From 2016: Tribute to Prince
David Shasha
Prince, “When Doves Cry” (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_tonrrxvYA
Dig if you will the picture
Of you and I engaged in a kiss
The sweat of your body covers me
Can you my darling
Can you picture this?
Dream if you can a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
Touch if you will my stomach
Feel how it trembles inside
You've got the butterflies all tied up
Don't make me chase you
Even doves have pride
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world so cold? (World so cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (A world that's so cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding (Maybe, maybe I'm like my father)
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold (Ya know he's too bold)
Maybe you're just like my mother (Maybe you're just like my mother)
She's never satisfied (She's never, never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other (Why do we scream, why)
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
When doves cry (Doves cry, doves cry)
When doves cry (Doves cry, doves cry)
Don't cry (Don't Cry)
Prince, “America” (Live Extended Version 1985)
http://video.naij.com/view=qphn6zz5
Prince Live on the Today Show Bryant Gumbel Tribute (1997)
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/PYeGl5R0F1g
“Chapelle’s Show” Prince Basketball Sketch (2004)
http://time.com/4303634/prince-chappelles-show-sketch/
Prince, an Artist Who Defied Genre, is Dead at 57
By: Jon Pareles
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/arts/music/prince-dead.html?ref=arts
Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died Thursday at his residence, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., according to a statement from his publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. He was 57.
No cause of death has been given. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that sheriff’s deputies responded to an emergency call at 9:43 a.m.: “When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide life-saving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 a.m.” The sheriff’s office said it would continue to investigate his death.
Last week, responding to news reports that Prince’s plane had made an emergency landing because of a health scare, Ms. Noel-Schure said Prince was “fighting the flu.”
Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, was a man bursting with music — a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career that lasted from the late 1970s until the arena tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with accepted music-business practices.
Prince’s Top 10 hits included “Little Red Corvette,” “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss,” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”; albums like “Dirty Mind,” “1999” and “Sign O’ the Times” were full-length statements. His songs also became hits for others, among them “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor and “I Feel for You” for Chaka Khan. With the 1984 film and album “Purple Rain,” Prince told a fictionalized version of his own story: biracial, gifted, spectacularly ambitious. Its music won him an Academy Award and the album sold more than 13 million copies in the United States alone.
Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards telecast and play the Super Bowl halftime show. Often, Prince would follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.
In Prince’s biggest hits, he sang passionately, affectionately and playfully about sex and seduction. With deep bedroom eyes and a sly, knowing smile, he was one of pop’s ultimate flirts. But elsewhere in his catalog were songs that addressed social issues and delved into mysticism and science fiction. He made himself a unifier of dualities — racial, sexual, musical, cultural — teasing at them in songs like “Controversy” and transcending them in his career.
He had plenty of eccentricities: his fondness for the color purple, using “U” for “you” and a drawn eye for “I” long before textspeak, his vigilant policing of his music online, his penchant for releasing huge troves of music at once, his intensely private persona. Yet among musicians and listeners of multiple generations, he was admired well-nigh universally.
From The New York Times, April 21, 2016
Concert Review: Prince, “Welcome 2 America,” Madison Square Garden, New York City, January 18, 2011
“Real music played by real people.”
Though the words emphatically spoken by the great musician Prince in the middle of this extraordinary performance might seem banal, the intent behind them seemed quite revolutionary on a night charged with an electric magic.
In the wild and innovative days of the 1980s, Prince was one of the most outstanding musical giants of the era. On his breakthrough 1981 album “Dirty Mind,” he presented his audience with a heady mix of synthesizer-driven Rock music that was heavy on the Funk backbeat. After two previous failed attempts at R&B success, Prince now broke all the molds and created a synthesis of African-American and Anglo-Rock music styles that fused James Brown, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Parliament-Funkadelic with the electronic New Wave sound and its Punk-Rock antecedents.
Prince’s music was determinedly alive and very real; he was a virtuoso musician and prolific songwriter who broke down the barriers between the dance music of Disco culture and the Rock-Blues foundations of a tradition that began with Jimi Hendrix. Prior to the start of Prince’s set at Madison Square Garden the audience was treated to video clips from the 1971 concert epic “Soul to Soul” featuring The Staple Singers, Ike and Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett that made the connections to this Golden Age of American culture quite explicit.
Prince is a prime example of what I have called “Radical Traditionalism”: An artist who draws liberally from the classics of the past, but who has put a very unique and revolutionary spin on tradition. Along with Madonna and Michael Jackson, Prince was the harbinger of a new post-racial world where cultural and sexual boundaries were collapsed and where a new multicultural audience could be created out of the disparate genres of American music. Prince was a new Stevie Wonder who relentlessly pursued his muse as he so brilliantly connected with the mass audience. Expertly deploying the musical lexicon of his many progenitors, he produced his very own sonic encyclopedia marked by a distinct artistic signature that was very much his own.
In an outstanding series of records from “Dirty Mind” to “Controversy” to “1999,” Prince not only raised the bar on his peers, but on himself as well. His commercial peak was the 1983 classic “Purple Rain” that catapulted him to megastar status. He reached a peak that he could never surpass in commercial terms. In three short years he had gone from a rising star on the club circuit to an international superstar, all the while stretching his musical muscles and generating work of astonishing complexity and mass appeal.
In the fecund period that followed “Purple Rain,” he released another set of brilliant albums, “Around the World in a Day,” “Parade,” and the epic double-album “Sign o’ the Times,” but it was very difficult for him to maintain the same level of artistic quality over time and his star dropped a bit.
In the late 1990s he started to become cantankerous and unpredictable. He bickered with his record company Warner Bros. leading to a progressive deterioration and an ultimate split. Though he continued to have some minor hits through the 90s, the flaming star had definitely dimmed. The split from Warners led him to relinquish the name Prince for an unpronounceable glyph-symbol – a symbol that he continues to use as a leitmotiv – it formed the skeleton of his stage set for the “Welcome 2 America” concert.
After a number of failed commercial and artistic moves, Prince was largely out of the public eye and it seemed as if he has turned his back on his own legacy. With the emergence of Hip-Hop as a reactionary commercial force replete with cartoonish violence, a renewed sexism and homophobia, and an aggressively un-musical stance with the ubiquitous use of recorded samples of old records, Prince looked like a fossil from a bygone era who could simply not keep up with the times.
After fearlessly leading the charge to a new musical and cultural era, Prince had drifted and was stuck in a ditch partly of his own making. He tried to exploit Internet technology to sell new recordings and unreleased material from his vast archive, but to no avail. He created a new band project with Jazz flavorings, but this too was unsuccessful.
A few years ago, Prince took an offer to do an extended series of shows in Las Vegas that was soon followed by a month-long residency at London’s O2 arena. One would think that he had now come to terms with his own rich artistic legacy and was not willing to abdicate his place in American musical history as some obscure footnote. He was, after all, Prince: Purveyor of some of the most important pop music of the past 25 years. In the wake of the passing of both Luther Vandross and Michael Jackson, two titans of the African-American music world whose reach into the White audience was considerable, it seemed appropriate for Prince to re-assert himself by embracing his artistic legacy and not dwell on the more recent failures.
This is the context for the latest Prince adventure: “Welcome 2 America.”
After so many years of being out of the public eye, Prince has put together a concert that vigorously embraces his musical legacy in a way that makes clear his massive impact on American culture, just as it restores his artistic genius in an age of artificially-contrived and artistically-questionable musical choices.
The job of the Radical Traditionalist is to absorb the heritage of the past as he restlessly looks for new ways to articulate that tradition. In Prince’s case the idea was to bring together the musical giants of the African-American past with the pioneers of the Rock tradition. In his music you can hear Jimi Hendrix being transformed into Van Halen while at the same time James Brown is being tied to Parliament-Funkadelic and Chic. To drive this point home, Prince highlights the contribution of saxophonist Maceo Parker, a former member of both James Brown’s JBs and Parliament-Funkadelic, who is featured prominently in the current concert.
In the hands of a lesser musician and songwriter, the whole thing could just become simply vain imitation, but with the legacy of great and memorable songs that Prince has amassed, the indelible power of his music continues to astound and delight.
The audience at Madison Square Garden was as varied as Prince’s music itself: Old and young, Black and White, Hipster and Soccer Mom, the crowd was a true cross-section of America. In the row in front of me were three Soccer Mom types who came all the way from Atlanta to see the show. I saw many parents there with their children, just as I did the last time I saw Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young play Madison Square Garden. There seemed to be a deep connection to Prince and his music and a pressing need to pass this legacy on to the next generation. The heady mix of people affirmed the positive effect that Prince has had on bringing the disparate parts of our social world together in harmony and unity. Under the banner of his music was a union of every part of America; a strong testament to the man’s artistic vision and his integrity.
But beneath it all was this seemingly ageless man who has now been able to reconnect with the best of who he was – without shame or personal hubris. On this night he pulled out all the stops and entertained in a way that we have not seen since the heyday of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. What we witnessed was a mature artist on the other side of the polarities of brilliant success and bitter failure. He brought to his seemingly endless catalog of hits a bracing intelligence that reflected his wish to dutifully entertain his audience, but also to let them know that he is no glyph anymore. It was a definitive coming-out party for a beloved performer who had not taken the big stage in New York for many years. He owned that stage tonight and made no question of his star power.
The performance began with a bunch of snippets of his hits. The audience went into a frenzy as each snippet boomed out of the sound system. Prince insisted that he had too many hits to get to them all, but in the two-hour concert he did play many of them. And not that it didn’t matter what he played. Like Neil Young, who is also a restless artistic wanderer who goes where the muse leads him, Prince has, as I said earlier, not always embraced his own substantial legacy. To the radical point of relinquishing the name Prince, he has sought to trash the past and avoid the obvious. Thus, the playing of the hits – classic songs like “Kiss,” “Controversy,” “Raspberry Beret,” “U Got the Look” and so many others too numerous to mention – fed the audience’s enthusiasm, but also allowed Prince and us to rediscover how great those songs really were.
Last year a similar thing happened with John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. It is astonishing to witness an artist take back their legacy. In a re-invigorated state, the old songs, not having been played in some years, take on a muscular aspect, the artist acting the part of a prize-fighter who is re-entering the ring and ready to take on all comers. The songs maintain all of their original luster and freshness.
In a music world now dominated by Jay-Z, Kanye West, and the rest of a motley crew of unappealing thuggish pretenders, Prince’s performance articulated a subtle polemic against Hip-Hop culture. By continuing to emphasize the organic nature of his music and his repeated assertions of the term “Old School” using the symbolic trappings of that style – the dancing and the waving of arms by an enraptured audience that was not only reliving its youth, but recapturing the magical synthesis of Prince’s authoritative fusion of so many different musical styles – Prince (re-)created his own canon in a way that asserted a narrative of cultural unity which his mastery marked as a watershed moment in our civilization. His vision is of a more inclusive and egalitarian America, not a vision of corporate greed predicated on racial corruption and venal hubris designed for personal financial gain.
Prince reveled in the old values of the Blues, Funk, and Rock. His guitar playing served as a reminder of the 1960s and the Psychedelic values that once unified the races and cultures that were so often split up in America. Prince could successfully be both Eric Clapton and James Brown at one and the same moment. But he could also slow down the tempo and do a Luther Vandross-style seductive Jam as if he were the Great Lover of the mythical African-American tradition.
He played the role of lover and guitar hero to perfection while never losing sight of his role as bandleader. As it was in the past, his band was a mixture of genders, colors, and ethnicities that asserted an open rainbow aesthetic now lost in a world of Gangstas and Hustlers and Pimps and Hos that embodies what has sadly been called by one prominent music critic “The aesthetic of new money.” Hip-Hop culture dutifully restores the old boundaries of race and sex that chip away at the hard-fought progressive advances of someone like Prince.
Hip-Hop has created a hermetic world of obscene wealth, guns, available women, macho posturing; ultimately an infantile narcissism borne of corporate dictates and commercial considerations. It is true that Hip-Hop has brought together White and Black youth, but has done so by reinforcing vulgar and offensive stereotypes of African-American men and women; objectifying them in sexually degenerate ways that feed infantile White fantasies of a libertine Black sexuality whose rough and violent edges titillate and mesmerize.
By contrast, Prince – who has certainly never shied away from overtly sexual expression – restored the idea(l) of love and primal sexual desire as a means to break down the barriers between people and not to serve as some form of vulgar titillation. Sex for Prince has always been about what it means to be a human being. This humanity is connected to the larger social world that we inhabit. His once-bold sexual vision is downright chaste compared to what now exists in our debased culture.
In the “Welcome 2 America” rant that preceded the last song of the concert before the encores, Prince brought his wisdom to the audience by unabashedly castigating the greedy bankers and corporate types – of which he has had his own bitter experiences, as evidenced by his long battle with the recording industry and his noble struggle for an independent artistic life – for their big paydays, as they have eviscerated our economy and failed to provide any tangible value to society. His defiantly independent voice permeated the concert as he courageously freed himself of the ghosts of the past, allowing him to fully embrace his rich legacy and re-invigorate those great songs with an energy that was truly staggering.
After ending the formal part of the concert with a bravura rendition of “Purple Rain,” he divided his three encores into roughly three different genre moves:
The first encore comprised some alluring Slow Jams that showed that the lover in Prince has by no means been suppressed. The many women in the audience, and there seemed to be a lot of women there who were ready to shriek at every twitch of Prince’s body, responded to his erotic machinations with ecstasy and wild abandon. The Gospel-tinged elements of the songs re-asserted the Holy/Profane dichotomy that has fueled so much of African-American pop music since the days of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke.
The second encore began with a Roller Disco motif that limned a frenzied performance of “Baby I’m a Star.” As the performance reached its climax, a whole bunch of celebrities appeared on the stage – led by the comedian Jimmy Fallon, who seems to be everywhere these days. It was confirmation of the magnitude and importance of the concert as a truly classic New York City event. But the music reminded us of the legacy of 1970s Disco culture with the roller-skating and the echoes of Chic and Donna Summer in the musical groove. It magically transported the audience to a glorious age of communal ecstasy.
The final encore was a relentless set of Rock-based stomps. From the first strains of “Purple Rain”’s opening track “Let’s Go Crazy” to the thumping paroxysms of “1999” and the final epic “Peach,” the triumvirate of classics created a bacchic frenzy that was the veritable icing on the cake.
It was more than clear that Prince had returned to the New York stage after a seven-year absence with a relentless drive to reclaim his greatness without apology and with a singular passion to restore the art of musicianship to a musical world that is now more keen on auto-tune and canned sampling. With the loss of some of the great artists of the recent past – most pointedly Michael Jackson – Prince is now the only champion still standing.
Just a few years ago such a magical evening would have seemed highly unlikely. Mired in self-defeat, Prince limited his massive artistic passion to after-show Jam sessions in small clubs where he would let out his musical demons in front of adoring insiders. He did not seem inclined to polish off the old war-horses and give them a ride for the wider audience.
But tonight he seemed completely free of past acrimonies and the frustration of his commercial existence, acting the part of an open-hearted but deadly serious entertainer. Like Elvis Presley who never stinted on performing with the best musicians he could find, Prince refused to relinquish his sterling artistic vision of an organic melding of Funk and Rock that has carried his own signature for so long – he and his excellent band most certainly, as he said so pointedly, “brought the Funk” in no uncertain terms.
Prince remains one of our most brilliant musical artists and carrying that great legacy forward in a time of great distress for “real” music is a heroic effort that is more than matched by the brilliance of his execution.
“Welcome 2 America” is a concert not to be missed.
David Shasha
From SHU 467, March 9, 2011
What is Social Activism Today?
Prince’s Rally 4 Peace at Royal Farms Arena, Baltimore, Maryland, May 10, 2015
Last November I wrote an essay on Stevie Wonder’s brilliant performance of his epic album “Songs in the Key of Life”:
After the album’s release in 1976 Wonder retreated to the benign comfort of iconic status, and though he made sporadic attempts to recapture his past glory as a socially-conscious songwriter, his concerts and albums were largely the uninspired product of a lounge-singer resting on past laurels.
Wonder’s recent re-energization came as a complete surprise as the effort and concentration that he paid to his classic album sought to re-open the question of social activism in the African-American community at a very troubled and confusing time.
Last week the boxer Floyd Mayweather defeated Manny Pacquiao as the men split a take of some $350 million dollars:
Mayweather – a morally dubious character – received a cut of $200 million; an amount that could match the annual GDP of a tiny island country. It is unlikely that his prize money will be used to alleviate any of the social ills of the beleaguered African-American community that is suffering from unemployment, mass incarceration, and social malaise, but there have been rumors that he wants to bail out accused murderer Suge Knight:
When we juxtapose the recent “Songs in the Key of Life” tour with the stark realities of police brutality against African-Americans and the vile culture of Infotainment that features bad actors in the world of Sports and Hip-Hop, the situation becomes that much more difficult to process. Money has become plentiful for those who can access the Infotainment system which rewards bad behavior. But more importantly those rewards accrue to individuals who choose not to upset the current socio-economic hierarchy.
Sex and violence is all right in the Hip-Hop world; socially conscious lyrics much less so.
Prince is an artist who grew in the post-“Songs in the Key of Life” era. His music was a heady blend of Hendrix-style Rock, James Brown Funk, Post-Punk electronics, all wrapped up in a Joni Mitchell-inflected interiority that made for a truly innovative mix of influences.
Prince had a tremendous commercial run in the 1980s, but eventually tangled with his record company and began to display signs of alienation and antagonism towards a music industry which adapted his innovations, but sought to move on and package a new brand of African-American music that was easier to control and market.
After years in the commercial and critical wilderness, Prince performed a series of concerts in selected American cities that would show off his true genius.
I attended one of those concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden in November 2011:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/prince/davidshasha/c3sflLPBHzU/k3mf9SdW4mwJ
The concert was a revelation: Prince had dispensed with his usual temperamental-egotistical need to not play the hits and just laid it all out on the line.
The audience was delirious to see the old songs being taken out of the mothballs and given new life.
But all this was not to last.
By 2013 Prince was back up to his old tricks:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/prince/davidshasha/yv3uzaoO4Dk/VR58Wp0ICa4J
In a series of concerts at the Mohegan Sun Casino he debuted a new band featuring a big brass section doing new arrangements of a few old chestnuts, but concentrating on anemic new material. Once again Prince rejected his legacy and sought to blaze new paths.
The process was frustrating and ultimately artistically and commercially unsuccessful.
Prince has since begun what he has called the “Hit and Run” tour with his all-girl band 3DEYEGIRL:
Judging from his Baltimore performance it seems that he has made amends with the past and is now loading up his setlists with fan favorites:
http://www.setlist.fm/stats/average-setlist/prince-13d6b9ed.html?tour=Hit+and+Run+Part+II
Aside from a rather turgid reworking of “Let’s Go Crazy,” which unfortunately opens the set, the Purple One does a fair job at reproducing his classics.
Here is the full set-list of the Baltimore performance:
http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/prince/2015/royal-farms-arena-baltimore-md-63c812f7.html
Now the Baltimore event was advertised not just as another stop in the Hit and Run tour, but as a Peace event in the wake of all that has happened since the killing of Freddie Gray.
It must be said that Royal Farms Arena was a place far removed from the sites of the protests that we have been seeing on our televisions for the past few weeks. It is located in the very heart of the downtown section of the city with its expensive hotels and restaurants, all within walking distance of the Sports stadiums that have revitalized the area.
Outside the area I saw a few homeless people as well as some stray activists selling t-shirts and giving out posters of young Black men killed by the police. But by and large the sense I got was that of a usual music concert event with rich and good looking people of all ethnic races out on the town to have a good time. I did not get much of a sense that it was about Freddie Gray.
Here is how The Baltimore Sun reported the event:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/music/bs-md-prince-concert-20150510-story.html
Although Prince continued to speak the name “Baltimore” as a mantra throughout the concert, there was little consciousness in his performance of what has been happening in the city.
Now I am not from Baltimore, and it is impossible for me to know how its native citizens were affected by Prince’s music. Media reports have fixated on the liberating effect of the event and indeed for some stretches of the concert there was a strong sense of musical and artistic purpose. Prince was unusually animated even though he started the show an hour late – possibly because lines to get it snaked around two city blocks and people continued to arrive well after the scheduled start time.
But I was struck by Prince telling the audience that he was their “servant” and was here for them.
The main set lasted just 50 minutes as Prince exited the stage without fanfare. He continued, as can be seen in the setlist, to come back for multiple “encores” that broke the continuity and momentum of the show.
The concert took flight when the band broke into the classic “Controversy” which was followed in quick succession by other classics like “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” and an epic rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U”; all of which were performed with great passion and depth of feeling.
The concert was as close, I suppose, as Prince gets to emotional sincerity.
But his Artistic vision is of a different character. Prince is an explorer of the internal and very intimate parts of the human experience and not a social commentator. In his performance of the bombastic ballad “Purple Rain” he provided a brief social commentary about the situation and spoke in rambling fashion about young people and how we need to have a new future. The fact that there were few young people in the audience or any specifics about how to change things did not seem to affect him.
The larger issue we now face is the chasm that has opened up between African-Americans who have attained a comfortable Middle Class life and the underclass that is removed from that reality. It is the classic Limousine Liberal conundrum that is better addressed by Stevie Wonder’s cultural interventions than by Prince’s sometimes diffident artistic hissy fits. When playing his classic song “Kiss” Prince changed the line “you don’t have to watch Dynasty to have an attitude” to “you don’t have to watch Love and Hip-Hop.”
As he was in 2011, Prince remains implacably hostile to the vile Hip-Hop culture and its ignorance and brutality. His own peaceful ethic is inclusive, but it has not taken hold in the current culture. That rejection continues to lend his music and public persona something of a bitter edge that makes connecting with his audience somewhat tricky.
The lives of those who attended the concert, whose ticket prices ranged from $500 to $22, seemed to me to be appreciably different from those suffering economic dislocation and who are most at risk from police brutality. It also struck me as I waited to get into the arena that many members of the Baltimore police, including two officers charged in the Gray killing, are African-American.
It is a deeply tangled web that is often hard to untangle.
The connection between those African-Americans who have “made it” and those who have not continues to be a conundrum. Those who had the money and leisure time to attend the Prince concert are different from those who are being tracked by the police.
The connection between social consciousness and entertainment has taken a serious hit since the days of Ronald Reagan. Young members of the minority community are trapped in an Infotainment world that rewards bad behavior and ignorance rather than artistic excellence and intellectual integrity.
For a couple of hours Prince dipped into his back catalog and made Baltimore forget about its problems. In pondered the situation as I experienced the event it remained clear that the lessons provided by “Songs in the Key of Life” are now more valuable than ever. At that concert I saw many parents who had brought their children to witness what was in effect one of the last truly socially committed mainstream African-American performers who still had standing in the culture.
But at the Prince event we were faced with the clash between the personal explorations of an independent and free thinker and the brutal realities that the African-American community continues to face. A street singer outside the arena did a version of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” that stayed with me as I watched Prince; a different voice from a different time spoke in a language of direct activism that is hard to imagine today.
So while we were treated to a selection of Prince’s greatest hits performed with the requisite energy and commitment, the larger question posed by the Freddie Gray situation remains: How do artists respond to such provocations and the racism that informs them?
David Shasha
From SHU 689, June 10, 2015
Some Final Thoughts on Prince: Artist, Iconoclast, Human Being
The death of Prince, one of the most brilliant American musical artists of the past half-century, came upon us as a shock, and over the days that have passed since we learned the news a number of issues have come to the fore that are worth discussing.
Prince was an extroverted performer and outspoken activist for the causes and issues he believed in, but was also a very private man who kept his personal life extremely secret. We have heard many people speaking about how Prince was essentially two different people; the public figure and the hidden recluse.
A corollary to this binarism is the largely off-limits private – and elite – world of Prince the celebrity and the way that he provided access to selected individuals who were allowed to enter his more private domain.
Saturday Night Live presented a quickly thrown-together tribute just two days after the death that featured Jimmy Fallon as host:
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/jimmy-fallon-on-prince/3024570
The very first thing that Fallon did was to recall Prince’s impromptu appearance at the SNL 40th Anniversary after-party where he performed a version of his hit “Let’s Go Crazy.”
Having seen him perform this radically re-arranged and slowed-down version of the song – more Heavy Metal sludge than the original uplifting Punkish New Wave version – I was somewhat familiar with the new routine.
The key takeaway for me in watching the video of the live performance was seeing the elite and hermetically-sealed world of the modern celebrity culture and how Prince dutifully fit into this world.
For most Prince fans this was a world that was largely inaccessible and unknowable.
So watching the obsequious Fallon going on about Prince in a way that most people could not relate to was an important contrast to what has become the dominant trend in the reaction to his death: an outpouring of emotion by the ordinary fans who were not permitted into the many Prince after-parties and his exclusive circle in Minneapolis.
With Prince gone, we saw wall-to-wall coverage on the cable news networks and local media outlets which gave voice to average Prince fans who were finally able to express themselves outside the enchanted world of the Prince intimate elites.
The average fan integrated Prince’s music into their lives in a way that spoke to just how deeply it cut across racial, sexual, and gender lines. This was for them not an academic analysis, nor was it based on an intimate access to Prince, a man who was largely outside most people’s social orbit.
We saw many people speaking emotionally about what this music meant to them as they were growing up.
In listening to Prince’s prime-period albums now – “Dirty Mind,” “Controversy,” “1999,” and especially “Purple Rain” – there is the timelessness of the bold musical vision that sounded like nothing we had ever heard before. But there is also the complex lyrical vision that remains very much of its time.
Prince wrote his most famous songs in the era of Ronald Reagan, and many of his rants on Sex and Religion and Politics are directly connected to the tense socio-cultural climate of that time.
Here was a young man whose views on these subjects were not yet completely formed, but articulated a pain and a joy that was a forceful response to the hot-button issues of the day, as America was rapidly moving in reactionary political and social directions as could be seen in the battle over AIDS and how it affected the culture of that period.
Prince’s very complicated view of religion has been addressed in the following two articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/princes-holy-lust.html?_r=0
The vacuous celebrity pundit Touré provides some important context in which we can better understand the often clashing values of Prince’s Pauline Christianity and Libertine Sexuality. These clashing values reflect an older tradition in African-American culture that brought together the traditions of the Church along with the highly-sexualized rhythms and themes of Rock music. It was an uneasy alliance between the sacred and the profane; a theme that remained a central part of Prince’s vision in the classic period.
But then there were his more conservative religious proclivities that are discussed in the Juan Cole article. I heard Van Jones discuss how Prince advised him to spend time in Jerusalem as a way to transition out of his problems after leaving the White House under some very difficult circumstances. Cole discusses Prince’s often reductive view of religion and how it lacked the necessary nuance to deal with the problems that we face today.
These discussions of Prince reflect an elitist intellectual tone that was missing from the more populist outpouring of love and emotion that we saw from his ordinary fans.
I was surprised to receive the following e-mail note from the African-American filmmaker Tyler Perry soon after learning of Prince’s passing:
About 12 years ago, I was playing the Kodak Theater in LA. I was on my way to the theater when my phone rang. I answered and heard a voice that almost made me wreck the car. The voice said, "I hear you're doing a bit of Purple Rain in your show. Do it again and I'm going to sue you... and I need 10 tickets and I'll be there tonight.” Click. I freaked out. PRINCE HAD CALLED ME!!!
So that night I waited at the backstage door for him to arrive. I was nervous and hoping he didn't get out of the car with 9 lawyers… lol. The limo pulls up and there he was. He got out smiling and laughing. I knew then he was joking (kinda). One of the first things he said was that he was a fan of mine. That blew me away. "Prince WHAT?” I thought. Can you say mind numbing?! Anyway, we chatted for a while, but time seemed to fly by. Soon enough, I had to get dressed and start the show.
During the play I would glance at him, and he seemed to be having an awesome time. Man! Prince was watching me perform!! And enjoying it!
Then we got to the part in the play where I had been doing a few lines of Purple Rain. I stopped and looked at him sitting in the audience. We made eye contact and he nodded to me. So, I queued the band to start playing Purple Rain and had someone bring Prince the microphone in the audience... BIG MISTAKE! He started to sing Purple Rain and the audience went CRAZY! I had never heard that kind of roar from a crowd before. 3400 people losing their minds!! He sang one verse and the audience was blown away. There was a standing ovation for him AT MY SHOW...lol. He was done singing and the audience wouldn't stop applauding him. I still had 20 minutes to go before MY show was over. I knew at that moment that I had just been educated by royalty!! The lesson: never give your microphone to a legend at your show!!! LOL
On the rare occasion that I had the privilege to spend some private time with him, I always new I was in the presence of someone special, someone incredible, someone brilliant. Whether we were at the White House or standing in his kitchen talking, he was consistently an icon! Whether I was in a crowd of thousands watching him perform or one of the handful in his basement listening to him sing for hours, he was always consistent, always royal, always a legend, always Prince.
He gave us so much of his genius that it is impossible to forget that he walked this planet. And who would want to?
Thousands of years from now the world will still know that Prince was here.
Travel well my beautiful friend.
The Tyler Perry note is interesting because it speaks to a human side of Prince that is not much known: the individual who would engage with people and things that you might not have thought possible.
As I have discussed many times, Perry is beloved by the mainstream African-American community, but despised by the intellectuals and media elites:
Perry’s letter reflects Prince the intransigent artist who would not allow others to use his work without his consent. But it also shows us a warm and open man whose interests and relationships reflected his intimate connection to the African-American community and the larger American culture that belied his apparently elitist alienated stance.
And it was this populism – the antithesis of what Jimmy Fallon presented on the SNL tribute and what we have heard from those celebrities who had access to the private Prince domain – that resonated with many people, and which has finally been given voice in the larger media world.
As I write this article we do not know the cause of Prince’s death. We have been hearing from Prince-hating Right Wing outlets like FOX News that drugs were involved. I have also heard rumors of HIV infection.
But after many years of relative inaccessibility to an artist that was extremely important in their lives, ordinary Prince fans can return to his classic years in the 1980s and 90s when he was part of the commercial and media mainstream and not a relatively esoteric and inaccessible figure, and express their love and appreciation for what his music meant to them and not have to deal with the tabloid nonsense.
For the average fans Prince was not a subject of a doctoral dissertation or some secret closed-door after-party, but a man whose extraordinary recordings spoke to them in a very direct and personal way.
It is these records – not the closed off hermetic world of an eccentric man – that will be the final legacy of the man.
When I was doing my usual walk along Riverside Park up to Harlem on Friday afternoon, I decided to walk an extra couple of blocks past the 125th Street A train station, and go to see what was happening at the Apollo Theater, where I had seen crowds massing the previous day.
I was not sure what I would find there, but decided it was worth the extra few minutes.
As I snaked down 125th Street I began to see people wearing Prince tribute t-shirts – something of a surprise given that he had only died the previous day – and finally saw a small crowd of maybe 50-100 people mulling outside the Apollo as Prince music was blasting out of the speakers placed in front of the theater.
Old and young, Black and White, men and women, the crowd reflected the diversity of Prince’s fan-base that transcended that hermetic insider world to which most of us had no access.
The death of Prince allowed him to be returned to the people who loved his music without all the complications of his celebrity and his personal peccadilloes. It was the purest and most direct expression of the joy and feeling that he brought to so many people, and how his groundbreaking music has become such a basic part of our culture.
It allows us to put Prince’s massive artistic accomplishments into some cultural perspective; as we see the ongoing Corporatization and mechanization of the music industry as a form of celebrity idol-worship.
No better example can be provided of the current trends than the surprise release of Beyoncé’s new album “Lemonade”; a project that is said to be a bitter discussion of marital infidelity and the pain of being a celebrity.
The New York Times published no less than four separate articles on the album:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/arts/music/beyonce-lemonade.html?ref=arts
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/arts/music/beyonce-lemonade-tidal-itunes-apple.html?ref=arts
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/arts/music/beyonce-hbo-lemonade.html?ref=arts
The following discussion by NYT music writer Jon Pareles provides some very important context in which to understand what is currently happening in the Corporate music industry and in our TMZ culture:
But most of “Lemonade” arrives like a follow-through to “Jealous” on the 2013 “Beyoncé,” a song that moans, “I hate you for your lies.” “Jealous” is offset on “Beyoncé” by songs about ecstatic lust, a topic largely absent on “Lemonade.” In most of the new songs, Beyoncé has been taken for granted or pushed aside. It’s a situation that, she finds, is both “a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you” and also flabbergasting given that she is, after all, Beyoncé. Beyoncé!: “The baddest woman in the game,” as she sings in “Hold Up.” Fact-check: She is.
Her reactions swing from sorrow to rage to determined loyalty, and she reaches beyond the electronic-R&B of “Beyoncé” to embrace new influences and collaborators: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Father John Misty, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Animal Collective and Led Zeppelin. “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” a collaboration with Jack White, is a funk-bottomed blues-rocker that has Beyoncé fighting back, declaring, “You ain’t trying hard enough/You ain’t loving hard enough,” working up to a scream. “Pray You Catch Me” is one of two collaborations with the British songwriter James Blake: slow-motion ballads of suspicion and longing. During “Forward,” the other Blake collaboration, the video has its most moving sequence: family members stoically holding photographs of men who were killed by police. It’s followed by a scene of a New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian in full feathered and beaded costume, shaking a tambourine in posh dining rooms as if to exorcise them.
Earlier in the article Pareles states that the album is “not beholden to radio formats,” but in reality the later description of the thematic subject matter and the evidence of many collaborations confirms that Beyoncé, like many of her celebrity music peers, has sought to collect many different genre formats and reproduce them in an artificial manner by using collaborators whose bona fides in their specific styles is known by a formal branding process.
So while there seems to be musical diversity, the trend today is to produce sounds that are mechanically tied to specific genres that are promoted by the Corporate music industry and the media outlets in radio and television.
As with Kanye West, Beyoncé’s modus operandi is to make her vacuous celebrity life into fodder for her lyrics, while at the same time dabbling in the contemporary music world to produce what is in effect a vain and artificially-constructed edifice that will conform to the expectation of an audience which is pre-fabricated and pre-marketed.
The albums are simply afterthoughts; statements that confirm what is being written in the tabloids and which mimetically reproduce the accepted genres that are part of the radio landscape.
All this is significant when we discuss Prince’s music, because Prince adamantly refused to adopt any Corporate directive. He refused the National Enquirer culture that burst out on the scene in the Yuppie Reagan era, as he refused to construct a pre-fabricated and pre-digested musical style, or set of styles, as if he was simply picking out dishes from a smorgasbord.
Having perfected a shiny new synthesis of Dance music, Funk, Rock, and Electronics on the “Dirty Mind”/”Controversy”/”1999” trilogy of albums, he transformed his sound with more fluidity and complex song structures on the epochal “Purple Rain”; an album that has remained his most lasting commercial success, and which opened the door to further refinement and experimentation leading to the neo-Psychedelia of “Around the World in a Day,” new cabaret/theatrical elements in “Parade,” culminating with the epic minimalism and stark social realism and lyrical introspection of the double-album masterpiece “Sign o’ the Times”; albums that capped off the classic period that most people remember so fondly.
The progression of these albums represents an organic development that was not at all connected to commercial trends or Corporate demands. Prince avoided the media limelight and did not look to draw attention to himself as a celebrity. He certainly never made his personal life the subject of his public persona as we have seen Kanye West and Beyoncé doing.
Unlike the Corporate Hip-Hop artists, who were once the objects of his scorn, Prince diligently mastered his craft as a serious musician, as a producer/arranger, and as a songwriter who was completely unafraid to explore new terrain in a way that reflected his own evolution as an artist. He was a maverick; a truly independent artist who did what he wanted to do and did not follow trends.
We are then left with a stark contrast between Prince’s musical culture and the current Corporate wave of conformity.
Prince had things to say, and was never reticent in expressing himself. But his journey – as so many people understood intuitively – was one that was firmly grounded in the human being and our complexities, and not in vulgar affluence and tabloid drama set to a fey and all-too-clever manipulation of market forces in music.
It is the difference between artistic originality, and the need to adhere to the protocols of the industry.
And while Prince certainly achieved substantial commercial success, his artistic temperament and human impulses never limited him to what the market demanded. He did things his way, making music on his own terms.
And he kept changing and evolving as an artist. His best work was unpredictable, allowing the listener to enter a world of endless innovation and discovery where the most basic elements of our humanity – our faith, our sexuality, our politics – would be given a rigorous airing and critical examination.
We now live in the age of Corporatism, TMZ, and a general Idiocracy where making money and accruing power is all that matters. The vulgarity, narcissism, and smug cleverness of our contemporary artists stand in stark contrast to the Old-School values of diligence and artistic integrity that Prince so brilliantly represented.
The universal outpouring of love and emotion that we are currently witnessing represents the pressing need for human authenticity and integrity in our benighted culture.
“When Doves Cry,” arguably Prince’s single greatest song, speaks about human relationships in a way that limns the racial issue in a subtle, and yet deeply moving and profound way:
Dream if you can a
courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
How can you just
leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
Addressing the very combustible issue of Black sexuality, we see Prince exploding clichéd gender issues of men and women, and lust and longing. In the song he deconstructs and turns inside out the myth of the Oversexed Black, as he transforms the vulgar stereotype into the tearful pathos of the “dove” figures. The lyric confronts the myth, but then transforms it into a newfound dignity that partakes of the ethereal in an almost religious setting.
The prosaic everyday struggle between men and women, the difficulties of race in America, the fears of everyday people to attain meaning and establish their identities on sound footing were all Prince themes that resonated in a populist manner.
In the end, Prince will be remembered for elevating the human being and our very human concerns and foibles in a way that was not at all elitist or obscure or mercenary. His best work affirmed the primacy of the human; an intensely personal concern that clearly resonated with many people and which provided us with one of the most eloquent and defining examples of a populist entertainment that has become exceedingly rare in a culture of cruelty and hubris that has been doled out by unfeeling Corporations and our Infotainment media outlets as just more empty nuggets of meaninglessness and vanity.
David Shasha
From SHU 738, May 18, 2016