Bob Collins
You have to admire the pluck of City Pages. Who would have thought to get the dirt on Prince by talking to the people who cooked for him?
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Arts & Culture
Minnesota could make purple its official state color. It could name a new transit line the “purple line.” It could find a street somewhere and call it Prince Street.
Here’s another idea: It could better support music in public schools. Read more →
Jad Abumrad, the co-host of the Public Radio podcast, RadioLab, acknowledges now that he’s an ‘elder statesman’ of the art form and Time.com’s video profile of him — American Genius — reveals the genius and brilliance of one of the nation’s best storytellers. Read more →
‘Stop talking about the music,’ activist, author, and commentator Van Jones said on CNN last week, urging people to look past the music if they wanted to understand Prince.
And so the Los Angeles Times did in a piece looking at the singer’s religion. Read more →
There’ve been plenty of rock acts singing Purple Rain over the last couple of days. On Saturday night at Barclay Center in Brooklyn, Bruce Springsteen walked out to start his concert and didn’t say a word before launching into Prince’s signature song. Read more →
This might be the most powerful and insightful interview yet about Prince. Read more →
This was, the experts say, a beautiful ad placed in the nation’s newspapers today in the wake of the death of Prince. The consensus is this tweet from 3M hit the mark, thanks mostly to a well-placed teardrop. Or maybe it was rain. pic.twitter.com/yOTo1USL8o — 3M (@3M) April 21, 2016 But this one, from General Read more →
Who represents us now? Who puts the bounce in Minnesota’s step. Who’s left to declare to the world that Minnesota matters? Read more →
I can’t say I was ever a huge Prince fan. I was never music literate enough, I didn’t experience his evolution the way people in Minnesota did, and I’m not of the right generation, even though somewhere in the boxes of old vinyl albums, there’s a Purple Rain album I listened to once or twice. Read more →
This is a Theft of the Blog Day, during which I encourage you to be the blogging creative class and share your essays and posts on a topic of your choosing. Read more →
The lowlight of last Friday’s MinnRoast has already been documented here (and nowhere else, for some odd reason), but sponsoring MinnPost has released the highlight of its fundraisers: A skit featuring the sons of Gov. Mark Dayton — they own the Bachelor Farmer restaurant in St. Paul — trying to help the old-timer break into the restaurant business. Read more →
We loved the summer temperatures over the last few days as much as the next person, but there was still a feeling that it wasn’t right. It’s not summer in Minnesota; it’s spring… a predictable, slow-moving, tantalizing progression to summer glory.
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Three days before it was set to perform in Raleigh, N.C.., Pearl Jam has become the latest musical act to cancel a show in the state because of a new state law whose aim was to wipe out attempts in Charlotte to provide anti-discrimination protections to LGBT people. Read more →
Protesters with air horns disrupted last night’s MinnRoast, the fundraiser at the State Theater for the independent news site MinnPost [dislaimer: I am a financial contributor to MinnPost], after Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges used an incident during the 4th Precinct protests as the setting for a joke about her husband. Last November 18, a group Read more →
There was an article in The Guardian this week on the nature of online comments — The Dark Side of Guardian Comments. It looked at the experience of its online writers and found that online harassment is particularly ripe for non-whites and women. Not much of a surprise there. Read more →