Tiny purple porno pygmy Prince is riding on the crest of a critical renaissance at the moment. Although he'll never be the tiny mental superstar of old, Prince is slowly beginning to find acceptance again.
And there's one group of society which loves Prince more than anyone else. No, not the booking panel of every single awards show ever – although they really do bloody well love him, but the Internet community. For Prince has just won a Webby award for the way he uses the Internet to sell his music. Which, reading between the lines, means that Prince won an award because no record label in its right mind wanted to try and sell his 45-minute-long jazzy instrumental noodling CDs, but hey.
You have to admit that Prince is brilliant at what he does. To be fair, what Prince actually does these days is turn up at awards ceremony, play a bit of Purple Rain, make some new music that isn't quite as good as the stuff he did 20 years ago and then get all kinds of rubbish awards for stuff he hasn't got a lot to do with. And he's brilliant at it.
If you believe the awards that organisations have been flinging at Prince, then you'll know that Prince is the world's sexiest vegetarian. And now, according to the Webby awards, Prince is also some kind of super internet visionary, too – Prince has just won a Webby award for Lifetime Achievement because of the way he embraced the Internet years before iTunes or Myspace. Tiffany Shlain, Webby awards founder, called Prince a:
"musical genius [and] a visionary, who recognised early on that the web would completely change how we experience music".
Obviously, this is Webby code for "Prince got shit and was forced to start doing the online equivalent of flogging CDs out of the boot of his car." Still, by accident or design, Prince was the first major artist to release an full album – 1997's Crystal Ball – online.
Prince will accept his Webby at the Webby ceremony, along with other people and groups judged by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to have excelled in their respective categories, including MySpace, Gorillaz and that hilarious bloke what looked scared when he got interviewed by the BBC by mistake. Or something.
Read more:
Webby Achievement Honour For Prince – Dotmusic
[story by Stuart Heritage]