Prince Is Being A "Creep," Radiohead Tell Him He's A Loser
Prince covered "Creep" at Coachella. Most folks know this. That said, it's been difficult finding reliable footage of the Purple One's take on the top of the Modern Rock 500, because Prince's NPG people are extremely thorough about removing the clips, including the one's we've tried linking. See, click on this for a real-life example. If Prince writes a song, and holds the copyright, he reserves the right to be as intense as we wants ... even if it's annoyingly draconian. Thing is, he didn't write "Creep." Radiohead did. Thom Yorke & Co. know this.
Via AP:
In a recent interview, Thom Yorke said he heard about Prince's performance from a text message and thought it was "hilarious." Yorke laughed when his bandmate, guitarist Ed O'Brien, said the blocking had prevented him from seeing Prince's version of their song."Really? He's blocked it?" asked Yorke, who figured it was their song to block or not. "Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment."
Yorke added: "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song."
YouTube prohibits the posting of copyrighted material. If the site receives a complaint from a copyright owner, it will in most cases remove the video(s). Whether the same could be done for a company not holding a copyright is less clear, but Yorke's argument would seem to bear some credence according to YouTube's policies. YouTube, which is owned by Google, declined to comment.
Prince also did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday...
When Prince performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., on April 26, he prohibited the standard arrangement of allowing photographers to shoot near the stage during the first three songs of his set. Instead, he had a camera crew filming his performance.
You must also remember when Prince brought the "PFUnk." Adding a twist to the tale, Clapclap.org has an argument that the Purple One actually did write (or re-write) "Creep."
Prince is not covering Radiohead here. He is, rather, making "Creep" a Prince song, which is to say he is bringing it within the Prince scheme of rhetoric. This is not merely an instrumental thing, nor even a stage gesture thing, though the gesturing offstage is pretty great. The particular moment it happens is at the end of the second verse.Recall: here, Thom Yorke usually says "You're so fucking special." That "fucking" is key, because it's supposed to sound snide. It's an insult. Prince, on the other hand, does not say "fucking." And not just because he doesn't swear anymore; he could have said what Thom goes with in the radio edit, which is "very." Instead, he changes the entire line, and in doing, he changes the entire meaning of the line. Prince says: "I think that you're special."
...So the fact that he changes that line then changes the line after it. When he yells "I'm a creep," it really seems like he meant to say "freak." He turns this chorus of self-loathing that even Thom Yorke was embarrassed about for a while into, well, a Prince song, a statement of sexual licentiousness. I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, I get freaky baby, and you can get freaky with me. The weirdness that was a source of embarrassment for Yorke is, here, a source of pride. And when he changes "I don't belong here" into "we don't belong here," it turns self-consciousness into "this party is lame, let's go find something as fabulous as we are." Prince brings you in, includes you in this fantastic Prince world that he has constructed.
What he's done here, then, is turn a song that regards an object of desire with debasement and disgust into a song that regards an object of desire as something to be connected with, included, freaked. It is, I think, an absolutely astounding bit of pop magic, a slight of hand so deft as to reveal itself only with a wink.
Or maybe he forgot the words. Grad School is fun. Give it up for Borges.
Posted at 9:48 AM by brandon
Tags: Prince | Radiohead
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That second to last paragraph almost made me throw up.
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yeah i threw up in my mouth a little.
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What kind of insane garbage was that second statement. If I go into a karioke bar, fuck up a song...can I claim that I was just using my creative genius too?
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We should all cover Prince songs now and put them on youtube. Little Purple Rain, anyone?
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and Weird Al Yankovic is like "EXACTLY!!!"
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HA! Nice one Jeremy.
"this party is lame, let's go find something as fabulous as we are."
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Fantastic Prince World....someone should make an artistic rendering of this.
That ClapClap paragraph is a load of bullshit: If All Along The Watchtower's still a Bob Dylan's song, then Creep is still Thom Yorke's. If Jimi Hendrix could have pulled his live vids of his song off back in his day like this....oh wait, Hendrix didn't have a massive stick up his ass like Prince has. A cover's a cover, no matter how much "astounding pop magic" is used, period. Maybe if I could see the fucking thing I could change my mind for the better, but since that's pretty much nil, Prince remains a corporate whore to me.
Plus, the fact that Radiohead embraces this new age of open media has to say something for them compared to other popular rock bands. They realize that you can't stop the YouTube barrage without pissing off fans. And Prince....damn, he needs his fan base more than anyone.
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I LOVE the description of how Prince made it his own - it's like that great clip where Vanilla Ice defends the bassline in "Ice Ice Baby" as being completely different from the bassline in "Under Pressure."
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I LOVE the description of how Prince made it his own - it's like that great clip where Vanilla Ice defends the bassline in "Ice Ice Baby" as being completely different from the bassline in "Under Pressure."
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Wait a minute. It seems it was Prince's label that removed the content from label, some Prince fan site that posted these comments etc. Not him. And Creep is a terrible song to begin with. I wish they had stayed a Brit-pop wannabe band, then they could at least be ignorable for a music fan.
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Leaving aside for the moment the debate over whether Prince should have done this, you guys really ought to read up on the law. This post just gets it completely wrong. Also, Prince doesn't have a label.
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I'm curious as to exactly what you say this post got wrong. If anything their sources are the ones who got it wrong. However, just for argument and clarity sake, the DMCA says that the copyright holder can request their material be removed. Prince does not hold a copyright on Creep, Radiohead does, so I would agree with the AP article that Prince (or his peons) overstepped his bounds.
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Radiohead owns the copyright to the song, which (due to compulsory licensing laws) they are required to license to Prince for public performance, usually through ASCAP or BMI. Prince, however, owns the copyright to his performance and is well within his rights to request a DMCA takedown.
The two things (the song itself and the performance of the song) are treated separately. The former is up for grabs for a licensing fee whether the band likes it or not, but the latter is under the performer's control.
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Radiohead owns the copyright to the song, which (due to compulsory licensing laws) they are required to license to Prince for public performance, usually through ASCAP or BMI. Prince, however, owns the copyright to his performance and is well within his rights to request a DMCA takedown.
The two things (the song itself and the performance of the song) are treated separately. The former is up for grabs for a licensing fee whether the band likes it or not, but the latter is under the performer's control.
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Interestingly enough, one of Prince's attorneys is David Schelzel--frontman of modern rock wonders The Ocean Blue. small strange world!
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I appreciate the hat tip--and the anti-intellectualism!--but I never said Prince wrote or re-wrote the song. I said his cover changed the meaning of the song to make it more Prince-like, which is what good covers do. I wrote the post a month ago and it had nothing to do with any of this. Thanks though!
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Oh that was you? Neat!
They quoted you with: "Prince is not covering Radiohead here. He is, rather, making "Creep" a Prince song".
I don't want to come off the wrong way, but it sure sounds like you are saying Prince rewrote the song.
And I don't know if you got the memo, but intellectualism is not very cool anymore (or was it ever?).
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Yes, and there's an entire other clause after that where I say the exact opposite.
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Then you might want to reword your opening sentence since that is where you say "Prince is not covering Radiohead." Everything you write after reads as if you're trying to prove Prince isn't "covering" the song but "making" it into his own song. The second part is the definition of a good "cover." Duh.
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This makes me sick. I remember a few weeks ago telling my friends that prince is an excellent musician and couldn't find one video on youtube to back me up. Prince is nowhere near what his name describes himself to be. What a prick.
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I can see your frustration with being unable to find a YouTube clip. Surely, there are no other forms of recorded media to show that Prince is an excellent musician.
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i wasnt aware there were ANY forms of recorded media to prove prince as a good artist lol.
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I was there, and while it was a cool idea that prince was covering one of my favorite bands...overall his version was kind of MEH.
So your not missing much. imo.
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While still a true classic, let's not forget that Prince is old, and has shown to more out of the loop than most performers recently. He shouldn't have taken the footage down. He has the right to do it, however, as he is the performer.
Thom, and the Radiohead posse don't "control" the right to keep or remove the footage just because they wrote the song and control the publishing. (It seems the article was written with that impression)
Regardless, its poor form from a Prince. Dude should be partying like its 2009.
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No offense Matt, but to say Prince is old and out of the musical loop is completely ridiculous since he was giving his music away years ahead of Radiohead, NIN, etc. While I think Prince has been overprotected lately, he has been very progressive as far as getting his music to the people sans major labels.
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Greg, the difference is that Radiohead and NIN allowed fans to take the music for whatever they thought it was worth, whereas Prince's attempts to be a visionary without a label consisted of charging fans full-price for sub-par albums. He wasn't "giving" anything.
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Prince is only 10 years older than Thom Yorke. That isn't a huge age difference.
Prince started playing music when he was very young but one of his best selling lp's, Purple Rain, came out 8 years before Creep. Prince has problems to be sure, but I don't senility is one of them.
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so i take it "the prince" would not mind if artists cover his songs? right.
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i've written this new song its called "2009" i copied Prince's "1999" almost verbatim but instead we're going to party like its about to roll over to 2010. you get it? I'm brilliant.
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"Calling Dave Chappelle... we need a parody. stat."
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I give it up for Borges!
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game.... blouses.
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Whoever wrote that clapclaptrap must surely know their error by now. I mean, that's just silly.
Back to reality: I LOVE THIS. Prince vs. Radiohead smackdown over copyright issues. Gotta love it. And it dovetails nicely with their free mp3 album release and all the other stuff. Go Thom, GO!
As an aside, don't you find it interesting that Prince would be so aggressively scrubby and covetous about his work, after screaming for years about unreasonableness out of Warner Bros? And that his efforts mean, in the end, that the people whose song he covered were among those who couldn't see the performance (and it was his doing that made it so)? Now, I like Prince. A lot. But he needs to freakin chill.
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did someone just say "weeaboo"?
cause i think i just heard someone say "weeaboo."
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someone should SlapSlap clapclap.org. that's one of the most ridiclous things i've ever read.
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this party is lame, let's go find something as fabulous as we are
ahhahahaa so that's what thom was trying to say!
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"this party is lame, let's go find something as fabulous as we are"
ahhahahaa so that's what thom was trying to say!
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I gave it up to Borges when I was 14. I got chlamydia and learned my squandered virginity was a precious precious gift from God.
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Yes, that's what this argument needs, post-modern literary critique, that'll fix everything. You say Men-ard, I say Meh-nard, lets call the whole thing off.
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How come the only two Prince songs (Creep, Best Of You) anyone has given a shit about in the last 15 years are covers?
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because he ahsn't done anything else worth talking about since Purple Rain.
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He's done some other things -- like wear a do-rag at the Super Bowl (and shred like a mofo while doing it).
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Once again, this all reminds me of Kevin Smith in An Evening With Kevin Smith talking about how much of a douche Prince is.
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Athough this debate is interesting, I think Thom was just being facetious, or hypothetical. It was just a casual remark, I doubt he's actually interested in excersing any copyright Radiohead may or may not have over the video of Prince's cover.
It's more just funny than anything else, Thom interjecting on Prince's hemming and hawing about copyrights to say "uhh, hey dude, that's actually our song so just chill the fuck out"
However, I hope this starts and ends with a good chuckle, or it'll just be another silly media-orchestrated so-called "feud".
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Pretty boring, but check it out:
http://inversehiphop.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/prince-creep-live-video/
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Lenny Kravitz has both, a:lost weight, & b: shrunk. oddity.
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good god, get over yourself prince
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THIS is why people will never truly LOVE Prince. He's a full-of-himself dickhead. He needs to lighten the fuck up. Specially at this extremely precarious stage of his career, ie, getting OLD. It's dumb dumb dumb business. Same goes for anyone ELSE who hasnt had a bona-fied hit since 1988. Oh yeah, I wnt there:D shuck ett prince...
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. . . i must've missed the part where Radiohead called Prince a "loser".
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this is funny too
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Prince preformed a song that he did not write. Sure, he took artistic licenses with the lyrics, but this does not change the fact that the song is not his. Since he is not the writer of the song, he therefore has no rights to it, and hence to right to charge Youtube of copyright infringement. This is just common sense. It's a cover!
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Prince is so very special... nice l'il bus and all.
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yeah, where did radiohead call him a loser? stretching it a bit aren't we?
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this is the biggest crock of shit i've ever read. prince turning "creep" into his own crazy sex song is just outrageous. damn.
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all this over a song radiohead themselves haven't played circa 2000, like seriously who gives a fuck
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as someone who saw "creep" performed live in 2003, i must interject.
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so does this mean House of Cards is Radiohead doing Prince doing Radiohead?
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anyone else have any random and misinformed things to add. Worst comments ever.
a. Thom was obvioulsy joking
b. Prince DOES have rights to the PERFORMANCE
c.that clap clap bullshit is unrelated to any of this.
d. Stereogum readers are all secretly TMZ readers
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Prince > Radiohead. I like Radiohead, but Prince is Prince. So he can do whatever the hell he wants.
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wow, second last papgraph of the clapclap piece...
"Prince brings you in, includes you in this fantastic Prince world that he has constructed. "
that sentence makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time i read it.
fuck.
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wow, second last papgraph of the clapclap piece...
"Prince brings you in, includes you in this fantastic Prince world that he has constructed. "
that sentence makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time i read it.
fuck.
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prince=kitsch
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http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x58nz5_creep-a-coachella_creation
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Especially when you consider that *he wrote this a month ago and it doesn't have anything to do with copyright*, I think the deep reading of the cover is interesting. Prince recontextualized it the same way Beck changed the chords of "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" to give it a little more optimistic feel.
The most interesting thing I heard in Prince's cover was how he played the chord progression twice as quickly, while singing the lyrics at the same speed.
Come on. Why would you cover a song if you weren't gonna put your own spin on things? And changing lyrics for a cover isn't anything new either.
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I say they should resolve this with a friendly game of Basketball and have pancakes afterwards.
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dave, well i truly do LOVE prince and i have since i was a kid knowing full well the man has the biggest ego in the known universe. i find it endearing. and frankly, i think he's one of those artists who has earned the right.
and i was listening to prince (and the cure) in high school. and i'd like to give a big "fuck you" to all you alternative kids at the time who made fun for me for that and are doing an about-face now. you know who you are.
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Have you even heard sign o the times asshole..get your facts right
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Prince Forgot the words? more like Thom Yorke originally wrote the words incorrectly, and Prince showed him the light. Prince is thine lord and saviour. Thom thought it was hilarious? Talk about nervous laughter reaction due to realizing that he pales in comparison, that without really trying, Prince performed his song infinitely better than he could have ever dreamed of doing. Yorke is on the level of like a Freddie Mercury. Prince is on the level of an Elvis or Michael Jackson.
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Radiohead should cover "When doves cry" and post it all over youtube. Maybe they should change the words to "when fans cry". I saw Radiohead and Prince both perform creep at Coachella and yes Radiohead's version was far better. This does not mean however that Prince wasn't great. His guitar skills are incredible to say the least. Yes he did claim to be the ruler of Coachella which was a stretch considering bands like the Pixies and Iggy and the Stooges have played past shows, but does anyone really expect anything less from Prince. You invite Prince, you know you are getting a cocky arogant performer. If you don't like it go to one of the four other stages. Moral of the story... Get off youtube and go to a live show.
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Prince owned this song. Guitar and vocals were out of this world and better than Radiohead ever will produce. They should feel honored. Prince is weird as it comes to a lot of stuff but as a musician and performer he's untouched. And for the ones saying Prince needs youtube. He got paid almost 5 million to play Coachella and sold out 21 nights in London (350.000 tickets) just last year. Dont see Radiohead doing that...
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Boy and I thought I was good at rationalization.
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This is the only Prince video I could find on YouTube. I'm sure that by posting the link, the video will be taken down shortly ;) Damn, the man's talented though, even if he is a douche about whether or not some low-quality video of him playing happens to be floating around on the tubes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7sT1HRV2qU
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Now, if Prince wants to release this version of a song on a live dvd or something, Radiohead would have rights to block it. Prince wouldn't be able to just pay the performance royalty - he'd have to get a synchronization license and negotiate a rate. I doubt Radiohead would be petty enough to reject it, but it would be funny.
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Once I saw a comedian rewrite "I'm a creep" into "I'm a peep". He wore a yellow easter peep hat, and sang the song very seriously, with altered lyrics: "I'm a peep, I'm all yellow, on the clearance shelf at Walgreens, what the hell am I doing here?"...... Or something like that, it was a long time ago. Seriously, though, musicians cover songs all the time, it shouldn't be a big deal. Though that last paragraph also makes me sick and I LIKE prince lol. As if Prince made a song better by making it slick, pop, and "positive". It just sounds sleazy to me.
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Once I saw a comedian rewrite "I'm a creep" into "I'm a peep". He wore a yellow easter peep hat, and sang the song very seriously, with altered lyrics: "I'm a peep, I'm all yellow"... http://figpeep.figwitlives.net/figments.htm . Seriously, though, musicians cover songs all the time, it shouldn't be a big deal. Though that last paragraph also makes me sick and I LIKE prince lol. As if Prince made a song better by making it slick, pop, and "positive". It just sounds sleazy to me.
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All of this is just a distraction from the fact the the cover sucks and Prince hasn't been relevant since 1985.
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Clapclap.org can psychoanalyze Prince's cover of "Creep" all they want. It's still going to be a cover of "Creep", regardless.
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yeah, that last segment was bullshit.
and i easily found a video of the cover online still. wasn't even that impressed with it all. the original is far better than whatever prince came up with. if i were radiohead, i wouldn't bother trying to check out the vid. waste of time.
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Excuse me Rocco but.....Thom Yorke pales in comparison to Prince?? Are you kidding me??!! I love both these artists but to say Thom and the boys pale in comparison is a joke. Prince is a great musician and artist and so is Thom. Actually, in comparison, Prince is a very talented musician but then Thom is better vocally. In my opinion Prince did a good cover of "creep" but for me, nothing compares to Radiohead's version.
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This all just made me shart in my pants. Looks like my reutation precedes me.