I Shit Music

In case you haven’t been following this, the musical genius formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince performed on Jimmy Fallon last Friday. He and his new brand-new all-chick band fucking destroyed that little studio… in more ways than one. First off, they sounded incredible. I’m not as much on the “Screwdriver” bandwagon as some of these other folks who think the song is phenomenal, but he did shred the living shit out of it. And then he and the band totally crushed the living hell out of his 1979 shred-attack song, “Bambi”. And then he literally smashed the beautiful 1961 Epiphone Crestwood guitar he was playing – throwing it up in the air and letting it slam down on its neck. Rock star move to say the least. Except the guitar wasn’t his. It was actually The Roots’ Captain Kirk’s beautiful baby, that Prince has asked to borrow for the show after he saw it at rehearsal. And according to Kirk’s twitter feed, Prince didn’t really seem to give a fuck about the destruction, and totally negged Kirk Douglas when the Captain asked him to at least sign the remaining bits of his axe. Total asshole move by Prince, but here’s what’s really interesting…

Douglas seems to be taking this all in stride, and I’ve been trying to figure out the reason why. I suppose that one of the advantages of playing in the band on a nationally syndicated talk show is that perhaps the network has some sort of liability for your instruments. So it’s quite likely that Captain Kirk will at least be compensated for his destroyed guitar. But I think the main reason he doesn’t appear to be flipping the fuck out is that he loves Prince. Douglas himself is a master of the guitar, and the Roots have always walked the line between rock, soul, rap, and R&B – essentially the same model of musical influences that Prince based his career on. As a musician myself, I can thus somewhat understand the significance of having this story for the rest of your life about one of your heroes destroying your shit, and how that may be a better thing to carry through life than the actual object itself. If Dave Brubeck had ever come over to my house, lifted up the back of my piano and just taken a massive old-man shit in there, there’s no doubt that I would be telling that story at least once a week for the rest of my life. But the question remains of whether in the grand social order of reality, did he actually have the right to do that? Is Prince just so much in his own reality that he doesn’t really give a fuck about anything? Or is he so confident of his influence on other black soul guitarists that he thinks it’s totally within his resolve to destroy their shit? Like he just knew that there would be no reciprocation from his act.  You know, like he’s just gonna say: “What, I’m fucking Prince – do you really want to abandon all respect you have for me and tell me that I owe you a new guitar?” The question I’m really asking is – has any musician given so much to the world that he actually has the right to do whatever the fuck he wants? And honestly, I’m somewhat torn on the answer. I definitely feel that Prince has more right to brake somebody’s guitar than a Nazi pedophile has a right to be the Pope… so, you know – street cred is a powerful argument. Either way, Prince is definitely an asshole, but maybe that’s OK.