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So, I'd like to suggest there's a simple reason for the debate in this post. I think there are two different conversations happening.
Conversation #1: You're looking at artists' output in terms of a hard quantity of "releases," and relating that to an arbitrary amount to listen to for a "deep dive." Because, in your view, that's an important metric for your question.* You're largely uninterested in defining those releases in any way, such as figuring out what's meaningful/not meaningful, or distinguishing posthumous releases, or listening only to "official" live releases vs, say, a bootleg later released through official channels (a la Jimi Hendrix). You're just interested in how much unique recorded audio there is, regardless of its source or its story. By extension, when you're comparing artists in terms of quantity, it's literally just a hard number, not an indicator of value, work ethic, etc.
This is not the way many of us think about an artist's output, and it's a different conversation than the sort we often have where quantity comes up... where we, say, compare the quality of two catalogs as part of a means of comparing artists. There, quantity plays a role but isn't an absolute factor. And in those sorts of conversations, the reasons that an artist's catalog size might differ, such as genre, are sort of tacitly understood. That's conversation #2.
Like, comparing Johnny Cash's catalog to Prince's catalog as some sort of proxy for relating the artists to each other wouldn't make any sense. They're totally different artists, and that shows up in the nature of their catalogs: Cash walked into some of these sessions, which were often lined with either studio musicians or with his long-time backing band, and whipped out a slew of songs, most of which were covers or trad tunes ... then the record company split that up over three records released over a year and a half. Or a cache of them were for an album proper, and another cache for a special occasion record, and other cache for a Christmas record, etc. That was common for certain high-profile country artists of Cash's period (though Cash is particularly notable, in part because his career was so long -- where others usually fade out after a decade or two); it's a given that his catalog will be huge and, because of the nature of his section of the industry, that it will include a lot of projects that quite frankly were not very important.
That approach to record making is pretty much the opposite of what Prince did, where he recorded a ton, but every album was pretty carefully constructed as its own thing, as evidenced by the amount he left on the cutting room floor. Where each album has a shape and a particular sound, a particular band; where it was accompanied by a very specific set of visuals and aesthetic, a specific tour, etc.
But for a good portion of Cash's catalog, that's not really a thing. They're collections of songs that mostly hang together because they were recorded together.
The issue of live albums is another obvious point here: if an artist has a ton of live albums released late in their career, I'm guessing most of us wouldn't think of that as part of their catalog proper; or, if live albums are a big part of a person's catalog, those are going to have an inherently different character and meaning than studio albums. They're different items.
Considered in context (time, genre, popularity, and the nature of releases), if we were having a conversation about quantity, Prince's output is indeed prolific for an artist of his sort. Again, that's not really up for debate. You can grab folks from jazz, or from the high-producing annals of country or early rock, but it's actually really hard to find "popular music" artists who have a similar number of intentional releases, by which I mean mainly studio albums or very particular live albums, released across a similar career length.
I think this is *especially* true of artists occupying the same span of time as Prince (from the late '70s onward). The label well ran dry on acts like Johnny Cash once you hit the '80s; very few popular artists had the green light to just record and release pretty much anything.
(With that in mind, Elvis Costello is a *really* good point of comparison here. He's rightfully considered really prolific for his sort of space, and he's released only 33 studio albums, according to Wikipedia.)
TLDR: The conversation you're having is a bare numbers comparison: i.e. how much publicly available recorded audio of Cash is out there, vs how much publicly available recorded audio of Prince is out there. I think this is still misleading - bc of the aforementioned problem with "releases" as a category of comparison** - but that's besides the point. The point of contention here, I think, comes mainly from the fact that we don't typically think of quantity of releases as a super meaningful variable in musical conversations, especially if completely de-contextualized.
And when you reduce artists to hard numbers in that way, I would argue it elides some of their uniqueness -- in this case, literally flattening what is actually a pretty unique career arc and output into something that is "average."
* Personally, I think it's strange to determine whether or not to a deep dive on someone based on whether or not they meet an arbitrary comparison of releases, especially when that audio doesn't have to be of a particular quality... but ok.
** Basie's a good example of the problem with "releases" as a term -- but I should wrap this up, I might come back later to elaborate.
-thebigfunk
~ i could still snort you under the table ~
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