Why Prince is still the king

There's a couple of artists with gender bending tracks on the pop charts right now, coincidentally under the same major label control. Usher's "Trading Places" and Beyonce's "If I Were a Boy" offer some very interesting commentary of what the lowest common denominator really is.

Usher's chorus talks about what's going down "tonight", but clearly the events in the song take place over a couple of days. Let's have a little consistency here if you're going to try and convince me that Usher doesn't actually have his maid make his dates coffee and jelly and all that. And, I can't wait for part two. Can't wait.

Beyonce goes for heaps of melodrama. I'm not really sure what the hell she's talking about, but I think she missed Usher's memo about having a "getting it on" part of the song, replacing it with bitterness and resentment.

21 years later, and the mainstream is still mining his Royal Badness for ideas it so desperately needs.

In fact, Prince's lyrics also refer to breakfast, going out for a movie, washing of hair, but for some reason, Usher's lyrics didn't go as far as oral sex.

Prince is like a weird pop alien from Mars who fell to earth bearing sounds of the future, but here we are at the end of 2008 still stuck in the past. Hopefully the good news will come in 2009, and we'll have Usher do a track with pitch-shifted vocals. That I would buy.