The rest is silence
August 05, 2021

Would Prince have wanted 'Welcome 2 America' to be released?

The New Yorker writer likes the new Prince album, but still felt uncomfortable listening to it. This is why: "Prince didn’t have a will when he died. Every act performed with his music is done without his permission. Even the people who seemed to know him well speak of him as a mystery. Who, then, is qualified to say that they have any inkling of what he’d do with his songs? Recently, things got even more complicated: around the time that “Welcome 2 America” was released, news broke that many of Prince’s siblings had received buyouts from the independent music publisher and talent management company Primary Wave, giving it the largest stake in Prince’s estate. During his life, Prince was vocal about ownership, autonomy, and control. He did not want middlemen to take shares of his streaming revenue; he changed his name to a glyph partly in protest of what he saw as an onerous recording contract. The infrastructure profiting off Prince in death is the one he’s criticizing on 'Welcome 2 America'”.