Prince is on a rampage! After insulting fellow pop icon Madonna during a Billboard interview, he targeted the band Maroon 5, slamming them for their cover of his 1986 classic “Kiss.”
Specifically, Prince doesn’t see the point to Maroon 5’s cover, arguing that it adds nothing to his classic track. NME reports that the Adam Levine-fronted band included their version of “Kiss” on their latest album Overexposed , which Prince also takes issue with: Specifically, the band including a cover on an LP.
Prince tells Billboard :
“I do pay performance royalties on others’ songs I perform live, but I’m not recording these songs and putting them up for sale. Why do we need to hear another cover of a song someone else did? Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what’s already there.”
Prince has actually been singing this tune for quite a while, saying that the music world would be better off is artists just stopped covering each others songs all together.
“I don’t mind fans singing the songs, my problem is when the industry covers the music,” Prince told George Lopez last year. “You see, covering the music means your version doesn’t exist anymore. There’s this thing called the compulsory license law which allows artists to take your music at will. That doesn’t exist in any other art form – there’s only one version of Law & Order , but there are several versions of ‘Kiss’ and ‘Purple Rain.’”
Do you agree with Prince, that the music industry would be better off without covers, or did you like Maroon 5’s version of “Kiss?”
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