One of Prince's most soulful and heart-felt songs ever, "Forever In My Life" is revealed in its earliest form, showing its bluesy roots while giving us a glimpse into both his creative process and his personal life at the height of his stardom. open.spotify.com/track/4572OrIx…
And this memory about the song's creation described by @susannahtwin will break your heart.
One of the most striking things about this alternate version of “Forever In My Life” is that, in contrast to the spartan arrangement of the released version, the accompanying acoustic guitar reveals a richer chord progression that evokes the earliest songs Prince wrote as a teen.
At four minutes into this new, unheard version, at about the point the familiar released version began to fade out, we instead hear some backing harmonies that would presage the gospel live rendition that debuted during the Sign O The Times Tour.
That live version was a standout performance on Prince’s greatest 80s tour. Incorporating elements of “It” (also from the Sign O The Times album), there’s no better demonstration of the heights Prince reached when merging the sacred and the sensual.
Prince revisited that same bluesy acoustic guitar 15 years ago in the charity single he released after Hurricane Katrina ravaged his father’s native Louisiana. It sadly feels just as on time as the night Prince recorded it, while the storm came ashore.
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This wonderfully captures of what our neighborhood learned in the 90s. I'd only heard bits of this from my tentative conversations with neighbors who had been around for the attack (or the NYPD riot in Tompkins), or what I picked up from Sante's pieces when I worked at the Voice.
I don't think I'd realize how much my world view was shaped by having the defining years of my early adulthood be surrounded by people who were persecuted for coming together as a community, building better lives for themselves, and protecting a vibrant and vital culture.
But I benefitted *so* much from being broke (and honestly, lonely) in the East Village and LES in those days. You could wander around, stumble into interesting conversations with strangers, and learn a completely different history of America in 20 minutes while sitting in a park.
We put the best minds in the industry in it, and spent billions of dollars, plus we misused the public commons in all kinds of unexpected and unspeakable ways. But ultimately, we triumphed. Computer bad at math.
These dudes: “Hey snowflakes, facts don’t care about your FEELINGS!”
Also these dudes: “Our software is so smart, it uses vibes instead of math.”
We need a term for something beyond “tragedy of the commons” when the extractive platforms try to kill off the sources they depend on to feed their models in the first place. The same thing the gig economy tries to do to workers, and equally short-sighted.
Part of the reason AI should be trained only on data given with consent is so that you can possibly go back to those sources again in the future. Every creator and problem-solver who has had their brilliance strip mined for this generation of AI will not let it happen again.
This is an astute analysis of where capital is at in tech right now, and focuses on founders/CEOs, but it explains why the capital class is also so focused on punishing workers right now. They really want to take out their frustrations with founders by targeting workers.
And it’s not just about VC — the backlash against workers is so powerful that one of the most consistently critical voices who has been anti-VC has now moved to sucking up to Musk, just to let his workers know his allegiance.
All other things aside, the fact that he clearly doesn’t know how to use GitHub or Slack is such outrageously funny boomer energy. Fully in keeping with “print out your code” and “I am constantly getting duped by obviously fake bullshit online”.
My man is cosplaying CEO by pasting screenshots into Microsoft Word documents formatted with Comic Sans. We’re a couple days away from him emailing everyone “FW: FW: fw: CAREFUL! Fentanyl in Halloween candy!”
Send him a zip file of your code changes, tell him if he doesn’t open it within the hour, Bill Gates is going to start putting a tax on email.