Dear Prince:
A few weeks ago, you announced your Welcome to America Tour. This announcement was greeted with great excitement by your most devout American fans, despite the ridiculous name of the tour. You are an American citizen. Why are you coming to America? Don’t you already live here and have a lot of properties that you don’t pay taxes on until the tax authorities chase you down and demand payment? And, why you are not doing the 20TEN tour in the United States like you did in Europe and like you will do in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates? And why are you stuffing your show with a bunch of artists that no one wants to see? And of course, the most important question, why are starting your tour just a few days before Christmas?
I know you don’t celebrate Christmas and that you need replenish your bank accounts given your huge tax penalties and the ridiculous amount of lawsuits that you lost in 2010. (Did no one ever tell you not to sue babies and not to make a deal with a stinky perfume company just because their name reminds you of the Bible?) Do you really need to burden your fans with your problems? Sure, you are worth the $173.00 sticker price for tickets on the floor and possibly worth the $500 per person for a table in the exclusive Purple Circle. But, why right before Christmas?
Do you not realize that you are old? Since you are old this means that most of your fans are old and are parents. You would like to think that your fans hot twenty-somethings but that is not the case. Face reality, your fans are mostly women between the ages of 35 and 48 who were kids when you took the pop music world by storm in 1984 with Purple Rain. Yes, it is true. Your fans don’t have taut asses and perky breasts, they are bunch of stretch mark laden, cellulite riddled moms who are going to try to look like Vanity (circa 1982) by squeezing their sagging, misshapen breasts and post-baby bellies into retro trampy dresses, lining their eyes heavily in black to mask their crows feet and wearing thigh-high boots to hide the spider veins. This really should have occurred to you once your promoters used the line “maybe your parents told you about him” to sell tickets to younger audiences.
So, although I have no problem being an “old fan,” who is willing to place financial burden on my family and will happily wear my streetwalker boots that hide my cankles, I am not thrilled about wearing so little clothing on the East Coast in the middle of winter. (Still searching for fashionably floozy dress that can easily be converted into a conservative dress that is appropriate for my library’s reference desk.) From the financial burden to the weather forecast, a concert in December is just bad idea, but you are “The Prince of the Bad Idea.”
In fact, 2010 has really been a banner year for your bad ideas. You started the year off with your depressingly dreadful fight song for Minnesota Vikings, which caused thousands, no hundreds (most football fans don’t know who you are) to blame you for their loss. Then, you followed that travesty with a couple of crap demos and fled to Europe for a few magnificent shows with fantastic set-lists (I know this because bootlegged copies of the shows were available almost immediately. Great job trusting the Europeans. They gladly steal from you just like the Americans.) You deprived your American fans of legal opportunities to hear those songs and then further screwed over your American fans by only releasing 20TEN (a really solid musical offering) through newspapers and magazines in Europe. You got your money upfront with no thought of your fans. Most of your fans didn’t care because they had an illegal copy of the CD within 24 hours of the release in France. But, now you are releasing a deluxe version of 20TEN. So, fans will soon pay an obscene amount of money for a CD that they partially possess. You know your hardcore fans are completists and will purchase every brilliant, average and horrid piece of music you put out.
Yes, 20Ten Deluxe is just another example of the way you screw over your fans. Redundant, frivolous albums, ridiculously overpriced inconveniently timed concerts not to mention all the embarrassing things you say like “the internet is dead” that forces your fans to defend your crazy ass. If there ever was an artist who did not deserve fans, it would be you, Prince. But for some reason the fans like the way you screw us. You don’t deserve it, but you’ll see me and thousands of your other fans when you come to America. See you then.
Sincerely,
Garbageman’s Daughter
