Prince and the old power generation: how TAFKATAFKAP's 20TEN doesn't make me LOL

So Prince has given away his new album via a newspaper whilst pronouncing a death sentence on the internet, that great enemy of old-school journalism?

Nice. The Daily Mirror has shoe-horned plenty of pre-release publicity into its rag, one example of which was an "interview" by Peter Willis which reaffirmed by belief that all old rock stars need euthanising, or at the very least, pickling alive.

It's not Willis that got me riled per se. An associate editor (or whatever he is) is bound to toe the newspaper's grubby little line. This is the same man who once followed orders to post a story claiming Michael Jackson thought he might catch Aids from the Blarney Stone.

But that didn't stop me going paisly purple with rage as I read his "rare insight" that proferred no insight other than, yes, TAFKATAFKAP is loopier than the symbol that used to represent him.

Prince, says Willis, is "a living legend who has sold more than 100 million albums over 30 years." Point of order: I doubt he's at the 100 million mark yet; if you know the figure, do leave a comment below. A few years ago, he had notched up 80 million sales, which means he is outsold by many including Cher, Chicago and Julio Iglesias.

Stratospheric

While we're on sales, his 2006 album 3121 sold only 80,000 copies, while his follow-ups have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It's hardly stratospheric. Oh, plus the few million more given free with newspapers and now lying in the billion-tonne pile of unrecycled plastic clogging up our planet.

Sorry, dwarfman, I'm filling your head with numbers, and that can't be good for you.

He is a legend, but he is a legend frozen in time. His last three albums have garnered an average Pitchfork review of 5.2, so I'm seriously doubtful it's a "return to his early blistering form which captivated millions of fans around the world".

I might be wrong: I haven't let the album soil my ears yet. It could be his best album for 23 years, putting his comeback "on a par with Elvis reinventing himself in Las Vegas in 1968." Not my words: I hope Tony Parsons' review was in no way biased.

He has now released 19 consecutive singles (Prince, not Tony) without hitting the UK top 40. The run of failure is even longer in the US. Compare that with the culturally-reviled Cliff Richard whose singles still consistently chart well. Where are your fans, Prince?

Captivated

Ah yes, the fans, the millions of captivated fans mentioned in Willis' piece.

Unofficial fan site Prince.org has less than 4,000 active members. As for his official sites, Prince's history is checkered. You'll already know about the Webby award preceding the closure of his New Power Generation Music Club. But do you remember his paid membership site LotusFlow3r which was, by all accounts, enough to make a dove cry?

These says, he has no official website. In short, it's not the internet that is over: it is Prince's love for his fans.

The short lilac duke will do well from this album, no doubt because of the hype from impotent bloggers such as myself. But before you reach for any one of the dozens of files already on Rapidshare for this "newspaper-only" album, think on this...

Here's a man who declared "all these computers and digital gadgets are no good", instead placing his trust in the purital worldview of an autocratic organisation that abuses its members. He consistently refused to answer Peter Willis' questions and at one point even grabs his wrist to stop him writing. Man of the people, Mr Rogers Nelson.

Hard-line

And you should see his documentary collection. Does Prince truly buy into the hard-line evangelical Christian view about Hurricane Katrina being the fault of a sinful America? It's alluded to - only just - in the Daily Mirror interview, but for some reason, Willis doesn't push him on it. Oh... wait... um...

He needs to be asked these questions because that kind of pop despot personality weirdness belongs to a wacko-Jacko land that has no place in our new-power internet world of shallow-and-wide fanship, that fabled world of tweety democracy that offers few all-dominating cultural heroes (and when it does, they're quickly stamped out, euthanised and, indeed, pickled).

One last guilty thought about Prince, who is no doubt scanning this on his Google reader whilst chucking quietly at his anti-internet public persona. I do feel quite bad. A closed-minded electronic music blogger slagging off the symbolian sexmuppet? It's like shooting fish in barrel.

Sorry about that, but to be honest, you harpooned yourself, you paisley berk.

Not very good: a slight blog blip

Please be patient, my sweet readers, while I migrate this blog to something other than Blogger.

I have been with Blogger since 2004, but their new rules on FTP publishing (I have no idea what any of it means) doesn't seem to be supported by my domain name people, Freeparking. So I'm having to jump ship.

Which means instead of writing, I'm having to wrestle with technical stuff that I'm not very good at.

Please be patient, make yourself a cup of hot chocolate, and wait by my blog for further instructions.

In the meantime, you could listen to a preview of Superfast Jellyfish by Gorillaz, sift through an excellent new writing site called Profwriting, look at these utterly uncharismatic photos of Four Tet DJing in Chicago, or grap this Martyn podcast featuring the likes of Joy Orbison, J Dilla, Drexciya and, er, Prince.

Chick lit rules! New singles from Joy Orbison, Flying Lotus, House Shoes, Pantha Du Prince and (phew!) Martin Kemp

Joy Orbison

Joy Orbison has announced a new EP, The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow, to be released on February 22nd.

The Croydon mailroom worker, who started DJing at the pimply age of 13, provided one of 2009's highlights with Hyph Mngo. In Shrew, he gives us more of the usual Joy: swelling dubstep set to grime up the dancefloor with washes of insistent synths.

The EP features a remix by Actress and is probably the best mouse-like electronica since Mouse On Mars and, um, Vole-netian Snares.

Flying Lotus / House Shoes

Flying Lotus, that hunk of manly beat production, appears this month on a cute-looking 10" courtesy of the Do-Over crew. On The Do-Over Volume 1, there's FlyLo's Sangria Spin Cycles and, on the flip side of the disc, you'll find Motownie beatster House Shoes with his crunchy soul stormer The Makings.

Both tracks are crisper than a starched collar fresh out of the drier, but the best thing is the artwork (pictured), which feels all rather Northern Quartery, cheerful and, well, a bit chick-lit. And yes, it now means I can call Flying Lotus a big flowery girl and not feel bad about it.

Keep an eye on the Do-Over for more, um, doings in the future.

Pantha Du Prince

Pantha Du Prince is ready to pounce with his new album and Rough Trade debut Black Noise (as promised in my 2010 electronica preview).

But first, a single. The shoegaze influence that once dripped through the sound of Pantha Du Prince has well and truly dried up for his recent 12" The Splendour.

Now, we have pin-sharp four-four minimal techno with a kitchen full of clanks and micro-samples. It is pristine: you can see your face in it. I prefer the dirtiness of his 2004 album Diamond Daze, and The Splendour is unlikely to stick in your head for too long, but it's no less beautiful for that.

Martin Kemp

Martin Kemp has taken time out from touring Sign O' The Times with Kajagoogoo (I get my 80s music mixed up sometimes) to bring us a snappy, dark slice of twenty-tens dubstep.

Okay, it's a different Martin Kemp and it's a crap joke. This one is brother of Brackles and his recent single After The Night is an uneasy, primative slab of multi-rhythmic 2-step and should ensure new imprint Blunted Robot's place on this year's calendar.

Listen to The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow here. Cast your ears on Sangria Spin Cycles and The Makings on the Do-Over blog. Hark ye The Splendour on the Rough Trade website. And listen to After The Night at Boomkat.

Max Tundra does Prince while, by the look of the picture wot I edited in Microsoft Publisher, the Von Trapps do LSD

The bejewelled crowd bustles and hums in a room glistening with gold carvings and low-slung chandeliers.

A woman in white announces, "Ladies and gentlemen, the children of Captain Von Trapp wish to say goodnight to you." She raises her hands in awkward invitation and the hum foams up into chatter and gasps.

Down the stairs of the grand hallway descends a music sensation that will be remembered for generations.

It's a topless Max Tundra balancing a huge tooth hat on his head.

Yes, the master of bizarre pop and lord of the 8 / 16 / 4 / 0.5-bit opus is back with a busy electro-fuzz single (see the video featuring the tooth hat here) that boasts the Sound Of Music's So Long Farewell as a b-side.

He's done well: he's gone for the obligatory cowbell, but I'm not sure how that thumping 808 snare would sit with the delicate Von Trapp kids (pictured).

It bodes well for Tundra's third album next week, Parallax Error Beheads You. Expect the usual suspects saying it's messy and as busy as an OCD bee, and there should be the usual stampede of comparisons to Nintendo / Sega / insert generic bleepy video game console here.

Time for an mpSunday, where I give away my record collection (but only on a Sunday, mind). This track was the first glimpse we had of the potential brilliance of Max's new album. It's him doing an uncomfortably straight approximation of a geeky Prince.

mpSunday (right click and save as): CRAASH! This mpSunday has now expired.

Which reminds me. If anyone is hoarding an mp3 of Tundra's version of the KLF's What Time Is Love, cyber-slap me. And yes it is okay to use the 'cyber' prefix again.

It was written by Pal Waaktaar you know, and not the good looking one

One of July's most significant electronic releases was Chromeo's Fancy Footwork, their follow-up to 2004's She's In Control.

She's In Control passed me by, like a fart in a strong breeze, but this new album hit me square in the face like a juggernaut full of crap, and the juggernaught itself is made of crap too, just like the whole metaphorical street scene which is made entirely of crap.

If I wanted uber-cool 80s electro funkdaddy disco, I would screw my eyes up like that Japanese guy in Heroes and transport myself to a multi-coloured disco floor full of bad mofos robodancing to the break-down bit of A-Ha's The Sun Always Shines On TV.

Please forget that last paragraph; I never said it.

If faux-retro Prince-wannabe lifeless post-Mika pap is not your bag, then let's move on to look at Night Of The Brain's debut album Wear This World Out.

This leftfield rock album earns its place on an electronica blog because it's the brainchild (geddit?!?!) of Cristian Vogel from Super_Collider (Messagesacomin artwork pictured).

The Theme, puked out as an EP a few months ago, owes a debt to tight post-rock, but much of the rest of Wear This World Out is Pixies-style noisiness with brave side-steps into odd neighbourhoods, such as the disco guitar in Dark Lady.

Vogel's weedy vocals, in strength and drug effect, make this record all-the-more likable.

While I'm doing a bit of catch up, it's worth a skip and a hop back to May's releases and my mobile phone alarm, which is Apparat's Not A Number.

Every morning the drip-drop insistence of that track shoe-horns me into the real world. It's a shame then that Walls, the album it's from, is liable to send you back to the Land Of Nod faster than you can say "quick let's fill this blog with antiquated literature references".

Walls is a hugely listenable album. My ears have even sent me a thank-you card. But it works as backing music for movies, not as a huge artistic statement.

TV and radio producers take note; you need Apparat in your collection. And if you use it in a programme as a result of reading this, make me look really smug and leave a comment.

I'm quietly rooting for the Klaxons but this is a post about Fopp's flopped shops and not the bloody Mercury Prize

My fabulously funky friend Julez sent me an invitation to join a Facebook group dedicated to saving the trendy music shops Fopp (upset customer pictured, taken from Admanchester).

I declined.

It doesn't matter that Facebook has as much power to save anything as Richard Dawkins has of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. It's more a case of feeling utterly pessimistic about the future of the record shop.

The closure of Fopp has been covered extensively elsewhere on the internets, so in short it went something like this:

Step One. It doesn't matter how much you take through your tills; if your cash flow dries up, you're done for. A private company buys MVC from Woolworths. It cost them their cash flow. They went under.

Step Two. It doesn't matter how much you take through your tills; if your cash flow dries up, you're done for. Music Zone buys MVC. It cost them their cash flow. They went under.

Step Three. It doesn't matter how much you take through your tills; if your cash flow dries up, you're done for. Fopp buys Music Zone. It cost them their cash flow. They went under.

There's a business lesson there somewhere. Maybe you can spot it. Write your answer on a postcard and send it to HMV before they fall into the trap.

I liked Fopp. The one in Manchester had a cafe. It didn't feel cheap like Music Zone. And if my grey cells are firing on all one cylinders, the fallen Fopp stands pretty much on the burial ground of the old Piccadilly Records. I'm going back a few years here, to the days when punks used to growl at passers-by between the shop and the old sunken toilets, in which lay interesting brown treasure.

Anyhoo, let's just blame Prince and move on, shall we?

Breaking news... the Mercury Music Prize nominations have just been announced. Last year I was horrifically wrong in my predition, so for now I'm just going to list the nominations and then think about it a bit more:

>The Arctic Monkeys' Favourite Worst Nightmare
>Basquiat Strings featuring Seb Rochford's Basquiat Strings
>Bat for Lashes' Fur & Gold
>Dizzee Rascal's Maths & English
>Jamie T's Panic Prevention
>Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future
>Maps' We Can Create
>New Young Pony Club's Fantastic Playroom
>Fionn Regan's The End of History
>The View's Hats Off to the Buskers
>Amy Winehouse's Back to Black
>The Young Knives' Voices of Animals and Men

August update: Fopp has reopened because HMV bought it. The postcard must have got lost in the mail.