Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace? 

Speaker 2 (00:00:02):
Well, for the British, we have, I dunno, like 3000 years worth of history. A couple of years where we had you as a colony and then you left. It's not really that much of an issue for us. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:25):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Darren Husted, host of Prince Track by Track. So since you were bringing up Prince Track by Track already, I thought that would be kind of a natural place to maybe start to tell a little bit about the show and how it got started. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:05):
Okay. Well, it is my sixth podcast. Yes, sixth. It is my sixth podcast project, should I say. And the first three that I did were minute by minute podcasts, which is 

Speaker 2 (00:01:24):
A format of podcast where you watch a film for a minute and then you talk about the minute you've just watched. It is not as some people are led to believe a podcast that is a one minute long. So that seems to be a common misconception. Yeah, I mean, star Wars Minute is kind of the originator of that format. And by Pure accident, I fell into being an editor of A Talking Cast, which is a minute by minute podcast about the Filmer Talking Cat, which is a cult kids film from about five years ago now, which it's so low budget. I mean, they say the budget is a million dollars, but you can't see any of that on the screen. It's like, and the level of acting is so kind of amateur-ish, and it's just such an odd script. And I mean, for our final episode, we actually managed to get an interview with the screenwriter. 

Speaker 1 (00:02:19):
Oh wow. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:20):
And so that was the kind of final bonus episode. And he came on, he talked us through the process of how he arrived at the idea of talking Cat and the constraints that were put on him and how they led to some of the quirks in the script. And it's like if you can't do certain things, then you have to write around them. And it's quite interesting hearing his side of that. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:43):
And then after that I was like, well, the people who've done it, I was like, well, should we do another film? Should we pick another film? And the Jennifer Lopez film, the Boy Next Door had come out and a few people who were in the group had seen it and they'd been quite effusive in their praise for how kind of schlocky it was. So I went and saw at the cinema and I was literally every 60 seconds I was like, well, this would be a good episode and then this would be a good episode. And so after watching it, I was like, yeah, this should be the subject of our next film. And then I reached the point of that where I was like, once we finished that, I was like, well, I'd like to do this one more time at least, but with a film that I actually enjoy rather than the choice of those two other films was kind of not mine really. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:30):
I guess The Boy Next Door was a little bit mine, but it was mostly kind of from other people or it came. So I said, well, how about we do Clueless? I love the film Clueless. Let's do that minute by minute. And so I was like, well, clueless is going to be a fun film to do. And so we kind of went ahead and did that. And while we were doing Clueless, I was thinking to myself, well, I would like to do something like a different podcast, but importantly, I like my podcast to have an end date when I start them. When you start a minute by minute podcast, how many episodes you're going to do because the length of the film dictates that. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:06):
So I was like, clueless is only 97 episodes. I think, boy, next Door was a hundred episodes, you're talking Cat was like 86 episodes. It's like these are very short run podcasts in the general scheme of podcasts. A lot of podcasts tend to go on for years and years. So I was like, these are only going to last six months. I'm going to be done with it. And I love the TV show Rested Development. And so I was like, well, what about a podcast about that? Just a rewatch podcast. And so with that much podcasting experience behind me, and also worth saying that there's a podcast that was done by the guys who did Star Wars Minute, which is called Alphabetical, which is the Beatles back catalog, but done in alphabetical order, which is a weird way to tackle it, but at least it kind of keeps it interesting because not starting with all the kind of two minute pop songs and then finishing off with a bunch of psychedelic jumping back and forth. And I thought about, in my head, I thought maybe that would be worth doing with Prince. Maybe I could, I've got all his songs on iTunes. All you have to do is click to arrange them alphabetically. It would only take me a couple of seconds to figure that out. But then in my head, the notion was, well, prince is going to be releasing albums for many years to come, and so if I rearrange them now alphabetically, I'd have to keep adding episodes in or 

Speaker 2 (00:05:33):
How would I do that? So I was like, well, there's no point even thinking about doing a Prince podcast because it's going to be years before the idea of covering it is a realistic notion. And then he died and I remember just being so devastated and for at least a couple of hours I was just sitting there. I mean, I listened to the first Prince album, which is Alphabetically, which is around the world in a day, and I just listened to that twice through because I couldn't really, I was like, I can't go around picking my favorite Prince songs. 

Speaker 1 (00:06:04):
I'll 

Speaker 2 (00:06:04):
Just listen to the first album that's here. And then a few months later I was thinking to myself, well, this seems like a good point to be like, well, let's talk about those songs not as a way of processing my grief. That sounds too big considering I never met the person. But just as a fan, it's like, well, if I want to kind of celebrate what he did, then it feels like just kind of starting with his first song and just going all the way through to the last two albums that he put out the year before his death, that seems like a good way of celebrating what he did, but not just praising every single song, not just saying, this is a great song, and doing that for 15 minutes every single day and not putting a critical eye to it, but actually listening to the songs and assessing them and saying, well, obviously he achieved levels of greatness and how do these different songs fit in with it? His first couple of albums didn't really sell a huge amount, and his next two albums, they didn't sell very well either, but at least they were kind of critically acclaimed. And then he just kind of crossed over. It took him six albums before you get to Purple Rain. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:23):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:07:23):
For most artists these days, if you think of an artist and you're like, what was their sixth album? For some artists it's like, well, their career was over before they got to make their sixth album because they weren't given the chance. They weren't nurtured. Obviously Prince got into a bit of a fight with Warner Brothers, but he should have given them a bit more credit for the fact that they let him fail five times 

Speaker 1 (00:07:45):
Before. I guess I hadn't realized that was how long it took for him to become successful because I mean, what year did Purple Rain come out? 

Speaker 2 (00:07:55):
1984. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:56):
84. So yeah, I mean, I was three when Purple Rain was out. So in all of my life that I can remember, there was always Prince who was a superstar. So I guess I never really thought about that. Those early albums not being a huge success. I've only viewed them through the lens of like, oh, well it's Prince, obviously his debut album was a hit. I just always sort of just assumed that. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:24):
Yeah, it's funny, his debut album came out just at the tail end of disco, and there's a couple of songs on that first album, which are kind of disco ish, but you can almost feel Prince fighting against that and being like, I don't want to release an album now and be labeled as a disco artist. And he did have some hits in the disco charts as they were back then with Billboard, but you can almost feel him trying to push against that and be like, no, no, I'm definitely not a disco artist. And by the time he got to Dirty Mind, he was emphasizing the rock side of himself a lot more, kind of almost as if to make it clear, he was never a disco artist. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:06):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:09:08):
That's only really a battle that happens in the first kind of few albums. But it's really funny to kind of hear essentially this 20 year old asserting himself and being, even saying to Warner Brothers, don't release this single end up as a disco hit, and that's it. I'm pigeonholed and I'll never have any success, so just don't get it. Don't make it a hit in the clubs. I don't want that to happen. And it is just kind of interesting that they kind of let him fail for so long. And then eventually he delivered Purple Rain, sold like 30 million copies, so their investment was paid off 

Speaker 2 (00:09:44):
The budget for Purple Rain. The film I think was 4 million or something like that, and it made a hundred million. So he was a good investment. It took a few albums before that kind of paid off. And then from that point on, after he crossed over, he then kept Fighting Against Success. So many times Around in the world in a Day is a kind of sixties psychedelic throwback, that's his follow up to Purple Rain. You've got 30 million people buying your album and he follows up with this weird kind of psychedelic album. And people are like, what is, there's so many critics who are just like, oh, well this definitely is not Purple Rain too. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:25):
It's like, 

Speaker 2 (00:10:25):
No, of course it is. And it's only when you look back over his career, which goes from 78 to 2016, it's almost 30, 40 years. My maths is not fantastic at this point. But yeah, so it's almost a 40 year career and in that 40 years, I'd argue 20 of them are princes deliberately going to the fans and being like, did you just the last album I did? Well, here is an album that sounds absolutely nothing like that one. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:53):
Well, when you were talking about the idea of ordering the podcast alphabetically as a way to sort create a little more excitement and diversity, I was thinking about that. That's one thing. Actually doing it chronologically with Prince doesn't necessarily affect it in that same way because he is hopping all over the place and he is a person who made so much music so quickly and he moved on to the next thing. I know that's been a thing you've talked about a lot in the episodes that I was a guest on of he's already onto the next thing after. By the time he's touring for one album, he's already recorded the other one and doesn't care about, he drops things very quickly. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:44):
Yeah, particularly if you think about the time that Purple Rain was released, it'd spend, I think it was 30 weeks at the top of the chart, something like that. He had three number one singles from it during all that time. Prince was recording all of Around the world in a day. I think it's something like the day after Purple Rain, the film was released, he was recording raspberry the next day. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:07):
So 

Speaker 2 (00:12:08):
It's like to him, any album that he just released was an album that was nine months old, and those songs on there were probably a year older than that. So by the time you are hearing his music, he's like, oh, I don't care about that anymore. I'm already three albums ahead of you. I'm already recording stuff for Parade by the time you've even enjoyed Raspberry Beret. And so that constant kind of restlessness, you're right, you don't have to rearrange his songs to kind of make it interesting. Because if you think of an album that's as big as Emancipation, which is 36 songs, literally the middle of his career and the biggest album he ever released. And on that you have at least 10, 11 different genres covered. And if you were to rearrange those alphabetically just within that one album, you would be all over the place anyway. So it's like there's no need to kind of gimmick it up like that. So I was just like, well, if I start at the start and kind of just go through to the last song that he released and occasionally kind of divert for a bonus track here and there, because obviously he wrote songs for other artists. I did a bonus episode for Man Monday because it is not a Prince song, but people know Prince wrote it, so there's no point trying to hide away from it. So 

Speaker 2 (00:13:27):
There's a few songs like that. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:29):
Yeah, I think where 

Speaker 2 (00:13:29):
You've got to kind of acknowledge it, 

Speaker 1 (00:13:31):
I think I might've said this on your show or sometime, but I realized one day you can hum 1999 over top of Manic Monday and it works out all right. They're very similar songs, especially the verse of them, not so much the chorus, but the verse of Manic Monday in 1999 to me are just like, oh, this is the same song. So why do you think you got into Prince Mean? What was it, I mean, was there a certain time in your life that you started listening to him or? 

Speaker 2 (00:14:06):
The weirdest thing is I remember hearing Get Off played on a radio program and they didn't even play the proper version. They played like a remix. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:16):
And as the song finished, and this is a story I've told before, but the dj, he said, prince, and then he spelt out the title, he spelled G E T T O F F instead of just saying Get Off. And I dunno why that DJ did it, but instantly I was like, you listened to the song. And I was like, what is this song? I didn't recognize it as being Prince. I was just like, who is this artist making this sound? And I think it was the thrust mix or something. So it was like a slightly different mix. It was the thrust and the urge mix with the two kind of remixes that got a lot of play. So I immediately, on my wall, I used to have a poster, and on that poster I used to have post-it notes, and if I wanted to remember stuff, I would just write stuff on a Post-It note and just stick it on there very quickly just so that at a later date I would be able to remember, oh yes, I remember hearing that song. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:13):
I liked that thing. There were a lot of times where there'd be upcoming films and I'd be like, oh, I'd hear about it and I'd think, oh, I better quickly just write that down and just stick it on my wall just so I remember. And I just remember putting prints get off and just sticking that on the wall. And when it came to the Christmas time, I was getting a stereo for Christmas, and I said to my mom, I was like, I want this album by Prince called Diamonds and Pearls. And the only reason I wanted it was just for Get Off. But then I just listened to that albums, I think I only own two other albums, which was, please Hammer Don't Hurt him. And Paul Simon's Rhythm of the Saints, which was his Brazilian album. And so I had those three albums, but it was Diamonds and Pearls that I just listened to nonstop. And all of the songs on that album that literally was my 1991, was just listening to those songs nonstop. And what I used to do is I used to get one of the speakers and I would put it underneath my pillow and I would just put my pillow on top of my speaker and I would just listen to the album quietly as I fell asleep. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:27):
And the thing is, I'm not even quite sure just what it was about Get off, but looking back now, of course everyone cites it as being one of his classic songs. So I guess maybe that was just it. Maybe the quality just spoke to me, but I was just like, and then of course, by the time you get in at that point, prince had 13 other albums, so then it was like, oh, well, I've got to then gradually get each of those albums. So I was starting to go into his back catalog from that point on. But then at the same time, of course, by the time you start doing that with Prince, he's already got another album out. So instantly I was stuck in this kind of hamster wheel of there's always a New Prince album coming out, and there's tons that I've got to buy and listen to from the back catalog. 

Speaker 2 (00:17:13):
The fact that I think the thing that I like the most, I mean, I did a GT s e in music and I did a level in music and I went to university before I dropped out to do music. So I think maybe there was an appreciation of the fact that he was, first of all so prolific. This is something that if you think of classical composers, that's what they always were. If you think of Chopin, he would turn out 24 songs without much thought every other week. Writing a lot of music was something that, because a lot of composers, they had to get paid for it, and they had princes and kings who wanted more music. That was kind of the way of, if they don't write another Sonata, they're not getting any food next week. So 

Speaker 1 (00:18:01):
They 

Speaker 2 (00:18:01):
Were always kind. I think that kind of the fact that Prince was so kind of prolific and just was always putting music out, I think that's maybe one of the things that attracted me to him. And certainly when I did music at school, that was one of the things that, if I say quantity of equality, it sounds terrible, but one of the things that I kind of learned was, and I think this goes for a lot of creative things, is you just have to do that thing. If you want to be a musician, just write tons of music. A lot of it's not going to be very good, but just keep writing lots of music and eventually you'll get good at it and you'll also find out how to do it. Well, 

Speaker 1 (00:18:43):
That idea of patronage that you were talking about a second ago is a really interesting tie in with art obviously, because I think that's something that there's a really clear parallel with, and especially that idea of this sort of idea we have of maybe this pure art that's like, this is what the artist is making for them, which is a kind of newer idea. I mean, maybe it's cyclical, but I think when you look at so much of the art that we collect, it's much of it was made for, you're saying kings or the very wealthy people who could afford to have this art made for them, and it was designed to never be seen by anyone but them really, the idea of going to a museum and looking at all these paintings is also a relatively new idea. That's not how people experienced art for most of history. It's 

Speaker 2 (00:19:44):
The same thing with music. Most of music up until the last, I dunno, 140 years, most music wasn't recorded. It was always performed. So it's like 

Speaker 1 (00:19:53):
There was no way to record it. No, it's like for most of history, 

Speaker 2 (00:19:59):
So, and in particular stuff that was written for string quartets or chamber music was written for wealthy people to have a string quartet perform at their dinner party while their guests were milling around. It was kind of background music that was very expensive. You had to pay four people to sit there all night doing it. And so the idea of art being for the people essentially is such a kind of new idea. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:28):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:20:28):
Like you say, yeah, museums are, when you think about what a museum actually is, it's such an odd kind of thing because it's like, yeah, this is kind of art that was commissioned by wealthy people for them to look at that has somehow managed to find its way into a public space. And it is the same with music. It's like, oh yeah, obviously at this particular point in time you can stream practically any artist, but it's like the artist isn't getting very much money for that. But also the idea of having so much music be publicly available, it's only a recent phenomenon. It's like you used to be able to have to read music and play a piano to kind of at least get the gist of what the most popular songs of the day were. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:09):
I was thinking about how the way Spotify has changed how I listened to a lot of music and the way that I definitely was a lot more tied to albums in the past. And I would listen to an album over and over and over again until I knew it front and back. And that's just how I like to listen to music, especially when I was a kid and I would get a new cdd and I would just listen to that CD for a solid month and just on repeat. And there's 

Speaker 2 (00:21:40):
Also that anticipation of a song finishes and you know what the next song is. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:45):
Yeah, totally. You're 

Speaker 2 (00:21:45):
So used to a song finishing and being like, oh, I know what song's next 

Speaker 1 (00:21:48):
Because 

Speaker 2 (00:21:49):
It is tied together in your head in the album order. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:52):
But I was thinking about that and I was having a little bit of an old man moment, I think, where I kind of am like, this isn't how it used to be with myself. Basically I'm having this internal conflict about how I listen to music differently now. And then I was thinking, yeah, but that idea of even the album is not that old, the idea of how we listen to music and this idea of a lot of people hold that up as the LP is this sort of holy grail of how you're supposed to experience music. And I was just like, but that's really kind of new. That's not that old in terms of history of how people have been experiencing music. It's like if you think about concerts and how most people experience music, which was through live performers playing, it would not be like, oh, I always hear this song that's always followed by this song, and it's always this exact one performance of this one song. So I was like, well, I'm getting hung up on something that's also just an arbitrary way of listening to music that's just as arbitrary as how I'm experiencing it now. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:06):
And also limited by technology as well. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:08):
Absolutely. Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:10):
The length of an album was dictated first by how much they could fit onto one side of vinyl. And then there were so many albums in the nineties that were literally exactly 80 minutes long because that's how much you could fit on one cd. And I know that the Beatles were criticized because some of their double albums were no longer double albums when you could fit them onto one cd, but they still insisted on selling them as two CDs. And people were like, this could easily, we could drop Maxwell's silver Hammer and we could probably put all this on one disc and people would be fine with that. So it's the way of consuming art is always dictated by something. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:52):
Well, even the idea of having two sides to an album that changes the way that experiences is crafted in how that decision of what ends aside, what starts aside is really careful. And then you move to CDs and that goes away. And I think now, I think what I'm noticing, and honestly I'm not too sad about it, is we had the CD which could hold 80 minutes, and like you're saying, everybody felt the need to fill it or get close to an hour. And I feel like now, because of almost the way Spotify lets you hop around really easily, and I feel like people are making shorter and shorter albums and people are happier releasing multiple eps, especially smaller groups, and things are like, no, let's just put out four songs now because what's the difference? 

Speaker 2 (00:24:51):
Put 

Speaker 1 (00:24:51):
It out now, then we'll put out more songs later. And the idea of this that, again, that arbitrary time length of 60 minutes or 80 minutes or whatever, it's just completely gone now. And it's like, huh, now what do we do? You could do something that's four hours of continue. It doesn't really matter. You could do anything. And 

Speaker 2 (00:25:14):
The irony is that's kind of almost what Prince was working towards for a large portion of his career. He hated having to wait to put an album out in October and then promote a couple of singles, and then he just always wanted to be releasing music. And in the last few years of his life, there were a few times, I mean, there was one time in particular where Prince just tweeted something, which always makes me laugh. I can't imagine Prince handling the Twitter interface. So the idea of Prince logging into websites just always makes me laugh. What would his password be? But yeah, so there's just one night that's just like, oh, prince has tweeted out something about a song, and then it's like, here's a link, and you go to the link and I can't even remember what site was hosting it. It wasn't SoundCloud, it was something else, but it was just like this website that essentially had this one Prince song, 

Speaker 2 (00:26:05):
Which is called De Bourgeoisie, that's the name of the song. And it was never released on an album. It was never collected anywhere. It was just literally this one tweet that prince tweeted and that's it, that's the song, listen to it. And he'd recorded it a couple of days before, and there you were hearing it 48 hours after he recorded it. And it's like that's how he would've preferred to, I mean, he did it a little bit with a thing called the M P G Music Club where he would release, you could be a member for, I dunno, a hundred dollars a year, something like that. And then every month he'd release four or five tracks, and then by the time you get to the end of the year, you've got roughly an album's worth of material. But just the fact that you could just, prince could just upload a song and then tweet out the link and then that was it. That's it. The song's out there. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:51):
I feel like if he'd have lived a bit longer, maybe he'd fully embraced title in the last few years of his life where he'd put all of his back catalog onto title and he made a deal, and then he released a couple of albums that were title exclusive for six months, and then the actual CDs came out, you could buy them, but that was music that was, he'd only recorded a couple of weeks before it was put onto title. And so it felt like that's the direction he was heading in of brand new music all the time. But he kind of never got to do that, unfortunately. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:27):
You laughing about the idea of Prince logging into a website reminds me of something I think, I'm sorry if I've totally repeated this on your show. I can't remember if I did or not, but did I ever tell you about my friend's brother who was working for Blockbuster in Minneapolis? 

Speaker 2 (00:27:47):
No, you 

Speaker 1 (00:27:48):
Haven't said this. I haven't told you about this. Oh my gosh, no. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:50):
So I don't remember exactly what he did, but he was working at the central office or something, not at a store for Blockbuster. And Prince would call up a blockbuster store and ask them to close early so he could go in by himself to look at movies. And this is my favorite image in the world, is the idea of Prince and an empty blockbuster just picking up a copy of, I don't know, mystic Pizza or something and kind of consider reading and going, yeah, maybe this sounds good. I just love the idea of Prince doing mundane activities is really funny. So 

Speaker 2 (00:28:32):
I mean, I would love if Jerome Benham was following around and he was like, Jerome, did I pretty woman, am I a fan of Junior Roberts? Should we watch Mystic Pizza? Who else is in this? And he'd be like, Lily Taylor. And he's like, do I like Lily Taylor? Have we seen anything she's in? He'd be like, well, we did dog fight, but we thought it was a bit sexist. And he's like, yeah, okay, well then I guess we'll rent it. And the thing is, what would it say is when he changed his name, what would it say in his card? I mean, 

Speaker 1 (00:29:01):
That 

Speaker 2 (00:29:01):
Would be 

Speaker 1 (00:29:02):
The, oh gosh, 

Speaker 2 (00:29:03):
To be the person to take that phone call where someone's like, hello, I'm calling from Prince's office, but he's not called Prince anymore. We need to change his blockbuster card. Not going to come and using it. If it says Prince on it, 

Speaker 1 (00:29:13):
That would be so amazing, a Prince blockbuster card with just the symbol on it. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:20):
I'm sure someone with some Photoshop skills could fake that up and put it on the internet, 

Speaker 1 (00:29:25):
But 

Speaker 2 (00:29:25):
I dunno, the idea of when he changed his name, the idea of him having to change everything would be so kind of funny to me just like him having to, because it would never be Prince, of course, but someone having to phone up the D mv and being like, yeah, we need to change your name on a driver's. They're like, okay, what do you change it to? I'm like, well draw a circle and then draw a line going down and then put a point at the bottom and then cross through it and then draw a tail 

Speaker 1 (00:29:50):
And hook 

Speaker 2 (00:29:50):
It back over. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:51):
That's 

Speaker 2 (00:29:51):
What we're calling him now. 

Speaker 1 (00:29:52):
Do a little curly cue. That's fine. Well, since we're doing this remote, I don't think I mentioned it on the show yet, the first actual remote episode I've ever done of this podcast, since you are across the pond, shall we say, I'm hoping 

Speaker 2 (00:30:10):
People would've figured that out from my accent. 

Speaker 1 (00:30:12):
Yeah, well, don't worry. I mean, I'm sure you know this, but Americans are so thoroughly charmed by a British accent, so you've won them over no matter what you say. You could have just been on here reciting a phone book, and we would've been all about it. We'd be like, oh, look at 

Speaker 2 (00:30:27):
That. He's got that 

Speaker 1 (00:30:28):
Accent. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:29):
Isn't 

Speaker 1 (00:30:29):
It adorable? And also there's a twinge of authority that goes with it too. We can't quite break as we just celebrated our independence from you here recently. We still can't quite break the chains that we, there's something we do perceive it as like, oh, well, they must be smart. 

Speaker 2 (00:30:57):
It it's funny as well, because for Americans, obviously American history is very important, but for the British, we have, I dunno, 3000 years worth of history, a couple of years where we had you as a colony and then you left. It's not really that much of an issue for 

Speaker 1 (00:31:13):
Us. A drop in the pan. Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:31:15):
Yeah. It's like, okay, I mean, let off some fireworks and you wave flags around or whatever. But to us it's like, I mean, okay, it was the title of a nice film from 1996, but otherwise we're really not that concerned with independence. And the thing is as well, it's almost like you having to, it's almost like a bad breakup that you just won't let go where it's like, yeah, we are independent from you now it's like, yeah, okay, alright. So that was 200 something years ago. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:39):
We moved 

Speaker 2 (00:31:40):
On. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:42):
Well, and it's like one of many colonies too. It's like, 

Speaker 2 (00:31:48):
Oh yeah, I mean we had bigger problems going on in India. Trust us. 

Speaker 1 (00:31:52):
That's 

Speaker 2 (00:31:52):
More of a sticking point because at the very least, they gave us curers and they gave us a lot of cuisine that we were quite happy with and obviously a lot of tea. So if we're going to remember anyone, we're going to remember the people who gave us the tea rather than throwing it into a harbor. 

Speaker 1 (00:32:12):
Well, that's a good perspective. I was kind of wondering if anyone actually cared in England, if it did register on, if it made it into say, an elementary school textbook even. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:27):
Oh no. This is the thing as well is through the internet, I have American friends and a few of them have kind of visited this country and they kind of asked me questions about England and they're like, oh, what do they say about American history? And it's like they say nothing. Our history has so many king's names that we've got to learn. There's eight Henrys to start off with. So we've got a lot of other history to fit in that the fact that a bunch of our people went to another place and started a colony, that's a story that's told 20, 30, 40 times over. We've done that all over the place. And the fact that a couple of them got a bit antsy and decided they didn't want to be with us anymore, it's not really important to our history. I mean, we have more fun with saying that Australia is a nation full of criminals. That's more important to us is the fact that we use that as a prison colony. The fact that India managed to overthrow us, which unsurprising given the fact that we put so little effort into maintaining any kind of control over there, 

Speaker 2 (00:33:35):
It feels like independence was a lot more inevitable in India where there was half a billion of them 13 colonies deciding they didn't want to pay taxes to literally our most insane king we're like, yeah, okay, we understand. We weren't particularly happy about him being on the throne either, but his son just couldn't seem to get it in him to actually get things moving. In terms of taking over, no. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:04):
Well, I thought we could take a look at a work in the collection since we can't physically walk to it. I've sent you an image this we are looking at mini Opa Falls, Minnesota by Robert Ss, and so obviously, I'm sure you understand why I picked this piece today. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:25):
Yeah, it's funny because when I saw the type in the notes, I was like, I feel like we are leaning into the prince thing very hard here, but 

Speaker 1 (00:34:32):
Well, hey look, 

Speaker 2 (00:34:35):
The thing is as well, the way I think of Minnesota consists of three things, which is one first avenue, the club where Purple Rain takes place. Two Lake Minnetonka, although that's not Lake Minnetonka where Apollonia is asked to purify herself. And three, it's always under snow. Maybe four is Fargo, but that's in Dakota. So I 

Speaker 1 (00:34:59):
Mean, I don't know if I have much more detailed thoughts about Minnesota either. I've never been there, so I don't know. I think probably you and I are about on the same track as far as what we think about Minnesota. Again, I'm just like, oh yeah, prince, prince and Fargo. That's pretty much where I go as well. Maybe 

Speaker 2 (00:35:23):
Well, the accent, which I'm not going to attempt, but 

Speaker 1 (00:35:27):
Oh no, you're not going to try that. No, Minnesota. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:32):
Well, the thing is, I'd have to be fighting against my own accent to get it over, so I feel like I'd have to be doing an American accent and a Minnesotan accent. So 

Speaker 1 (00:35:40):
Yeah, that is double duty 

Speaker 2 (00:35:41):
Difficulty. Well, I mean unlike most of the things that I know about Minnesota, this kind of lush kind of green and the idea of, I mean, it looks like it finishes in a pool, doesn't it? You have the two little waterfalls and it kind of finishes in a little pool. This isn't what I imagine Minnesota being like, which is ridiculous because of course Minnesota isn't under snow a hundred percent of the time, 

Speaker 1 (00:36:07):
Right? Yeah. I think they have beautiful summers. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:10):
Yeah. So the idea of having a really green area in Minnesota, obviously for someone who's never visited, it maybe seems like a strange phenomena, but I guess this is pretty common. I mean, the painting itself, it it's like a photorealistic painting fairly, yeah, it looks very pleasant. It's like you could imagine were the weather a little cooler there, maybe just sitting by that pool and just being maybe dangling your feet in and just being in the quiet. I imagine if it'd be funny if it widened out and there's a gigantic industrial estate right next to it or something. But I don't think that would've been true of when the paint was painted, but 

Speaker 1 (00:37:00):
I don't know. Probably not in the 19th century. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:02):
No. Well, it just looks very tranquil and very quiet and it's a very pleasant painting. 

Speaker 1 (00:37:09):
I should have said this painting was made in 1862, so just a little bit of facts. Robert s Duncanson was a freed black man in the Antebellum us. So he's living during the Civil War and is one of the few African-Americans who are able to make a living by being an artist, which pretty much kept out that world and especially the kind of structure of it at the time really kept out anyone who was not white and generally wealthy enough to pursue an art education as well. So 

Speaker 1 (00:37:57):
I think what's impressive about this painting, when you look at it and you said you thought of it as being photorealistic, of course at the time, photography is brand new, so that's something to keep in mind. I mean, photography does exist at this time, but it is not certainly common and there's no color photography yet. And so it probably wouldn't be the way anyone would've thought about this painting most likely at the time is like, oh, it wasn't the benchmark by which we would judge a painting at that point. You wouldn't be like, oh, it's so much like a photograph. But it is impressive that he is basically a self-taught artist who learned all of this by studying other paintings and drawings by the masters. So he learned this all by himself. Another thing I thought was kind of interesting, and another reason I wanted to choose it maybe a little less on the nose than the Minnesota connection is he also has some interesting racial connections with Prince. Because I remember, I think I heard you talk about on another show, another one being not one I was a guest on about the sort of misinformation about Prince's parentage of whether he is of mixed race or not. That's something that's come up, right? Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:39:23):
That was something that came up because in early interviews that was something that someone at Warner Brothers put out there and Prince didn't correct. They said, oh yeah, he had a white mother and a black father. And that was kind of how it was kind of publicized. And then obviously when Purple Rain came out and in the film you have a black actor, you have a white actress 

Speaker 1 (00:39:46):
Playing 

Speaker 2 (00:39:46):
Those roles, and people obviously kind of felt that was autobiographical in terms of Prince's life. Obviously it wasn't parents separated fairly amicably when he was younger. There weren't any shootings or attempted murders going 

Speaker 1 (00:40:01):
Into 

Speaker 2 (00:40:01):
His house. But that kind of ended up being a repeated story of to the point where for years that's why I'd heard myself, and that's why I'd read in other Prince biographies. And I 

Speaker 1 (00:40:14):
Believe that too. That's what I had heard. And again, I think also that purple rain like you mentioned, I think that also cemented it in my mind as well as this must be fact, which is crazy. Purple Rain. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:28):
Yeah, I was going to say, there are very few other films where you're like, oh, Robert, Danny Jr must have a flying suit somewhere in your 

Speaker 1 (00:40:33):
Property, 

Speaker 2 (00:40:35):
Given how much money he makes for doing those Marvel films now I think he could afford, he may 

Speaker 2 (00:40:39):
Buy a flying suit if he wanted, but yeah, it was just a bit of misinformation. That kind has been repeated so often that someone on Twitter, actually after I'd put one of the episodes out, they actually corrected me and said, that's not correct. And I was like, oh, I hadn't even realized it. And when I looked into it a bit more, I was like, oh yeah, Prince's mother was, she was light-skinned, but she was most definitely black. And the same with Prince, obviously he was very much very light-skinned, but he wasn't mixed race. That was just something that kind of, I think Warner Brothers had a habit of lying about Prince early on. They said he was 18 when he signed his first record contract when he was actually 20. They seemed to come up with some misinformation in 78 that stuck around for about another 20 years before Prince started correcting some of it. But yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:41:32):
If you look at Robert Ss Duncans son's Wikipedia page, almost as accurate source of information as the film, purple Rain is Wikipedia, so you have, it will say that he is of African and European heritage and it'll say some things that are a little confusing and then it later goes on. If you get down deep into it, it'll say, it's often reported that his father was like Scott Canadian or something, but there's really no evidence for that. And basically he was a really as well, and probably as is the case with many people, there are sort of illegitimate children of slave owners and things like that that probably happened on both sides of his family. So he has this kind of also confused racial story that happens a lot and gets sort of often misreported, but both of his parents, as far as we know, we would typically identify as African-Americans, at least by whatever insane standards. I mean all of this is race is all made up anyway, so it's a little bit getting into the weeds on this stuff. It's like, I don't know, where do you draw these bizarre lines that are of course completely fabricated and made up 

Speaker 1 (00:42:56):
Basically to make a white person feel special. It's like you're not white is really the rule usually. Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:43:03):
I think it's interesting as well that I think he's interesting in that his surname is Duncanson, which Duncan obviously being a very Scottish name, very Scottish. So it is interesting that he's obviously identified as son of Duncan as being Duncanson, and obviously again, that's like a Scottish tradition of having McDonald and that kind of thing. So I don't know. That struck me as just interesting. It's like if he did have heritage from Scotland and stuff, his surname does kind of fit with that 

Speaker 1 (00:43:39):
Well, and a lot of slaves took on the name of their owners, so that as well, it's very hard to know where that starts and who gave them that name at what point. It's all very messy. But the other thing, I don't know if you notice this because it's kind of small and if you're able to zoom in at the bottom of the falls here, you'll see there is a person in this painting, I don't know if you saw them. 

Speaker 2 (00:44:10):
Yeah, the size that I'm looking at. I saw that was something, but I couldn't quite make out exactly what it is, but now you say it's a person. Yeah, I can kind of make that out. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:24):
And if you can zoom in, can you see him better or are you able to zoom in? 

Speaker 2 (00:44:28):
I think I'm zoomed in as much as I can, but yeah, I can't make out a face or anything, but I can certainly kind of see the shape of a body. 

Speaker 1 (00:44:39):
They're turned away from us, so what we're seeing is their back and it is when you get up close, you can see that they're wearing, they have feathers in their hair and it becomes pretty clear that this is also a Native American person in this scene too, which was also a pretty popular theme of the day of this time. And actually, let me just look up something really quick. 

Speaker 2 (00:45:14):
I mean when I first looked at it, because obviously there's a tree stump or something kind of in the very foreground, I think maybe I was thinking that was a small tree or something, and I hadn't kind of focused on exactly what it was. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:28):
What was really popular at the time was this poem, the Song of Hiawatha. Have you ever heard 

Speaker 2 (00:45:34):
It? Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:45:35):
Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:45:36):
I've heard the title. I dunno that I'd be able to hum it. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:41):
Actually you probably, I'll look it up here. You probably have heard, I dunno if you've ever watched old episodes of I Love Lucy or something too. You'll see there's an episode. I feel like that's how I remember knowing this. I 

Speaker 2 (00:45:56):
Love Lucy. It really wasn't a thing in this country really. Yeah, I know it seems odd to say, but it's like the only reason I know anything about I love Lucy is because of references in The Simpsons to I love Lucy. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:08):
Really? You only know Lucy from The Simpsons. I mean, there's so many things I probably I learned about through the Simpsons though, so I shouldn't say it like that. How many times did you, especially, you're probably about my age, I feel like probably you would see something first in The Simpsons and then watch the real thing later and go, oh, it's like that thing in The Simpsons, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:46:30):
Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:32):
So the line that I feel like you hear a lot from this poem is by the shores of Geechy, gummy by the Shining big sea water stood the wigwam of Kois daughter of the Moon. So that geechy gummy thing is pretty popular and it's like this weird thing where the poem is on one hand very sympathetic to the Native Americans and what was going on here and their treatment and being run out of their own country. But at the same time, it also perpetuated a lot of those kind of bad habits of pigeon speech, of that sort of 

Speaker 2 (00:47:15):
Fake 

Speaker 1 (00:47:16):
Gucci gmi. And it plays into a lot of those stereotypes. It's got some weird things, but I think it's interesting that in our gallery, if you were able to see it here, this painting has another sculpture in front of it that is also an illustration of a scene from that poem. And both of the artists are both African-American and the artist who made the sculpture is Ed Monia Lewis, who's both African-American and Native American descent. And so there was a lot of almost mutual sympathies that were basically like, Hey, we're both mistreated, right? We should sympathize with one another. So I 

Speaker 2 (00:48:05):
Mean I can see that that makes sense as if you were someone who was either a slave or descendant from slaves or close enough to being a slave, then obviously you would identify with what happened to the Native Americans in 

Speaker 1 (00:48:20):
America. 

Speaker 2 (00:48:21):
Yeah, it feels like the oppression of both of those people would at least give them a common theme, particularly when it comes to art. I would expect that they would both understand that they have the same viewpoint I feel. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:39):
Yeah, and is the point he's making this painting, he's traveling north and he eventually goes to Canada, so he is sort of getting out of the United States as well as this is sort of traveling. We have a lot of his paintings here because he did a lot of work in Cincinnati. He's not from here originally, but he did a lot of work in Cincinnati and found patrons and some of the wealthier families who hired him to do a lot of work. And so he has a big connection with Cincinnati, but eventually did move north and got out of there. So this is sort of as he's passing through and he goes through Minnesota, he is painting these seats. I should also mention I did look up, I was kind of curious how close is this falls to Minneapolis where since I'm making it tying into print, it's not actually that close at all. It's about an hour and 45 minutes south driving, I guess if you're in the Twin Cities, you got a 

Speaker 2 (00:49:45):
Little bit of a track. Yeah, I was going to say obviously living in a country that you could probably traverse in about four hours, the gigantic expanse of most of the states of America is kind of foreign to most Britts. So obviously the fact that it is kind of close to the Twin Cities, but at the same time it's like it's still a couple of hours drive away 

Speaker 1 (00:50:10):
To you guys. It probably that feels like so far. Yeah, I remember 

Speaker 2 (00:50:15):
Talking with, that'd be the other side of the country. You could probably be in France in a couple of hours from here, so you'd be in a different country if you traveled that far from here. But yeah, I find it interesting that basically decided just to go up north and was just like, that's it, I'm going to Canada. But then also the fact that he stopped and painted what I will say is quite a beautiful painting. He obviously found the time to, I mean this is not a painting that I can imagine took a short while. This feels like something that maybe he camped out for a couple of weeks and 

Speaker 1 (00:50:46):
Just, yeah, I believe he spent some time in the Minnesota area. I don't think he was just, it's like how travel was in those days where it's like every time I watch a movie that takes place in those time periods, you realize like, oh, people go and they stay for, they've made the journey to go visit their aunt or something and they end up living there for a year because it was such a pain to get to and from a place 

Speaker 1 (00:51:14):
You end up having these really long extended stays. So I'm sure again, he wasn't hopping in a car and just driving to Canada. So I'm sure it was a slow process of moving through is how I understood it at least that he was spending some time. He spent some time in that area. And yeah, I should have also mentioned that landscapes are what he is most known for. So he did do some portraiture and things earlier on, but really landscapes are his bread and butter and he's sort of like a continuation of what we call the Hudson River School who are really the artists who made, you could really argue they made America beautiful because up until those artists started painting the country, the perception was that America was a very ugly place, that it was not an attractive country. And they basically were like, no, we're going to show you the beauty of this country. And so they painted it in a way that has really changed how people perceived the landscape. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:29):
I can understand that. If you think of culturally how we think of America, I think maybe the first thing that spring to most English people's minds would be the wild West and everything being dusty and ghost towns and stuff being run down. But obviously to get to that point, you've got to have at least built a railroad to somewhere and built a town for it to become rundown and turn into a ghost town. So it's like the kind of people going out west and gradually colonizing the country, obviously that, I dunno, I guess that has a certain kind of perception. So I think maybe having artists deliberately go, no, no, actually some of this place looks quite nice. It's not just like dusty canyons. There's actual vegetation somewhere in this country. I guess that kind of makes sense. I mean, how interesting can it be painting Sandy canyons over and over again? There's not really much, well, I guess you couldn't make a 

Speaker 1 (00:53:34):
Living that that's what Giorgio O'Keefe did. But again, that's another person who really did affect the perception of that area. 

Speaker 1 (00:53:47):
I don't know if I would go so far as to say, I don't know. There are other artists who certainly painted the West and actually the same, this sort of time period too, this sort of romantic era. There are paintings of the West at that point as well too, but she definitely changed how people saw the West and saw those desert landscapes. And I think for a lot of people that did make them beautiful to them. It is hard to see when you look at this painting. It's another thing and you do kind of have to zoom in on it in some ways, but it is hard to understand what was maybe revolutionary about some of these paintings at the time. This period. You see people painting more scenes from nature more directly. And certainly some of duncanson landscapes too earlier are follow the earlier traditions where you kind of go out and you make a lot of sketches. 

Speaker 1 (00:54:51):
This painting was probably not done in this landscape here would be my guess. This was probably went out and it is a bit of an idealized version, but that focus on trying to capture a certain sort of reality of the scene is actually pretty different than what was going on in earlier paintings where nature was much more idealized and you weren't really actually seeing any landscape that probably really existed anywhere. It's just like, oh, well here's this waterfall I liked from this location and this valley I like from this location. And you can kind of start to tell, once you start looking at 'em, you go, oh yeah, this feels like a little too good to be true it. Nobody's ever seen anything quite like that. And these romantic painters play with that. Sometimes you'll start to notice if you look at photographs from the real locations and the paintings of them, you go, this is a little idealized in this way. They've kind of pushed this in a way that creates a little more drama. That mountain looks maybe a lot bigger than it really is in the real scene, but they're painting the feeling of being there too. It's part of it. 

Speaker 2 (00:56:03):
Yeah. I mean it is a nicely composed, you have the waterfall at the back is kind of between a couple of trees and then the way that the next waterfall is not directly in front of it. There's a little meander, so it's off one side. The area where he's painting may not have been this ideal, but it's a well composed painting and you look at it, and I guess you mean to me, I can kind of just imagine being there and imagine the quiet and just the sound of running water and just it being a very kind of calm place. And if that was the feeling he was going for then that's what I'm getting from this painting certainly is this kind of calmness. 

Speaker 1 (00:56:47):
Yeah, that composition you mentioned is It's true. I think one of the things it does, if you kind of follow the path of the water from the first waterfall down to the second waterfall down and then to the little pond at the bottom, you do make this kind of zigzaggy shape from left to right down the canvas. And I think what that does is it helps create a more realistic sense of space and that sort of, if you lined up those two waterfalls, you flatten the space out a lot and that's creating that volume and that sort of three dimensionality by composing it that way. So it's another really smart thing he's done. Plus all those trees, all those layers help create that space. You get all those different layers, you can kind of see those trees that are much darker up against the trees that kind of get lighter in the background, which helps also create that sense of space. Yeah. Well one of the things, this might be a really goofy question, but if you had to pick a print song to serve as a soundtrack to this painting, could you come up with one? 

Speaker 2 (00:58:04):
I think I would go with, the first thing that comes to mind is Another Lonely Christmas, which is a prince song about a lover whose lover is sung from the point of view of someone who has lost their lover. And it's actually quite a kind of tragic and very melodramatic song, but just, it's the only prince song I can think of that has anything to do with watering because it opens with about, prince actually says, I saw your sister Skating on the lake. So it's one of the very few songs that Prince ever did that refers to Lakes, which considering how many lakes there are in Minnesota, it's a miracle that Prince wasn't releasing every other song with the word lake in. 

Speaker 2 (00:58:55):
But that's like a very loud and noisy song. So it doesn't really fit with the calm, unless there is something noisy going on in the background that we can't see, then I guess it would fit. But I dunno, that's the first song that kind of comes to mind. But I guess, I think the thing with Prince is he very rarely does a song that is just kind of calm. There's always a certain level of dynamics. So it's like, I mean, I know there was a song that obviously we discussed, which was called Solo, which is just Prince doing acapella 

Speaker 1 (00:59:27):
With 

Speaker 2 (00:59:27):
A harp. And so I don't know, that would probably be about the Calmest Prince song that, 

Speaker 1 (00:59:32):
Or honestly even the other, one of the other ones we talked about, Venus de Milo could actually be a sort of, I mean it's purely instrumental, so that also maybe makes it, lends it better to a sort of landscape. It doesn't have a lot of other visuals that kind of confuse it, I guess. So 

Speaker 2 (00:59:56):
I could 

Speaker 1 (00:59:56):
Work here. 

Speaker 2 (00:59:56):
Yeah, I guess Venus, the Mylar would work, so I'd advise people to find Venus de Milo, I think it's on Spotify, and just listen to it as you look at this picture, 

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
It's the song I think from, of all the ones we've talked about, the one I hated the most. So you also have that to look forward to. My least favorite print song so far, Venus de Milo, 

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
I think I 

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
Liked it the least. I can't remember. 

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Yeah, I think the ones that we've talked about since Venus Deo, you have been more interested in. I think that 

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Venus Deo 

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
Was just very kind of bland kind 

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
Of music 

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
To you, but 

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
It was kind of bland. But I don't know. I still actually, I don't think it would be a bad fit for this painting if I was to try to fix something. I think it could work. So yeah. Alright, well thank you so much Darren, for being my guest. Do you want to plug your myriads of podcasts? 

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
Well, I guess if you search in iTunes for a talking cast, the cast next door as if a clueless podcast, I've made a huge mistake, which is my Arrested Development podcast. Or you could search for a podcast which I only really edit and occasionally guest on, which is called Stage of Fools, which is a episode by episode podcast about the e-series The Royals starring Liz Hurley. Or of course there is just Prince Track by track, which currently that is the only active podcast I have going on at the moment. So I think if you search anywhere for Prince Track by track, you'll find us apart from on Twitter where we are Prince podcast. And I'm quite happy that I'm managed to get that particular handle. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
Alright, well thank you again so much. 

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
No problem. It's wonderful being guest. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking. The special exhibition on view right now is Terracotta Army Legacy of the first emperor of China. Plus special features include Jane Bussy innovations and weaving and kenchi painting, beauty and death. Join us on Friday, July 27th from five to 9:00 PM for art after dark terracotta, army Beer Bash. Enjoy beer tastings from local breweries, live music from the hot Magnolias, food for purchase, from Dewey's Pizza and GRA ice cream, and access to the museum after hours. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Efron Mu by Lau. And always please rate and review us or tell a friend about the show. I'm Russell Iig and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.