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Dig If You Will the Picture

Funk, Sex, God and Genius in the Music of Prince

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Ben Greenman, New York Times bestselling author, contributing writer to the New Yorker, and owner of thousands of recordings of Prince and Prince-related songs, knows intimately that there has never been a rock star as vibrant, mercurial, willfully contrary, experimental, or prolific as Prince. Uniting a diverse audience while remaining singularly himself, Prince was a tireless artist, a musical virtuoso and chameleon, and a pop-culture prophet who shattered traditional ideas of race and gender, rewrote the rules of identity, and redefined the role of sex in pop music.
A polymath in his own right who collaborated with George Clinton and Questlove on their celebrated memoirs, Greenman has been listening to and writing about Prince since the mid-eighties. Here, with the passion of an obsessive fan and the skills of a critic, journalist, and novelist, he mines his encyclopedic knowledge of Prince's music to tell both his story and the story of the paradigm-shifting ideas that he communicated to his millions of fans around the world.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Skilled narrator Peter Berkrot is the perfect fit to deliver this biography of the life and legacy of the rock musician Prince. Berkrot has the gravitas of a theater veteran, and Prince was a consummate performer of exacting detail in a career that spanned decades yet was tragically cut short. The audiobook is both a fascinating and touching listening experience. Greenman's book is one of the most detailed career biographies of Prince, covering the early days of his work until his final days. This is required listening for Prince fans and is recommended for anyone interested in learning how Prince shifted the course of popular culture. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from April 3, 2017
      Part fan’s notes and part cultural criticism, music journalist Greenman’s absorbing and entertaining study of Prince and his music compellingly underscores the Purple One’s enduring contributions to pop music. After he buys his first Prince album—1999—in 1982, Greenman becomes obsessed with the music, waiting anxiously at the local record store for every new album and discovering that Prince is, among other things, a “jazz-age sweetie, spiritual pilgrim, sexual puppeteer.” Greenman chronicles Prince’s life from his childhood up through the earliest moments of his career, but and he peers into the sources of Prince’s inspiration as well as the many themes that appear constantly in his music, such as sex, virtue and sin, and race and politics. Greenman also considers the reasons that Prince changed his name in 1993—in part as a ploy to retrieve his masters from Warner Brothers—and his frustration with the Internet as a method for delivering his music. Prince’s genius is on full display here as Greenman remarks on his prolific music virtuosity, putting out an album once a year, and his obsessive dedication to saving every little scrap of his writing and recording to use again. Greenman’s brilliant book celebrates a musician who crammed substance into every corner of his music.

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  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

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  • English

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