Baby, I'm a Star.
‘I don’t live in a prison. I am not afraid of anything. I haven’t built any walls around myself, and I am just like anyone else. I need love and water, and I’m not afraid of a backlash because, like I say, there are people who support my habits as I have supported theirs. I don’t really consider myself a superstar. I live in a small town, and I always will. I can walk around and be me. That’s all I want to be, that’s all I ever tried to be.’
- Prince Rogers Nelson (MTV, 1985)
I started getting really obsessed with Prince around the spring of 2013. I was bored, broke and lonely. Prince represented the opposite of everything I was feeling in excess and it wasn’t long before I became evangelical about his music, as if I was the first person to discover it. Every day I would wake up around noon and stay in bed watching music videos and old television interviews with Prince, Wendy and Lisa, the glamorous dykes who stood guard at his slender shoulders, forming his backing band, until the sun dipped out of the sky and it was time for me to go to work. I guess you could say ‘I was busy doing something close to nothing/but different from the day before.’ I worked in a bar and during the short breaks in my long shifts I would go into one of the neglected private karaoke rooms and sing ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Little Red Corvette’ or if I was in the mood to make myself cry, ‘The Cross’.
Those were the only times during that period that I remember feeling anything like myself, when it was just me, Prince and the pink paint peeling off the walls. A few years later, the morning after Prince died I took myself out for coffee and let it go cold while I cried silently behind the book I’d taken with me to pretend to read. I didn’t want anybody to know I was upset. When David Bowie died earlier the same year I found the subsequent weeks of melodramatic outpourings of grief on TV and social media embarrassing. I’d loved David Bowie too but couldn’t grasp that depth of feeling for someone I had never met. I thought I was above the fanatical blurring of celebrity and reality and it wasn’t until I was suddenly immersed in a sea of purple tributes that my heart sank and I realised that I wasn’t.
I didn’t grow up in a household that played Prince. That is not to say that I grew up in a household that rejected Prince but that my parents’ reserved sensibilities were more suited to Lennon and McCartney’s ‘I wanna hold your hand’ than Prince’s ‘we can jump in the sack/and I’ll jack U off.’ My early years were soundtracked by The Beatles, Squeeze and Pink Floyd. Despite his shameless sexual content, by the late ‘90s Prince had wormed his way into our suburban English discos and so my first taste of Prince would’ve been in some squeaky-floored village hall. I loved ‘Kiss’ because it sounded like the unacknowledged adolescent horniness that buzzed under my skin, like my veins were made of electrified wire. When ‘Kiss’ played I could slink around the makeshift dance floor and look for someone to plant my lips on in perfect sync with the moment Prince delivered the line: ‘I just want your extra time and your/Kiss.’ Prince was not only giving me permission to kiss, he was practically begging me to.
Before I went deep on his vast catalogue of music I dismissed Prince as camp, great for dancing to at weddings but nothing too serious. One New Years Eve in the early 2000s when my parents were heading to an ‘80s throwback themed party, the neighbour who came to pick them up was wearing a shop-bought costume that was instantly recognisable as Prince. I find the exact same one almost two decades later with a quick Google search under the name ‘80s Purple Musician Costume.’ The model is a white man standing with his hips cocked, making finger guns. He has a drawn on pencil-thin moustache and a curly black wig styled into an inelegant mullet. The costume itself is a cheap and highly flammable imitation purple crushed velvet suit with silver sequined shoulder pads and a frilled white lace shirt underneath. It’s an uncanny reproduction of Prince’s Purple Rain-era aesthetic interpreted from its lowest point. In her essay ‘Notes on Camp’, Susan Sontag writes: ‘indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.’ But there is no such duplicity in Prince’s artistry. I’m not denouncing the spangled umbrella of camp but I wonder if this reductive reproduction of Prince is born out of a fear of his subversion of the construction of black masculinity that had previously been fed to white audiences.
The album Controversy was released in 1981 alongside an iconic poster of Prince posing in a shower stall wearing nothing but black bikini briefs. It came out nine years before I was born but the image is stamped on my memory. Prince stands with his lithe body outstretched and his arms thrown behind his head. He stares down the camera defiantly with his dark eyes full of sex. A crucifix is mounted a few inches above his right shoulder. The portrait echoes the salacious confusion he poses in the album’s titular single: ‘Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay.’ Prince luxuriates in the mystification, batting playfully at the binary like a sleek cat with a mouse.
The writer Hilton Als notes in his ‘Paean to Prince’ for Harper’s Magazine in 2013, ‘this is America after all, where for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.’ Prince’s overtly sexual foothold on the mainstream charts did not go unchallenged. Tipper Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the group responsible for labelling albums with parental guidance stickers, after allegedly catching her 11 year-old daughter listening to Prince’s erotic magnum opus ‘Darling Nikki’. Although this hardly made a dent in Prince’s music career, when I see the white-modelled ‘80s Purple Musician Costume’ I can’t help but feel sad that Prince’s pure sexual energy and all of the glorious gender confusion it implied has been metabolised as a sexless, synthetic and reproducible camp in order to create a more palatable version for fearful white suburbanites.
Occasionally when I tell people about my love of Prince they’ll say something like: but wasn’t he super religious? When Prince publically announced that he had become a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001 there was some anger that the homophobia the religion implied stood at odds with the uninhibited and inherently queer sexuality he had presented earlier in his career. Though I understand how this contradiction presents ethical problems, I think that the pure energy and escapism of his art make the details of his personal life immaterial. In an interview with Melody Maker in 1981, Prince says, ‘More than my songs have to do with sex, they have to do with one human’s love for another, which goes deeper than anything political that anybody could possibly write about.’ I think it’s possible to replace ‘sex’ in this context with religion. Despite his conversion, Prince is not necessarily a shoe-in for the rapture, as he sings on ‘1999’: ‘War is all around us/My mind says prepare 2 fight/So if I gotta die/I’m gonna listen 2 my body 2night.’ Prince the artist belongs to us; Prince the person does not. The music’s focus is the pleasure, freedom and pure guttural emotion that carries our earthly forms to wherever they might be heading next.
Over this past Christmas I read The Beautiful Ones (2019) the almost-memoir that Prince was working on alongside journalist Dan Piepenbring at the time of his death. Though the memoir itself was tragically unable to progress beyond Prince’s personal handwritten notes, Piepenbring’s introduction documenting their precious few early meetings unveils as much of Prince’s unique character as the volumes of ephemera he left behind, the precious jewels of which are archived beautifully in the book. Prince’s desire for full autonomy over his life’s work and legacy was a longstanding public affair. After a legal dispute with Warner Bros in 1993, Prince began appearing in public with SLAVE written across cheek in black eyeliner. He eventually changed his name to the unpronounceable ‘Love Symbol’ in order to emancipate himself from the contract.
This firm self-determination extended to even the smallest details. As Piepenbring writes, ‘Prince had developed fastidious ideas about which words belonged in his orbit and which did not.’ Piepenbring describes Prince’s disdain at specific terms being used by the ‘white critical establishment’ to describe his work: ‘Alchemy was one. When writers ascribed alchemical qualities to his music, they were ignoring the literal meaning of the word, the dark art of turning metal into gold. He would never do that. His object was harmony.’ Another word outside of Prince’s orbit was Magic and I have to agree. The feeling you get when you hear a great Prince record is human and sexy. It’s not magic but something else entirely, something with guts, something that sweats. Writer and Prince fan Michelle Tea describes his music as ‘a landscape as completely shaped by sex as a valley is shaped by wind and rivers.’ Dancing to Prince should be a deep in-body experience; there’s nothing magic about it. As Prince says to Piepenbring, ‘Funk is the opposite of magic,’ because, he explains, ‘Funk is about rules.’ Even at his most ecclesiastic Prince remained faithful to the freedom, human essence and work ethic of funk. Among his handwritten notes for The Beautiful Ones is the maxim, ‘If U’re funky, even on a ballad U’ll hear it. It’s just what U R.’ The mastery required to create a truly great funk sound is the same discipline that allowed Prince the freedom to carve his own enigmatic image.
Prince is more than a frilled purple costume, perfect dancer, religious contradiction, musician or celebrity; he is the manifest desire to create a new and ever-evolving identity out of our everyday selves. Prince offers a portal out of the mundane everyday and into ‘a world of never ending happiness/Where you can always see the sun/Day or night.’ A temporary reality where the only currency is love. For me he is a totem for sexual and emotional freedom, for breaking out of repetitive, repressive normality, even if only for the length of a three-minute song.
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