I never wanted to be
Prince.
At various points in
my musical life, I did want to be
Springsteen, or Dylan, or Tom Waits, or even Eddie Vedder. I wrote songs that
emulated—or, more accurately, ripped off—all of the above, plus The
Replacements, The Cure, U2, Ali ce In
Chains, and Smashing Pumpkins for good measure. But never Prince. That sounds
like a slight, but it wasn’t. It was the highest level of respect.
Those other guys
with guitars wrote songs that sounded like, well, guys playing guitars. Their
chords were the same chords I could play, the same sounds I could clumsily
create. Their voices sounded like my voice, but better. They were ideals to
aspire to, targets that were far off but attainable. If you squinted hard
enough, you could trace the path they took, and if you listened even harder,
you could (sometimes) pull apart the magic and figure out the tricks yourself.
But I could never do
that with Prince. Prince wasn’t of this earth. Prince was on another plane
altogether, living in a separate realm where music was effortless and songs
emerged like Athena, fully formed every time. Shooting for Prince would be like
shooting for the sun: Even if your aim was perfect, your range could never even
come close.
It wasn’t just that
he was a genius songwriter and a
genius instrumentalist and a genius
producer. I honestly believe he heard
things differently from you or I, as though some sounds were colors outside the
visible spectrum, and his gift—his true genius, maybe—was capturing those
sounds in a way that made sense to us, the mere mortals with our limited
frequencies and narrow color palette. How else to explain “When Doves Cry,” a
song that resembled nothing else on the planet when it debuted on May 16, 1984?
How could a piece of music that sounded so foreign, so alien, also resonate so deeply with millions of people across all
races, genders, and ages?
I can vouch that it
resonated with me, all of twelve years old, because that’s the period in your
life when you absolutely have a Favorite Song Of All Time, and you can say that
without irony or overstatement, and whereas previous Favorite Songs often
changed month to month or even week to week, “When Doves Cry” became my FSOAT on its
very first listen. And remained so for the next two years. I can’t fathom how
many hours I spent during the summer of 1984, watching and rewinding and
rewatching my VHS tape with the entire video recorded, in full, from its “world
premiere” on MTV, mesmerized in that way unique to children first starting to realize
the world is far bigger than they ever imagined.
By that point I’d
already fallen hard for Prince, thanks to “Little Red Corvette,” but I’d also
fallen hard for Michael Jackson and Hall & Oates and The Police and
Eurythmics too. (In hindsight, 1983 was an amazing year for pop music.) I
wasn’t picking sides the way the media awkwardly would years later, but in
sixth grade? I was all Team MJ. He was the easy choice: The non-white musician
all the white kids loved, the wholesome superstar who won the approval of my
Republican parents by posing with Ronald Reagan, the pop sensation so iconic a
skinny little Caucasian boy with no discernible dance skills could dress like
him for Halloween (red jacket, white T-shirt, one glove) without raising too
many eyebrows.
But Prince? Prince
was something else altogether. He wasn’t safe or wholesome. He was freaky.
Dangerous. The stuff of month-long punishments and bans on further MTV
watching. His early videos were lit like cheap motels, all neon reds and
purples and flashes of pure white, and his band was a mix of men wearing
eyeliner and women wearing lingerie, their skin black and white and shades in
between, and there he was swirling in the center, a trenchcoat-clad figure who
fascinated and scared me in equal measure. I was too young to have even a vague
concept of sex (it would be a couple years before my friend matter-of-factedly
explained what the “pocket full of horses” line meant), but I already understood
Prince exuded the sort of raw, pulsing energy that my more clean-cut
heroes—your Halls, your Oates—never did.
And that was both
lure and terror.
One night I snuck
downstairs (past my bedtime) to watch the local Atlanta video music station (banned by my
parents), so I was already a double sinner when the clip for “Controversy” came
on. In the video, Prince performs in front of a church's stained glass window, dressed like a French dandy, lit by glowing crosses, singing
“Do I believe in God?/ Do I believe in me?” in a voice pitched above a woman’s
register, all the while staring down the camera like a man possessed.
I wasn’t even a year
removed from private school, and I thought the music was amazing. I also
thought I might burn in hell just for hearing it.
But I needed to hear
it, regardless. All of it. I borrowed
three tapes from some older, cooler kid on the bus: 1999, Controversy, and Dirty Mind. I already knew and loved the
first three songs from 1999, thanks
to Top 40 radio. These versions were longer, weirder, stranger, but still in my
comfort zone.
The fourth song was “Let’s Pretend We’re
Married.” I listened to the entire thing, mesmerized, with that same
combination of fascination and terror. And then I rewound the tape, and
listened again, but this time with the volume turned down. Way down.
Could my mom hear
the words through the walls? I couldn’t take that chance.
The music was
primal, but futuristic. Simple and crude, but otherworldly. Stripped down to
the barest minimums of beat and melody, yet absolutely engulfing. The vocal was
pitched high, again, but now with other voices in the mix, some lower and some barely
discernible, like a stranger whispering lewd advances in your ear. They were
all Prince, all the versions of him, and then they dropped away until there was
just a single Prince, talking not singing, and he was definitely talking about S-E-X with words that left nothing to the imagination, words that would get me
grounded for weeks just being in their vicinity. And then the other voices
returned, seven minutes in, every single version of Prince now flat-out confessing
his (their?) love of God.
In unison.
Followed immediately
by a promise to have fun every motherfucking night.
I was eleven years
old. I’d never had a single face-to-face encounter with an African-American. I’d
never kissed a girl. I’d never even held hands with a girl. But I now possessed
cassette dubs of Prince, unfiltered, singing songs about dirty minds and head
and sisters and lady cab drivers and all the places he would jack U off.
To say that Prince
blew my world apart is a slight understatement.
He wouldn’t be the last one who did that, of course. As the decade wore on, my love of music expanded along with my tastes, in the same manner as countless other white suburban teens: Zeppelin and Rush, New Order and The Cure, INXS and Guns N’ Roses. Michael Jackson fell by the wayside, at least for the short term, along with Hall & Oates and countless others from my awkward past.
But Prince? Prince
never left. When the rest of my peers stopped caring after Around The World In A Day turned out not to be Purple Rain 2.0, I stayed on board, if just for “Raspberry Beret”
and “Paisley Park” and “Pop Life.” Parade
was the first album I bought in a real record store (Turtle’s Records &
Tapes in Snellville, GA), mainly due to my infatuation with “Kiss” (my FSOAT
for the rest of 1986), and there were enough lifelines on that one—“Girls &
Boys” and “Mountains” and “Kiss,” of course—to make up for all the moments I simply
wouldn’t, or couldn’t, grasp at the time. When you’re an eighth grade boy yet
to experience any significant losses, you can’t appreciate “Sometimes It Snows
In April” for the masterpiece it truly is. Prince was already there, but I
wasn’t. I had to mature into him.
My grandfather
passed away the week I bought Sign ‘O’
The Times. It was the first death of any kind I’d ever experienced, and I
still remember how my mom was crying when she picked me up early in the school
parking lot, and then I was crying too, and I sobbed all afternoon and all
night in my bedroom with that Prince cassette on a steady loop, finally hearing
all the levels and layers that were there all along, waiting for me to really
understand. Sign ‘O’ The Times isn’t
a particularly dark record, but it’s shot through with sadness and
spirituality—especially on “The Cross” and “Forever In My Life”—in ways that
rarely exist in pop music. Because this was pop music for adults, not kids, and
while I wasn’t an adult yet, I was finally on my way to becoming one.
And of course Prince
was there, guiding me and shaping me, even when I wasn’t fully cognizant of his
influence in my life. I was a good Christian boy in a deeply religious
household, but I was also a teenager with raging hormones and a constantly
frustrated libido. The constant push-and-pull between the flesh and the spirit
suddenly seemed like a very real, very actual
battle occurring inside me, a battle that Prince had already articulated
with “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” and “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Darling Nikki” and
now “Anna Stesia.” Years later, when he devoted himself to the Jehovah’s
Witness faith and renounced all his “dirty” songs, I wondered—for maybe the
first time—if Prince had been just as confused as I was. If he’d had the same questions about love and lust and God and sex and sin and redemption and
the afterworld. If maybe he and I weren’t so different after all.
Except, if I were being honest, I knew that was a lie. Prince was different from me, because he
was different from everyone else who has ever lived. Even at my best, I was just an average-to-good
musician with a bit of talent and the occasional knack for catchy songs, but Prince was Prince, a mythical figure with genius
dripping off his fingertips and a voice that made women lose their minds and a
guitar that made grown men cry. Even when I holed up in my bedroom layering
tracks and vocals to create my own one-man band, it would never sound like
Prince. Even when I finished my acoustic sets with an encore blowout of “Little
Red Corvette” (an encore always received far more rapturously than any original
composition I’d played that night), it would never sound like Prince. Even when I worked
“17 Days” into the coda of one of the best songs I ever wrote and caught heads
nodding in the crowd, I knew they weren’t nodding for me, but for Prince.
And that was okay.
All us diehards shared a bond, a common story told in a million different ways.
We all paid tribute, and we all paid tribute with the understanding that we
were a mere facsimile of his greatness, a blurry Xerox of a true original.
I never wanted to be
Prince, because deep down, I always understood I never could be Prince. None of us could. None of us ever will.
That’s why
his passing hit all of us so hard. We could live a hundred more lifetimes and
still never get another one like him.
But each of us got
him. Once. In this lifetime.
And that’s reason
enough to celebrate.
