Author Ed Miller: “Music is the weirdest human thing. A few dozen songs out of the zillions recorded fire off like a massive dopamine flood every time I hear them.
And then like other people don’t even like those songs.”
A friend and long-time loyal blog follower recently sent me a 30-Day Song Challenge meme in the hope that I couldn’t resist taking the challenge and blogging about it. Here’s Day #7 – A Song Title That Is All In Uppercase: D.M.S.R.
April 21, 2016. I was at the Westin Washington Dulles Airport leading the second day of a Total SDI (Strength Deployment Inventory®) certification class. The group was heading to the hotel restaurant for our lunch when somebody in the class said, “Did you hear Prince passed?” I let out the most incredulous “What?” that I have ever uttered. I bypassed the restaurant and beelined it to the bar televisions all of which had the terrible news.
I discovered Prince like a lot people through the song I Wanna Be Your Lover from his second self-titled album. It was big in the dance clubs I was frequenting quite frequently. I thought it was a cute song but it held nothing special for me except the buzz about him playing all the instruments in it.
Fast forward to a dance club in Ithaca, NY and the DJ saying he was gonna play something new by Prince. It was Head from the album Controversy. I was immediately hit by two simultaneous thoughts:
1) Uh, is it legal to play this song in public?
2) Whoa. This song is THE BOMB[1].
Runs out the next day to Discount Records in the Vestal Plaza to buy that album along with Controversy and thus a lifelong Prince relationship had begun. Like most relationships, it has run hot, cold and, at times, not at all. That’s what it’s like with someone who resolutely goes their own way and is beholden to no one. Prince’s artistry was constantly in motion and he left it to you to decide if you were following him or not and he didn’t care either way. Wherever he went, he left enough behind for someone else to be influenced by. I don’t care what type of popular music you like, Prince’s inspiration is somewhere in it.
One direction he went to was his all-female backing band 3rdEyeGirl who sadly turned out to be his last band. I have no doubt that he and 3rdEyeGirl would have kicked a lot of royal purple ass – and then he would have moved on to something else. In his and their honor, let’s add a bonus cut to today’s Challenge from his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum recorded with 3rdEyegirl since each track is stylized in capital letters. I offer you the grungy rock jam FIXURLIFEUP.
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[1] I think that’s what I would I have said. Phat, dope, sick, and insane weren’t in yet. Rad was a west coast thing. Speaking in text – OMFG, WTF – were a long way off, so I couldn’t have said, “OMFG! WTF is this?”
Ray's Musings 
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