We lost Prince and Vanity in 2016
As we observe the tenth anniversary of Prince's passing, here is the elegy I wrote for him...
And now we lose another great Dionysian incarnation, Prince. It's really starting to get to me. I lost touch with Prince a while ago but always respected his artistry and his willingness to take on the music industry establishment- and more recently, Silicon Valley. Befitting of his Bacchic archetype.
Prince first appeared on my radar when the video for "I Wanna Be Your Lover" was played on Don Kirschner's Rock Concert. I wasn't impressed. It sounded like disco to me and I still resented how disco had forced out all the muscular funk-pop I loved in the early to mid '70s and replaced it with treacly, cookie-cutter mush.
Worse, artists who should have known better got strong-armed into making disco-records. I actually liked some disco-- if you consider Donna Summer and KC and the Sunshine Band "disco"-- but by 1979 it outwore its welcome.
Things changed with the Dirty Mind album the following year. The sound was leaner, harder, freakier. Being a sex-obsessed adolescent, I certainly appreciated the lyrics. Prince's sexuality was raw, unapologetic but also lacking in the kind of aggressive machismo that normally came with the territory. There was a complexity there, an ambiguity, a tension that gave the smut dimension and character. There was a thought process at work as well. It made for an interesting package.
Prince now seemed part of a new vanguard that bringing back a lean, hungry edge to pop R+B, along with Rick James, The Gap Band, and Cameo, but also fit nicely with the more experimental sounds coming out of NYC. Controversy repeated the formula and got a lot of airplay on the predominantly New Wave/postpunk college radio stations I lived on.
1982 was the game-changer. MTV broke through to the mainstream, bringing a whole new wave of acts with it and sweeping away most of the hairy cock-rockers of the 70s that seemed to linger past their sell-by date. Many of the new acts that replaced them were conspicuously androgynous "New Pop" acts from the UK like The Human League, A Flock of Seagulls and Culture Club. At the same time, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bombaataa brought Hip-Hop to the mainstream.
Prince essentially fused all these disparate impulses with his double album, 1999. He continued to fuck with boundaries- racial, sexual, musical- and it only made him more popular. He assembled a multiracial backing band with men and women, conspicuously Wendy and Lisa, his guitarist and keyboardist (who went on to a career of their own). He fused rock, pop and R+B so effortlessly you barely noticed the seams and later worked in jazz and Hip-Hop.
1999 would be a prelude to his monster, Purple Rain, which accompanied the film of the same name. That album was everywhere that spring and summer, so those songs are burned into my experience of that year. Which, I have to say, was a great fucking year.
Purple Rain was filled with startling guitar pyrotechnics but also ripe with gospel influences, particularly in the title track. Like Marvin Gaye, Prince struggled to harmonize the yearnings of the spirit with the needs of the flesh. There was Hendrix and Bowie and James Brown lurking in the mix and Sly Stone was there in spirit but the cake and the frosting were all his own.
Archetypally, Prince embodied Dionysus with his outrageous music and flamoyant persona but also Hermes, particularly in the first phase of his career when he was so eager to violate boundaries and taboos. There was a bit of the Orphic in him as well, his moodiness and aloofness but also the mythic loss of Vanity to drug abuse hell as well as her death earlier this year (I never accepted Apollonia as a replacement).
Along with Let's Dance (produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers) and Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues, Purple Rain seemed to offer up a distinctly new fusion music for the 80s, one in which technology became an instrument. My favorite track was "I Would Die 4 U", a song that had special resonance for me closer to the end of the year.
Indeed, that period in Prince's career resonated for me in another way since I was involved in an interracial relationship. My high school sweetheart was a black girl from Brookline I actually met at a Clash concert so Prince's racial utopianism had a special personal appeal for me at the time. That seems like an entirely different world ago now, sadly.
Along the way Prince had written or cowritten hits for other artists, including 'Stand Back' with Stevie Nicks, 'I Feel for You' for Chaka Khan, 'Manic Monday' for The Bangles and 'The Glamorous Life' for Sheila E. Later Sinead O'Connor hit the big time with her cover of 'Nothing Compares 2 U', a song Prince wrote for one of his many side projects. Interesting to note these were all female artists.
He made more albums and another feature film but I didn't reconnect with Prince until Sign O' The Times, the 1987 double album that felt like a return to form after a bit of creative drift. It would be the last time I really engaged with his music. It felt like a return to form but also somewhat of a look back. From there on I drifted away as that moment passed and pop became a vapid, arid wasteland of hairspray and histrionics.
Prince entered into a long and protracted battle with Warner Bros. over creative control and famously renamed himself as 'The Artist Formerly Known as Prince', using an androgynous symbol as his identifier. He started his own label, Paisley Park. He initially shunned the Internet and went to war against YouTube over copyright infringement. More recently, he joined the Jehovah's Witnesses.
I may have lost touch with the man and his music but like so much else I am grateful to have been there when it mattered, when those early classics were hitting the street. To have been there in that intermediate period of 1980/1981 when he was struggling to forge a new sound and then to hear it bear fruit. I wish kids today could feel that kind of excitement.
And to see artists like Prince whose careers I tracked early in high school break big when I was graduating-- well, it created a sense of possibility, of potential. Probably an unrealistic feeling. Certainly a feeling that I don't think many kids- or adults, certainly- still believe in today.
It's depressing to be writing another of these posts. I almost couldn't get through it. But everyone else will be doing their own tributes and it seemed too important a moment to go unmarked.
I should also add that Prince's last concert was at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.
