…something borrowed, something purple
[Edit 4/28/16.]
I’ve mulled over what to say, or whether to say it, about
Prince for almost a week. I found out about his death after I had done a lot of
blog work last Thursday, and though I usually check news websites during the
day when working in the library, I hadn’t done this up until I got in the car
and the radio, tuned to a news station, came on. My first thought about the
ongoing coverage of Prince was something like, “It wasn’t his time yet.” Which
probably many of us thought.
And since tributes, allusions, etc., to him are still
rolling on, I might as well offer a few thoughts.
MTV as the big
launching pad
I was already a pop-music aficionado by the early-mid 1980s,
but what is interesting about the first Reagan term is that U.S. pop music
suddenly seemed to take on a new youth and colorfulness, especially with the
rise of MTV in its ever-rotating music-video days. More personally, the period May
1984-early 1986 was a rare one in the early decades of my life in which I had access to something that was
considered a privileged accoutrement of the time; and this, in particular, was
cable TV. And I just happened to have this access (as a function of the
otherwise Spartan shared-renter house I lived in in Arlington, Virginia) when
MTV was in its first (maybe only) glory period.
And stars were made then who fit two criteria: not just the new-flavor
music, but the visual look, tailored to TV, that focus of sensationalism, short
attention spans, etc.
Prince, of course, was in heavy rotation. Not only him, but
for a time his protégé Sheila E. He was probably one of the two biggest names
in Black stars on MTV then, the other being Michael Jackson. But also, was what
key to understanding about these two stars and MTV, they were “crossover”
successes: they appealed to both whites and Blacks. (Jackson, of course, had
had a career going on through the 1970s, where he was more of a “Motown” star;
MTV remade him, helped by his monster-hit album Thriller [1982] as a crossover star.)
So, when you were aware of MTV—and not only that, but in (my)
working at the Marvin Center (and otherwise being among the college culture),
you were quite aware of the big Top 40 hits on the radio—you then became quite
conversant in Prince, Duran Duran, and many others whose eye-catching videos
were in good part key to their enormous success.
Prince’s amalgam of influences,
and trademark “je ne sais quoi”
Prince’s image, sound, and way of working were all cemented
in the mid-1980s; note that, while his long career and ~35 albums have been
remarked on, the big hits that people lately recall fondly seem to be all from
the 1980s. Then, he managed to keep a career going based on his established
persona and type of art ever since, even if after the mid-1990s (and his famous
dispute with his distributor, Warner Brothers) he was no longer the much
talked-about trendsetter he had been until then, though he didn’t become half a
joke the way, say, The Rolling Stones have become.
Prince was nevertheless like the Stones in having a central
feature of his music being one (or a gestalt of a) defining quality: for them,
it was a combination blues and country take on rock music; for Prince, it was
funk/dance music, with the pronounced drumming/beat being maybe 85 percent of
what a lot of fans needed to hear before their asses would be shaking on the
dance floor. But Prince did songs that you remember also for their more global,
atmospheric sound, and some of their lyrics—like the best pop songs of artists
of any race: “Little Red Corvette”; “Delirious”; “1999”; “Purple Rain”;
“Raspberry Beret.”
Though he has seemed unique, he was an amalgam of a variety
of influences that actually makes him, I think, the last of the great
“bridging” pop artists following World War II. Remember, in the 1960s, when
civil rights fights in the South were still raging (and it was rare to even see
the likes of Bill Cosby on TV as a star), the most cutting-edge rock, building
on stuff that fermented in the 1950s, showed it embraced both Black and white “street”
culture. The Beatles (whose hit single “Twist and Shout” was an adaptation of
an Isley Brothers song) and The Rolling Stones (and Elvis) were “white boys” doing
music that in many respects was Black. No need to belabor this kind of point.
Among Black artists, going back to the late 1950s, some were
cutting-edge for sheer outlandishness of a sort, such as Little Richard, whom
Prince may have echoed in largest proportion as a sheer visual figure. Little
Richard was someone whose blues-shouted-type singing and “questionable sexual
orientation” meant that, if your fine white daughter was grooving to his music,
this music was nothing if not boundary-breaking. Prince not only adapted the
Little Richard sexuality-puzzle in his own androgynous style (while the Prince private-life
mates of various sorts, spouses or consorts, all seem to have been women), but
also, in his hardworking funk-group delivery (and associated sexual
confidence), he echoed James Brown a lot.
People have talked about his guitar playing; I think there
was a superficial way he echoed Jimi Hendrix, but this isn’t very instructive,
as Hendrix was a new-rule-setting guitar virtuoso who made guitar the center of
his act, while with Prince guitar was more of an accessory. (Some remark of Prince’s
that got quoted, that he was more influenced by Carlos Santana than by Hendrix,
I think is about right. Santana, himself enough of a blues-based guitarist that
he is among the league of Clapton, Page, Beck, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn,
Robin Trower, and others, developed over the decades more of a
“spiritual”/multicultural flavor to his music, which seems to accord more with
Prince’s approach.) Granted, Prince liked to showcase his guitar-playing at
times, again “mixing it up”—adding a “white-rock guitar hero” element to his
Little Richard/James Brown mix, showing his crossover approach and his overall
eclectic style. But I think as a musician Prince was more impressive for the range of instruments he used—and piano (and
keyboards in general) seems to have been central (to his early development and
his later sound).
I didn’t realize he recorded all his albums by himself,
playing all the instruments [update 4/28/16: Actually, with me no big expert on him, this isn't entirely true; his backup band The Revolution played on some of his albums, e.g., Purple Rain and Around the World in a Day]. What is more remarkable is that the music didn’t
come out sounding precious, stilted, or amateurish for this.
How I got “hooked on”
Prince
What impressed me about Prince in 1985 was his album Around the World in a Day, which I either
borrowed from a housemate (more likely) or bought. His doing, with this, a sort
of take on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper
was interesting because it wasn’t him coming out campy or self-indulgently
“dabbling”; he seemed to make something new and synergistic, stamped with his
own trademark beat. He wasn’t being “manic,” saying “I can do this shit, too”;
he was doing a tribute yet also taking a different route for himself as
reflected what has been remarked on a lot recently, his capacious music-prodigy
quality.
He went on to do an imitation, keyed to his own musical
roots, of The Beatles’ “White Album,” though The Black Album has had an odd history of not being decisively released
as Around the World was. I
appreciated Prince’s foray into “white kids’” music as him showing his
crossover ability and appeal. It’s not that I simply wouldn’t like him if he
didn’t take a stab at white pop; I came to admire his generosity as an artist.
Someone also, years ago, gave me a mix-CD of various pop
artists’ songs, which included Prince’s “Housequake,” which is remarkable for
its elaborate drumming that seems as if he played three bass drums at a time
(which is, I think, technically impossible). (And did he often use a drum
machine?)
(Though his Purple
Rain—the movie and the album—have been referenced repeatedly since last Thursday,
at the time those were out in 1984, while I was aware of the “mania”
surrounding them, I was not a fan. I didn’t quite understand the phenomenon of
that film. I don’t begrudge the fandom
for this; it just didn’t catch fire for me personally. Today, with much water
under the bridge, I’d say that even the song “Purple Rain” strikes me as the
sort of touchstone people would grab onto when they really don’t fully know the
artist—similar to how some people might think The Beatles were only about “Hey
Jude.” But that may be enough for a lot of people today, where they aren’t so
much loyal to specific groups, albums, or artistic styles when they have tons
of songs from tons of artists on their iPods, picking and choosing as gym
workouts and “tunings-out” require.)
So I have Prince in my system without being a diehard fan.
He was as familiar to me as Duran Duran, which meant in part a reflection of a
time (now 30 years ago) of unusual ferment—rejuvenation—of American pop music,
prior to Internet-affected culture.
Even Prince, in a
sense, got elderly
And his old-time “bridging” style seems to have gone by the
board. Not only is it ironic that in the immediate wake of his death, it seemed
the TV media (at least) selected predominantly Blacks on the street to be
sampled for their reactions—almost as if he was only (or mainly) a
Black-audience artist—but we know today that artists of his stature wouldn’t
try music in some “vastly different” (racial) genre as he did in the mid-1980s.
Imagine Taylor Swift recording a hip-hop album that actually sounds like pretty
good hip-hop (I admit, I’m not a big fan of hip-hop myself). Music has, no mystery,
gotten more fragmented among sub-audiences since the heady MTV days.
