Frank Zappa on the lesson that the music industry failed to learn from Prince
Frank Zappa once said, “Science is moving closer to weaponry, and Art is moving closer to commercialism. And never the twain shall meet”. No record proved this quite like Prince’s The Gold Experience. He paired dystopian dread with a legal battle that symbolised both fronts of Zappa’s prognostication.
Prince was at loggerheads with Warner Music, the label to which he had been signed since 1977 when he was just 18. However, over the years, he felt that they increasingly tried to strong-arm his creative endeavours and wrestle away the funds he was generating for his work. This culminated in the star scribbling “slave” onto his face before public appearances, and a battle between artist and patron ensued.
Prince had already been on Zappa’s radar when his song ‘Darling Nikki’ became the first track at the forefront of the infamous PMRC music censoring debate. Zappa took up the fight, stating: “The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretation and enforcement problems inherent in the proposal’s design.”
At first, Zappa was miffed that Prince wasn’t equally vocal on the matter, but he soon realised he was busying himself with his art, and when another battle encroached upon his capacity to do so, it was then that he rose to the figurative frontline. Eventually, Prince resolved his dispute with his label, but the victory wasn’t all that Zappa found commendable. It was the will of an artist standing up to the industry and the legacy that should have followed.
“Can you imagine what Prince’s image would be like today if it really had all been left up to those guys out there in the valley,” Zappa said in an interview following the resolution of the Prince’s dispute. “Nevertheless, how many record companies are willing to give up that kind of control, you know, hand over artistic control over their art?”
“Warner Brothers was smart enough to give it to Prince. It’s to their credit that they were smart enough to stay out of Prince’s way,” he added.
This stance enamoured Prince to Zappa. “You can, you look at him and know he is a creative guy,” he remarked. “Like his stuff or not, I think that compared to the rest of this stuff in the vicinity, Prince’s stuff stuff stands out because it’s a vision. You can agree with the vision, you can disagree with the vision, but it looks like Prince, not Warner Brothers, and that’s worth something, that’s something that’s worth protecting. It’s something that’s worth commending, and I hereby commend Prince and Warner Brothers for working out whatever they worked out.”
He concluded: “I would say that the whole music scene would be better off if there were more Prince-like relationships between creative artists and the record company, where they would, you know, just stay out of the guy’s way.”
However, Prince was a unique artist. Not only was he a hard-working perfectionist who never compromised on his art an iota, but he was also a genius in every department and needed little outside assistance. On his debut album, he is cited as recording 27 different instruments, and he was only a teenager at the time. Thereafter, he’d go on to master producing, too, and even invent a few more instruments just so there was something left in the world that he couldn’t already play.
Sadly, not every other artist has this level of technical proficiency, and labels soon realised that Prince’s victory could simply be a battle lost rather than the war. For other artists, they could still manipulate things in a manner that benefited themselves.
When Far Out recently interviewed John Lydon, he explained that this is worse than ever in the modern music industry. “Corporate thinking,” he says, is rampant. “Record labels are very much a death by committee. They have their little committee meetings or rather BIG committee meetings, and they decide what blah-blah-band should be doing for the next ‘hit’ single, right? This is a dangerous world to be trying to navigate through. I’ve always been accused of being ‘difficult to work with’. Yes, of course, I am!” he proudly exclaimed, almost headbutting the camera with a trademark leer.
Concluding: “It’s a stupid trap. The promise, of course, is instantaneous wealth, fame and fortune.” With such little money available, artists often struggle to establish any bargaining power in these situations, so they have to yield to the corporate thought process. This has sedated the music industry and, ironically, made it less profitable – the lesson of Prince’s profitable victory for art, long forgotten.
