The Artist Currently Known as Prince is locked in a legal battle with his fans-- or more specifically, the operators of his fan sites. His attorneys are going after the sites that use his name or image; the main sites have banded together and put up a protest site with the whole story. Here is an excerpt from their press release:

"Several of the largest web communities dedicated to the artist have received notices to cease and desist all use of photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to Prince's likeness. It is our belief that these threats are not made in an attempt to enforce valid copyright as Prince alleges in his threats, rather we believe they are attempts to stifle all critical commentary about Prince."

The Purple One responded with an answer song, which he put up (listen-only, no downloading) here. The 7-and-a-half minute jam is, and this is typically vexing and a little bit meta-textual, better by a mile than anything on his latest record by a mile (and y'all know I'm a fan.)

Anyway, I used Creative Wave Studio to capture the audio of this Pfunky jam and save it as a .wav file, and then I used Musicmatch Jukebox to convert the .wav to MP3, and so here it is for your listening-- and DOWNLOADING-- pleasure.

Will Prince's lawyers contact me? Yeah... if only!

Labels: pop culture, The tunes