Photo by penner - Wikimedia Commons
Prince at Coachella
Prince performing at Coachella
The death of Prince on April 21, 2016, came as a shock, and like the death of John Lennon 36 years earlier, fans will always remember where they were when they heard the news. I was in a car with Shepherd Express coworkers; we learned of his death from the news at the top of the hour. It was dumbfounding. Prince wasn’t even 60 and like Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan, he should have had many miles ahead even if he no longer led the way.
Other than their common origin in Minnesota, Prince and Dylan seem to share little, but I couldn’t help thinking of Dylan while finally reading Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. The 2019 book (from Melville House) included his final interview, with The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis (2015), as well as nine previous “conversations,” ranging from his high school newspaper (1976) to the New York Rocker (1981), MTV (1985) and even Vegetarian Times (1997).
Like Dylan, Prince could play the press like an out-of-tune piano. He could be monosyllabic as well as enigmatic. He tended to avoid interviews, and despite his reluctance and game playing, occasionally gave an interesting account of himself. Was he letting his guard down or erecting barriers of misdirection? When asked in 1997 if his song “Computer Blue” had “anything to do with computers” (a dumb question?), The Artist (as he then called himself) replied, “It may. That hasn’t revealed itself yet.”
Prince’s impact was seismic in the early ‘80s, his music and persona overspilling the resegregated racial boundaries of American music. He was George Clinton with mass (sex) appeal, Sly Stone married with Jimi Hendrix, a soul singer and a grandmaster funk with rock star delivery. His resolute heterosexuality was tinged with Little Richard and like his androgynous ‘50s forebear, the spirit wrestled with the flesh to uncertain resolution. In the ‘80s, Prince couldn’t quite match the sales of Michael Jackson’ Thriller, but where MJ was the product of the entertainment industry, Prince was his own mega-corporation whose multiple subsidiaries included Morris Day and Sheila E. Even MJ couldn’t claim to simultaneously score number one for film, album and single (Purple Rain, the movie’s soundtrack and “When Doves Cry”).
He produced ideas and songs faster than his record label, Warner Bros, knew what to do with them. He’d signed with WB at age 18—an Orson Welles Citizen Kane contract that gave him virtual artistic control. However, the label “wanted to filter his output,” as essayist Hanif Abdurraquib put it in his intro to The Last Interview.
And so began Prince’s unanticipated sidestep from center stage. In the ‘90s he “freed” himself from his Warner contract. He called his next album Emancipation; on the cover, a pair of unshackled hands, as if slavery equated with being a star who couldn’t gratify every itch by releasing anything he wanted whenever he wanted. He didn’t want to be Prince anymore and became known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or The Artist, or the “Love Symbol” glyph (supplied to the press as a CD-ROM, can’t open my copy on my laptop).
Under any name, he was endlessly prolific, unstoppably creative, and possibly unable to weigh his own relative merits. Some interpreted his Artist stance as a brave stroke for artistic freedom where others saw only egomania buttressed by pretense. As The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote, he was “never a man exactly crippled by modesty.”
He became Prince again, and continued to make music almost continuously, but if his records didn’t chart as high as before, he never forgot how to command an audience. His 2007 Superbowl halftime show, performed during a torrential downpour, left on impression on 140 million viewers.
Even with his decade-defining records behind him, Prince retained, as Abdurraquib writes, “his superhuman capacity to hold so many other people inside of himself … and his ability to satisfy each of their sonic and aesthetic needs.” And yet, superhuman or not, he was, after all, only human. The physical demands of his dynamic performances coupled with the inevitable entropy of aging resulted in physical pain. He sought relief in opioids and like millions of Americans, fell prey to addiction. It was a terrible irony for a musician who famously avoided some of the pitfalls of the rock star life. Wary of alcohol or recreational drugs, he became dependent on hydrocodone, and the illicit dose that killed him was laced with fentanyl.
What can we make of Prince ten years after his death? For those of us around when he broke, his records represent nostalgia for a time when “1999” seemed long into the future. Looking back on his career in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we can see how he demonstrated the importance of branding in pop culture and the danger of diluting or confusing the brand. He demonstrated how singular figures—Beyonce or Taylor Swift today—can exert their will in the music industry, albeit I imagine there will be fewer such singular figures in our increasingly fragmented society than in the past. And yes, he left a lot of music, and the best of it still sounds timeless.
