Prince’s first album
was released the year before I was born and his music permeated my childhood. I
don’t remember ever not knowing who he was. 1999,
Little Red Corvette, Purple Rain, Raspberry Beret, U Got the Look, Cream, I
Feel For You, Let’s Go Crazy, When Doves Cry, I Would Die for U, Kiss. These
were the backdrop of car rides with my parents to school, dancing around to the
radio with friends, swimming in summer. His presence was palpable and
ever-present.
Scott Woods says in his essay/eulogy “Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods” that “if you are, say, thirty-five years
of age or older there is a 99% chance that you are no good right now. Not
merely sad, but irreparably despondent. Verily, Shakespearean in your grief.”
I grew up a Catholic
schoolgirl in the South. Everywhere I looked, there were strict rules about
what one did and did not do. Rules about fashion, about gender, about bodies, about what one should do with one’s body (not trust it) and should
do about sex (not have any), about what did and did not count as sin. As a
child, I was both terrified of breaking these rules and deeply suspect of them.
I spent much of my childhood being indoctrinated into rules about how I was
allowed to be in the world that would take years to unbind.
I remember watching
Prince’s 1991 performance of “Gett Off” at the MTV Music Awards and being
completely and utterly scandalized. I was twelve. Although my parents were lax
on what I watched, I can’t imagine them not turning off the television when
this happened. So maybe I was not home watching. I don’t remember that detail. What I do remember is that canary yellow suit
and the moment he turned his back to the screen and revealed his butt, covered
only by thin sheer fabric. I gasped. Prince was wearing buttless pants! Naïve and thrown off by his wardrobe, I completely missed his nearly-naked
backup dancers having what amounted to a group orgy on the stage behind him,
grinding and writhing up against one another. When I watched his performance
again—along with a slew of other videos, performances, and interviews—in the
aftermath of his death, I found myself stunned I had not seen them. But the
truth was—with or without buttless pants—when Prince was on stage, everyone
else disappeared.
Early on the morning
Prince died, I had checked my Facebook page and saw a news alert about an
emergency at his residence Paisley Park, but not for a single moment did I
suspect the emergency had to do with Prince. He seemed untouchable,
immortal. Someone had partied too hard,
I thought. People were always coming in and out of there, I assumed. But when I
checked my Facebook after I taught my first class of the day, I saw a stream of
posts referencing Prince. My response was visceral: heart sunk, stomach
clenched, breath caught in my throat. It couldn’t be true. But it was. And I
spent that day, like many of us, in a cloud of mourning.
For me, this was a
mourning I couldn’t completely locate or understand.
Here is the thing. I wasn't a super fan. I didn't know obscure songs. I never saw him in concert. I
didn’t even own any Prince albums. If someone were to ask me who were the most
influential musicians in my life, I likely would have left him off the list.
I have always loved
Prince’s music but when I was a kid, he confused me. I didn’t know what to make
of him: his androgyny, his fashion choices, his tremendous vocal range and the
way he completely possessed those notes and the power of his own voice in a way
that made me both aroused and alarmed.
But some part of me deeply
wanted to understand. Because I think I got, even then, that Prince had the
flowchart out of a world of limited living. That by understanding him, I would
understand the key to self-possession, to creativity, to boldness and necessary
risk. I saw in Prince someone unapologetically himself, unconcerned that not
everyone would get him. In my
rule-following self flamed a tiny kernel of something that yearned to fully
express and vanish my fear of being different.
*
Elena Passarello
read several hundred pages of Prince interviews that spanned thirty years to compose “Ceremony of the Interview of Princes" in tribute to and imitation of acclaimed essayist Montaigne who authored
an essay with the same title. Montaigne’s essay is concerned with the etiquette
of meeting with Princes, or actually with the etiquette of meeting with someone
in higher standing than oneself. Passarello’s is, too, using a listing format
to tell us what one should and should not do in interviewing Princes—i.e. all
of the different Princes that made up the artist we came to know as Prince. In
doing so she creates a portrait of Prince that reveals his mutability, his
ability to shapeshift and also the common threads running through.
Her list of how to proceed shows how to call on Prince or wait to be called upon. The list of instructions asks questions, regarding Prince’s demands and also the expectations of those interviewing him. The list reveals all it takes to get into a room with Prince and also all it takes to remain there in good graces, including not having your pencil confiscated for lack of eye contact and staying away from off-limit topics. The list reveals elusiveness on Prince’s part but also thoughtfulness. The list warns about accidentally upsetting him without knowing what you did or what you can do to correct it. But it also reveals an understanding that the hype about Prince is not hype.
Passarello writes: “There is something you must know before
you end up alone with him. The rumor he is magical is completely true.” Later
she says, “He might ask you not to report any of the words of your meeting, but to just
write down the vibes.” The reporters of interviews past, she shows through her exploration,
are concerned with their questions--but that is not Prince’s concern: “You might
feel that your interview has ceased to be an interview and has instead become a
riddle to solve. This will never be far from the truth.”
Wasn’t that what was always so compelling about Prince? The element of mystery? The way we saw so much of him and also always had lingering questions about who he was and what he was trying to tell us? Rather than being
infuriating, this endless curiosity, this mystery unfolding felt like part of his
offering.
One constancy throughout
the instructions on the ceremony seems to be this: Prince will not let you
record his voice. But the other constancy in what Passarello uncovers and
writes seems to be his desire for realness in the moment. It seems his rule
switching is part of a desire for an authentic experience. This is not the
usual pathway of interviews. The interviewer and the interviewee come in with
expectations, with things they want to ask, things they want to say. It seems
in his process, as explored by Passarello, Prince refuses the notion that an
interview—or anything—goes only one way.
*
Since his death,
much has been written about Prince. Some have discussed how he supported women artists and musicians in a misogynistic field that at the time (and to some
extent now) only regarded them as backdrop or eye candy.
Reports poured in of
his incredible philanthropy, which his Jehovah’s Witness faith proscribed
against advertising. But I also get the sense that faith or no, Prince was more
interested in doing the work in the world than recognition.
Lest the work being done become about him somehow and not about the work
itself. The beneficiaries of his work
included Green
for All and the Black Lives Matter movement. At the 2015 Grammy’s, he said, "Albums still matter. Albums, like books
and black lives, still matter."
In “Prince and the Sparkle Brains: Growing up epileptic, surviving sexual abuse,and loving Prince,” Karrie Higgins explores how Prince whose chronic pain and physical ailments informed
the development of his stage presence. She quotes a 2009 interview with Tavis
Smiley where he discussed his epilepsy “publicly for the first time”: “From that point on,” he said, “I’ve been having to deal
with a lot of things, getting teased a lot in school. And early in my
career I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I
could.” Higgins explores Prince’s story in relation to her own and writes: “Prince was a walking disability poetics.”
The outpouring of grief in the week since he died has been
tremendous. This feels like a cultural moment we will remember forever: Where
was I when I heard the news that Prince died? More so than
other musician deaths, Prince’s passing felt urgent and palpable, calling for
the need for collective mourning.
And also celebration
that we had him as long as we did. Vigils were held outside Paisley Park. Minneapolis Public Radio's The Current stopped their scheduled programming to broadcast Prince for nine hours and in following days ran through his catalogue from A to Z. A jazz funeral processed in my hometown New Orleans, thousands of people in purple
flooding the streets with dance, voice, brass. In Tucson, where I live, I and
other bicyclists sped across the city, speakers blasting from a faux-leopard-furred-bike,
wheels turning violet light, the group stopping to dance to the hits at intersections. Bands and
burlesquers paid tribute to His Royal Badass at the Rialto Theater. Tucson's independent movie theater The Loft hosted a sing-along screening of Purple Rain—a packed house singing at
the top of our lungs as we—laced and leathered and primped and purpled—waved glow
sticks through the air singing: “Life is just a party and parties
weren’t meant to last.”
I am listening to Prince as I write about Prince because it only seems fitting. The epic range of his
voice—from deep bass to falsetto—permeating the space between my thoughts.
I’m listening to Prince as I write about him because if his music is anything,
it is a sort of séance, the songs come through us and before we know it, we are
bopping our heads to the rhythm, we are singing under our breath and then at
full volume. We are, in a moment, up out of our chairs, which, suddenly, will no
longer contain us.
An awareness of
death permeated Prince’s lyrics:
Yeah everybody’s got a bomb/ We could all die
any day/But before I’ll let that happen/I’ll dance my life away.
But life is just a party/ and parties weren’t
meant to last
So if I gotta die/ I’m gonna listen to my body
tonight
We’re all excited/But we don’t know why/ Maybe
it’s cuz/ We’re all gonna die.
And when we do (when we do)/ What’s it all 4?
(What’s it all 4)?
U better live now/ Before the grim reaper
comes knocking on your door.
When I read he was
found in the elevator, I instantly recalled the words of “1999.” It seems
altogether possible to me that Prince created out of his last moments a
performance piece for all of us. That he knew he was dying. That he went to the
elevator. That he wanted to say to us, even as he left us: “Are we going to let the elevator bring
us down?” That he hoped for us to call back: “Oh no, let’s go!” That he wanted
to remind us that we never know when our time is up.
What I realized in
the time since Prince died is how his music and his presence were a constancy
underneath everything. Prince was always, without a doubt, his own
person. And Prince was also ours. He belonged to all of us. His presence in the world gave us permission
to be ourselves. Not our polite-well-kept-and-well-mannered-fitting-everyone’s-expectations-selves
but our messy-chaotic-creative-sexual-nonconforming-bursting-over-out-and-through-selves.
I, for one, needed this permission. I needed to know that the freak flag I kept
tucked in the furthest corner of the drawer was not only welcome but necessary.
Prince told us through the way he lived to
create, to work hard, to stop caring about what others think, to release
obsessive thoughts of failure and start thinking about what we can do, to be as
raunchy or out there or rule-breaking as we needed to, to live our lives the
way he was on stage: brazenly alive.
In one undated video
interview, an interviewer asks him, “And birthdays, you don’t like birthdays?”
“No,” he says. “We
came here not knowing we were going to die—somebody told us that. And if we
never knew we were going to die, we wouldn’t celebrate birthdays.”
She follows, “Isn’t
nice to celebrate you day you were born?”
Prince says, “I’ll
celebrate the day I die.”
*
Lisa M. O’Neill writes and teaches writing in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been published in Salon, Scalawag, The Feminist Wire, defunct, drunken boat, DIAGRAM, and Edible Baja Arizona, among others. She is the creator, editor, and curator of The Dictionary Project, an online constraint-based literary project. You can find her at lisamoneill.com
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