PRINCE'S FIRST POSTUMOUS LP.
TIMELESS...
But tasteless.

09/24/26

Talentless idiots, disrespectful and ungrateful morons, and traitors. Greedy fuckers.
Does betrayal have no limits? How far are you planning to take this fucking distasteful farce?
Yes, I am pissed, because I am still recovering from the stab in the back delivered by Mick Jagger with the monumental disappointment that was their latest—no, wait, I was about to use the word “opus,” let’s say piece of intergalactic turd from the Rolling Stones that is Foreign Tongues (see one of my previous posts). I just removed the blade; the blood is still fresh, the wound has not healed, and now I have to endure a scalpel straight through the jugular.
And let me stop you right there because I am having a hard time swallowing that fucking pill.

I knew a time when the music industry released new material from deceased rock stars that was either interesting or brought a new perspective. But lately, all I see are marketing wizards and mixing-desk geniuses who, unlike Midas, who turned everything he touched into gold, somehow manage to turn sheer genius into unsophisticated mediocrity.
And I am fucking fed up with it.

I’ll skip the financial reasons that pushed the Prince Estate to release this steaming pile of bland, gooey, and uninteresting songs. Instead, I am more inclined to seriously question the sanity and the tainted wisdom of their musical and financial consultant.
Let’s not forget to mention the studio engineer who had the audacity to work on those “so-called timeless” tracks. I hope I’ll never get to meet him and pray that he doesn’t touch any piece of music for the rest of his life.
To be fair, I can’t blame him too much. I am sure he did what he thought was best, but the one I am particularly pissed about is the one at the end of the food chain who sat down, listened to that, and agreed to release this gigantic, insignificant crap.
In a way, you have to admire the balls that some people have to try to finish what Prince started.
Delusional.

Because it’s not like they didn’t have a choice; they were not stuck with those tracks. Prince left behind thousands of songs and hundreds of live performances sitting in the vaults that would be infinitely more worthwhile than this succession of forgettable and utterly pointless songs.
But Prince is dead. May he rest in peace. And as the saying goes, God help me, but how the fuck did they possibly think they would satisfy the fans with this selection?
By the way, who is the fucktard who chose those songs?
I want to know who is responsible for this musical crime against good taste, which is an offense and an insult to Prince’s legacy.

He was a unique artist. And the issue isn’t whether you liked him or not. He was a fucking genius. Period. He was unique, creative, innovative, impossible, and arrogant. Ambiguous. And at times dark and twisted, if we are to believe Ezra Edelman’s documentary that will apparently never see the light of day because it was controversial.
Yet another example, if one were needed, of the unfathomable stupidity of the Prince Estate.
Because Prince cultivated controversy.

Personally, I don’t give a shit that he was not a saint; I never liked well-groomed legends. What’s more interesting is what was behind the makeup and tailored outfits. And in this age of musical nothingness, it still feels good to remember that some artists had a fucking personality. And Prince, regardless of his 5.5-foot height, was larger than life.

Speaking of which, as far as I am concerned, I do believe that no artist of that magnitude is entirely sane, physically or mentally. These people are not like us. I am not excusing their behavior in any way. I’m simply saying, who the fuck are we to judge? Are we all so fucking perfect that we can condemn or question someone whose work was so often fueled by his flaws, his obsessions, or his demons?
At one point, I think we need to take a step back and separate the artist from his craft. If that is even possible. Otherwise, why do we still listen to Michael Jackson, or read some authors, or admire the work of some painters?

To be honest, I was not crazy about the man, but I was a hardcore fan of the performer, the musician, the dancer, and the songwriter.
I have to admit I always preferred artists with dirt under their fingernails and darkness in their souls. That might be motivated by the fact that I have a rather unfortunate tendency to wipe my ass with conventional morality and political correctness. I’ll give you that.
Still, I’m perfectly aware that some flaws are acceptable and others are not. But I didn’t listen to Prince because I thought he was a role model. I don’t give a fuck about that; I did because he was fucking Prince. And when the man walked onto a stage or grabbed a guitar, something divine happened.

Although I understood at the time that some people might have been shocked by the hypocrisy. As I was. Because it makes me sick.
Like many others who hid behind a lie, Prince was no exception to the rule; he had a facade; he spent years preaching to us about religion, altruism, and money and wearing a stance on drugs like a chastity belt, and he died from a drug overdose. Accidental, yes. But still. The amount of pills that were found later on at Paisley Park strongly suggested that he was a junkie. And that caused his death.
A death that was somehow prophetically written in the lyrics of the song “Rock and Roll Is Alive” in 1995:
“There’ll always be another king 2 die butt-naked on the floor.”
Indeed. Although he was found on an elevator with his socks on.
What a fucking tragedy. And quite an irony. This time it was not a king but a prince. I guess it’s the curse of belonging to royalty.

So we can’t pretend he did not fall from his pedestal because his fate was doomed by the very things he was pretending to warn us about.
And when he was alive, he even pushed the envelope forbidding and lecturing people about cursing and smoking and fired musicians for that.
Double standards at their finest.
That’s why I have always preferred a more “Richardsian, Stones-esque” approach to the everlasting rock-and-roll trinity of fame and excess:
Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—and go fuck yourself.
At least it’s honest.

The fact remains that despite his absolute and undeniable talent, Prince could produce complete shit. And he proved it. He alternated between moments of absolute genius—1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, The Rainbow Children, Musicology, 3121, and the Batman soundtrack or the triple album “Emancipation,” which is criminally underrated—and in between he delivered rushed, uneven albums at best.
But even on his worst records, there were always one or two little gems that saved the whole fucking ship from being a total wreck.

And to this day, I am still completely in awe of that authoritarian imp of perversity who seemed to sweat funk, sex, and pure, concentrated genius from every pore of his skin. Even toward the end of his life, when he was with the 3rdEyeGirl band, I was still paying attention, but I have to say I began to lose interest because of his new musical direction, and I started to worry about his physical appearance.
Still, even then, the guy was an enigma. An extraterrestrial musical phenomenon who could completely fucking mesmerize me the second one of his songs came on. I was baffled by this possessed leprechaun who could dance around on those ridiculous little heels, shamelessly mimicking fucking his microphone on stage, then leap off a piano and throw himself into the splits.
He was a fucking beast in concert.

Which is precisely why, instead of dumping this bland, insipid soup of insignificant tracks, which I am having a hard time digesting, I still don’t get why the Prince Estate didn’t decide to feed us from the treasure trove the man had kept hidden in his musical cave: the private club shows, the tours, and the original so-called unfinished songs.
By the way, who can say they were unfinished? Maybe he left them that way because, at the time, he didn’t like them anymore, or he wanted them to remain as they were. Who the fuck knows?
This is the material that we want to listen to. The kind of stuff we, the fans, would happily devour without the slightest hint of satiety, like a fucking wild boar discovering an ear of corn.
We want untouched stuff from the vault.

But instead, this is what you chose to put on the table. It’s like having the greatest selection of champagne or wines in the cellar and deciding to serve your guests some fucking Californian sparkling wine found behind the lawnmower. No offense to Californians.
Why? It beats the shit out of me.
And mostly, who sat around a table and said, “Brilliant. We will call it timeless.”
Are you fucking kidding?
Sure, let’s add infamy to the insult and name a Prince album the same as one of Michael Bolton’s. Why not?

And that’s where the failure of Timeless becomes unsettling because there is something deeply strange about listening to Prince’s songs remixed and re-recorded by other people. It is a stupid whim to imagine how he would have sounded in 2026.
Only Prince would have known that.
Which makes the title of the new album rather unfortunate, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Perhaps the most respectful thing to do was to resist the temptation to rework them for him, because Prince didn’t need anybody to make him timeless or relevant, for that matter.
He already was and still is and always will be.

So to the people managing his legacy who are going to keep digging into that vault, there is only one thing I would ask:
Just open the fucking door and let us hear what is actually in there. Because that’s what fans have always done, listening without prejudice, to borrow a George Michael album title.
You don’t need to tell us that something is timeless.
We will decide that on our own.

Artists die. That’s life. And their estates and heirs always have the choice between giving them resurrection or letting them rest. But if they choose to bring them back, they shouldn’t do it by denying what made them great in the first place.
Because where the fuck does this end? What will be the next remix? The next edited production?
George Michael singing in the shower?
Hendrix playing out of tune?
A James Brown concert on crutches?
Marvin Gaye rapping?
Luther Vandross performing with laryngitis?
No.
Come on.
There has to be a fucking limit to marketing.

That’s why this LP is an insult, and I refuse to accept that artists who spend their lives respecting their fans are betrayed by their heirs using their graves, or the urn in that specific case, as a fucking doormat. Enough with that shit. Have some fucking respect.
The worst part, when I listened to it, I was trying to wrap my brain around something: by what fucking miracle did they manage to reduce Prince’s genius to this disgraceful compilation?
What a waste.
What a joke to call it “Timeless.”
“Tasteless” would have been far more appropriate.

So give us the archive, not your interpretation of it, and stop remixing those fucking songs. His Purple Highness did not need your help to write, compose, play, and produce songs that would fit a specific era because the man spent his career making music that refused to behave. He changed his sound when everybody expected him to repeat himself. He made records that confused his audience. He changed his appearance, his name, his bands, his musical direction, and occasionally his entire fucking personality. That alone is what makes his music timeless.
Personally, I can tell you that if you keep that attitude, the way you manage his legacy is going to be judged with much less … forgiveness.
Oh, here, that’s a good title for your next sacrilege. Since you decided to dig him up from the afterworld, at least use the right fucking tools.

No hard feelings.
May you live to see the dawn.

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