Ryan MacMillan

Let us turn our attention now to the world of funk, dear friends, wherein we find tiny purple pervy popster Prince all a-twitter (but not, as this story will make clearer than a cold martini on a winter’s morning, a twitter-er, as it were). Apparently, Paisley Park’s most famous midget is sore vexed that his fans - for lo, such people do so self-identify - have been using his image and lyrics upon their websites. I know! The very gall of them! And thus, The Artist Formerly Known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has, in an act of self-righteousness rivaled in size only by its unmitigated lack of irony, threatened to sue thousands of his own fans. A legal letter to various fansites demands to know (and I would love to tell you that this is some sort of witty parody on my part, but, like Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize, sometimes satire must bow to reality’s superior idiocy):

…substantive details of the means by which you propose to compensate our clients [Paisley Park Entertainment Group, NPG Records and AEG] for damages.”

Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online, is quoted by The Guardian as saying:

It’s a paradox that a musician who has done so much to bring himself closer to his fans, particularly with his ‘them and us’ crusade against the record labels, should be engaging in a course of action that effectively removes the raison d’etre of fansites. But it’s the mark of the man who always goes against the grain that he should be doing this at a time when other artists and their labels are suddenly embracing the social media phenomenon.”

Well, Alex, that’s possible, but it’s also possible that it’s the mark of a man whom, I have long vaguely suspected, is actually a bit of an arse.