sound, you know? Like I was like, I still got this in my back
pocket. Yeah. And then alongside it, arguably the greatest video he ever did. It's this
beautifully shot, black and white video, course, requisite, gorgeous model in the clip with him.
But he's just mugging. Like, he's just making the face. And you have undoubtedly seen this
if black and white image of Prince just looking side eye at something,
like something smells bad.
And it's like, and that is from that black sweat video.
So he is doing sort of peak Prince face alongside the strongest,
and probably the last truly great single that he had.
It is just an incredible song.
And I loved especially about it that it was modern and it had that classic sound.
I love that.
The more I talk with you, Anil, the more I'm just staggered by how many sides.
to his personality, his craft, his identity prints had. And I imagine as more songs and his
archive are released that will just get to know even more aspects of this really multifaceted
artist. Anil, this has been such a fun conversation. I realize I'm kind of springing this on you,
but how would you feel about becoming our show's official senior prince correspondent?
I really want to have you back to talk about prints.
There's going to be more news as material from his archive is released.
We're going to shine the love symbol in the sky and hope that you can come running.
It would be an honor and a privilege to get to do justice to his memory.
The new season of Function, Anil Dash's show about technology and culture has just dropped.
Anil, where can people go listen to Function?
And what are some of the topics you're going to be covering this season?
So you can also send a function at glitch.com slash function.
That's where the show lives.
We do text transcripts every episode, so it's a great way to sort of jump into the show.
We talk about how tech shapes culture.
I think if you're a music fan and you're like, oh, there's this unexpected angle to tech that's in there.
Awesome.
Anil, thanks again so much for being here.
I can't wait till the next time we get to talk about Prince.
Switch on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, and Bridget Armstrong was the producer of this episode.
Brandon McFarland is our editor and engineer.
Megan Lubins, our production fellow,
and Liz Nelson and Ashot Kerwa are executive producers.
You can find more episodes anywhere you get podcasts or a website,
Switchedonpop.com.
Reach out to us on Twitter at Switched on Pop.
We love talking about music with you.
We're a proud member of the Vox Media Network,
and we'll see you in another week with a brand new episode.
Until then, thanks for listening.
