The Prince and the Safecracker – The Weird Side of the Internet

The Prince and the Safecracker – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I wasn’t a big Prince fan when I was growing up. It wasn’t his music, I just thought he was another over-the-top rocker. That was before I had occasion to consider his music apart from his persona. This was when I heard the “My Guitar Gently Weeps” jam with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and Dhani Harrison. Prince, snubbed at the Rolling Stone’s “Top 100 Greatest Guitar Players” list, absolutely burned his guitar lead to show the rock illuminati that the Rolling Stone had made a mistake, and it was glorious.

So Prince died, of course, but he was such a prolific songwriter that he had 8,000 unreleased songs in a Mosler American Century safe, six foot and a half, 6,000 pounds. And long before he passed, he had forgotten the combo. So right as soon as he died, the family hired a “safecracker” to get in.

The safe was daunting, but the safecracker had cracked it to the family’s applause. Which might have been the first time a safecracker got an applause for breaking into someone’s valuables.

I think that the real takeaway here is that Prince had 8,000 unreleased songs. Where are they? I don’t mean the trickle, I mean the flood. Lets say you can get away with ten songs in an LP, one LP a year. So we should be in Prince for like 800 years.

How in the hell did he manage to write that much?

I don’t think the Grateful Dead wrote that many songs; well, probably. But this Prince collection could be the new “All I Want for Christmas.” A new Prince album that comes out the day after Halloween.

So let us beg and let us plead to the estate of the august performer Prince to become the October performer Prince and lay out the songs for the seasons. Are you with me, fellow music heads and musicologists.

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