FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm sorry Prince is dead, but there's not much on the internet of him I can use. I'm sorry Hound Dog Taylor is dead too.
• Chuckleheads like Steven Hayward at Power Line are trying to portray the placement of Harriet Tubman on the 20 dollar bill  as a crisis for liberals because a few authors (including my old pal Steven Thrasher) have noticed the irony of a soldier of liberation appearing on the currency of her oppressor. But by and large the liberals I've talked to (and I see lots of them at our frequent abortion-fests) are pleased to have Jackson o'erthrown by a freedom-fighter. Actually the real split appears to be among conservatives: The Hill cites a survey showing the Trump faction (which, I remind you, is yuge) mostly against the new avatar for reasons I bet you can guess. The anti-Trump conservatives, perhaps sensing a propaganda opportunity, have devised a claim on Tubman because, as National Review's Eli Lehrer writes, she was "black, Republican," and "gun-toting" -- as if she were an NRA yahoo rather than a person of color operating in a time and place where she could easily have be killed without consequence. Some of them even want Tubman shown holding a gun on the bill. I would agree, if she could be shown using it to kill a white man. (Also, I bet every one of these cowboys would plotz if they came upon a live black woman with a gun.)

• Oh and yeah, Prince. So much has been said already, but I will say that he was always reliably fresh in a way that even the most talented non-genius musicians aren't -- after I stopped paying close attention to him in the glyph era, every so often a new AFKAP/Prince tune would pop up and suddenly all would be funky and right. I'm listening to HITNRUN Phase Two now, and with its rock-solid pop values -- not just in the way it's written but in the way it sounds, the way the stings and squeals are placed, the reverb on the flute, the twist of the stomp-box dials -- he could have written it 30 years ago. Who knows, maybe he did. But it has no smell of the basement or the retro vault; it's as new as today. And so is everything he did from I Wanna Be Your Lover onward. Even the cheesy 80s synthesizer and drum pad sounds on the old stuff don't chain his music to the past. That's because of his gift, but also because he was always down in it -- though he was a great guitarist his real instrument was the recording studio, and he played its variations obsessively and revealed them to be limitless. That's good to remember at those moments when you get sick of pop music or feel too old to participate and start to believe that what the withered scolds of the past hundred years say is true, that it's just cheap crap for children; Prince always proves them wrong. We didn't get tired of him because he never got tired of music. He believed in jazz, rhythm and blues, and this thing called soul; he believed in rock 'n' roll.