Fred Armisen names his favourite Prince songs
Prince was the kind of artist who seemed to draw admiration from all over the place, from his crazy fans to his musical contemporaries via stars in other entertainment mediums, including the realm of film and TV. Prince’s effortless ability to write music and give it a sexy edge made him stand out from his peers.
Fred Armisen fits into all the above; he’s an actor, writer, comedian, musician, and, most importantly, in this context, a massive Prince fan. Given the fact that Armisen’s show Portlandia regularly deals with the humorous side of music, he is well placed to give his two cents on Prince’s outstanding career.
Armisen once said of Prince: “Everything that I thought was cool about music, he turned it all upside down. I was so into punk and The Beatles. It was like punk and The Beatles, and that’s it. This is what’s cool – camouflage, leather jackets – and then all of a sudden this video came on MTV, of the song ‘1999’, and it was the opposite.”
He added: “Purple, pink, fluorescent lights, hearts, make-up, thongs – you know, really, it was very much the opposite of what I understood or would preach to people as what was cool, and it turned it upside down and said ‘Fred, you’re wrong. This is even more punk than that’.”
Prince had a musical ability that arguably no other musician in the past 100 years could stand up to. He was simply a genius. By the time he was 21 years old, he had already recorded a number of albums, including the showstopping self-titled in 1979 – on which he also played every single instrument and sang every vocal.
“He was a control freak, and he played all the instruments on those first albums,” Armisen noted. “The way he wrote songs, it was like an alien came down and wrote music. He was like the Steve Jobs of making music. You know, he was like, ‘I know you think you know what funk is, and I know you think that you know what a good album and a good song is, but this is what you need.'”
Referencing some of Prince’s all-time classics, Armisen concluded, “And 1999, I love that album, love that song and ‘Purple Rain’. [I thought], ‘what? How can anyone make music like this?’ And then the song ‘Pop Life’. I think that, for me, is everything that I love about Prince.”
