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I'm not a huge Prince fan but if this song is representative of the rest of the album...I'm interested.
I can't help but hear early U2 in "the repeated, ringing guitar figure" - "I Will Follow" anyone?
Prince is one of the most brilliant pop entertainers in music today. He writes brilliant songs, can hold an arena of 20 thousand people rapt with an acoustic guitar, and as Dave points out, he shreds. And he wrote Let's Pretend We're Married in 1990, with the filthy line, "I sincerely want to f*ck the taste out of your mouth." Not bad for a Jehovah's Witness!
I think there's a good argument to be made that Prince is the last fully-fledged pop music genius.
Good Lord, What an abuse of the Guitar, a beautiful instrument when well played. That is just noise.
emanating from suckers who don't need to speak on the issue (perhaps resentful of a black man playing guitar) is even worse.
I wouldn't say Prince was quoting the Edge, but one could certainly argue that he, intentionally or not, loosely paraphrased him on that 1980 debut piece, "I Will Follow." On the other hand, its just a vamp. We're just talking about a vamp here, hardly intended to serve as a testament to Prince's (or The Edge's for that matter) originality and creativity. Indeed, putting the rest of the subject song aside, one need only go back to Prince's 1979 sophomore album (his first album was released in 1978) and spin "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad" to get a taste of the originality and creativity marking, among other things, Prince's guitarmanship.
