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Prince: A Thief in the Temple | 
 enlarge | Author: Brian Morton
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 421561
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 1841959162
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.66092
EAN: 9781841959160
ASIN: 1841959162
Publication Date: October 10, 2007
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
From the basement studios of Minneapolis to the top of the Billboard charts and his bitter battle with Warner Bros., this honest and sometimes startling account of one of the world’s premier musicians examines his missteps and celebrates his recent reemergence. Since the explosive success of Purple Rain (the album, the single, and the film) more than twenty years ago, Prince has scored Top Ten hits, won Grammys and an Oscar, and finally been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame. He’s inspired protest and devotion, and provoked as many questions as he has commendations. BBC Radio’s Brian Morton mines Prince’s oeuvre, unmatched for breadth and excellence, to figure out just what Prince has created. Investigating his many feuds with old friends over songwriting credits and royalties owed, Morton also reveals the shrewd and sometimes cunning businessman within the man who has dared his listeners to think differently about sexuality, love, recording contracts, and assless chaps. Prince: A Thief in the Temple is a look behind the scenes and in the studio with the innovative, fearless, and iconic Prince.
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| Customer Reviews:
 A take so anemic as to be insulting to Prince or his fans September 21, 2008
Prince's career has had so many ups, downs, left turns and triumphs that no one book could contain the story of his career. Authors (be they biographers, musicologists or in this case, suggestive theorists trying to prove a point by balancing both biography and musical output) have largely had to content themselves with capturing the eras through which he passes, or only key developments of his career.
Prince traditionally produces so quickly and through so many avenues that most books about him or his music are dated almost upon publication. There are a few classic books (classic in the sense that they're great and in the sense that they are, yes, dated, but were great for their time) that really give what people who might be interested enough in the artist to read a few hundred pages devoted to his life and work: studio insight, musical inspirations, band drama, hard-to-acquire interview revelations, etc. This book, however, doesn't come close.
In all fairness to Morton, this book does not strive for comprehensiveness. The author is well aware that even a meager internet search would glean just about everything presented in this book; to a stalwart fan even less. Despite being a former academic, Morton's goal here is only to draw enough conclusive evidence to make a point, not to illuminate corners of Prince's world that audiences may not have seen or heard about before. So it is a slim book - a treatise, really, and under 200 pages very large-formatted - and it is extremely light on details...so light as to be offensively cursory.
But what is the point of the book, the premise? Be clear that it is not what its dust jacket suggests:
"[The work] alleging that all along Prince has been aiming for a biracial music...[Morton] dissects the man behind the artist and shows emphatically why [Prince] still matters in the twenty-first century."
I'm not saying he wasn't shooting for this; I'm saying the book doesn't accomplish this.
Looking for the answer in the preface seemed more prudent. Here is as close as we get to a point for this ill-conceived tome;
"The myth of America is all about successive rebirth, and seeming to grow younger rather than older...
Prince has followed [Miles Davis and Bob Dylan] in treating his own astonishing body of songs...as if they were counters on an improvisational game-field, part of an open flow of `work' rather than canonical `works'. he hard thing for any student of Prince, but an endless source of delight and discovery for his admirers, is that the real work does not come through to us as settled `product' but as a tricksterish chase after bootlegs, reworked ideas, willful suppressions and mere rumour. It has kept him, depending on how you look at it, either ahead of everyone else, or in sole charge of his own enigmatic game."
So the author thinks not only that Prince is a big calculator of a huge endgame of mind tricks, but that his book will be the one to show you just how cunning Prince's plan really is. What the author does not allow for is the most likely scenario of all: that Prince had a stunningly great start, peeked out a little, freaked out a little, despaired a little, hit a musical bottom aided in no small part by the fact that he surrounds himself with people 24 hours a day that wouldn't tell him he had a bad idea if their lives depended on it, and only within the last few years released some music people beyond only a slavish fanbase could appreciate. I think that a far more reasonable theory than suggesting that Prince is a puckish genius pulling our collective legs with tripe like "Chaos and Disorder" or "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic".
Morton seeks to prove all of this with a cursory take on his early years, a jaw-droppingly short take on his high-powered 80s success, and a practically non-existent take on the genuine turnaround of Prince's career post 2003. Even if I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, he doesn't give me enough room on the ledge to stand on next to him. And the constant desire by most Prince biographers to draw race into the equation hurts their cases more than it has ever helped.
In the end you could skip this book entirely and you would not have gleaned one thing about Prince you couldn't have gotten off of a fan site or in five minutes with a genuine, bootleg-collecting fan.
simply awful September 3, 2008
If you're looking for an accurate document of Prince's work, stay well clear from this book. Prince's prolific output deserves attentive, accurate documenting, and thankfully they are a few books out there that do this. Unfortunately this book doesn't. There are so many silly errors it beggars belief. The author just doesn't have a clue. It's as if he's been given only a few albums, and a few newspaper/magazine clippings from over the years and wrote this 'book' based on that. A total and utter waste of resources. If I ever come across this author, he's in big trouble. AWFUL.
 What a disappointment November 6, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
I was very excited when I heard that this book was going to focus on Prince's work and music and be less of a biography. What it contains is a hodgepodge of fact, rumor and critical analysis. Although I did find a few insights, I was astonished to find the approach to be all over the map. It barely maintains a chronological or thematic order -- where was the editor? Certain albums receive a lot of attention (particularly the 0(+> album)while others barely merit any notitice, in particular, anything past the aforementioned "Love Symbol" album. As the book runs through the release of "3121", that is a shame and a missed opportunity.
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