Listening to Prince at fifty
I had my musical heroes in high school, men and women who were fifteen to twenty years my senior, but when Prince came along he was the first of my generation who really touched me. The fact we were living an ocean plus a sizeable chunk of soil apart, never mattered. What counted for me in those days was time and I surely had no difficulty at all tapping into everything he was singing about. He seemed to be voicing my feelings as much as his own, and those waves of excitingly perfect music the words were riding on were just the right combination of soul, funk and edgy guitar rock the eighties (my eighties at least) were in need of. I took his songs at face value, the highly sexualized lyrics just the thing a young man who didn't want to be bogged down by reality all the time was thinking off. We all dreamt of crazy wild sex with girls who wanted exactly the same. And we all liked to believe that sex was the highest expression of love, even on a one night stand. Yet I dug the stance he was taking in those golden years, Controversy being my introduction to the man who never needed be king for a reason.
When Prince’s belief in a creator no longer was merely a driving force behind his continuous output of supreme quality music but also became the leading principle for his melodic choices, and the rough, youthful edge was gradually replaced by more heavenly arrangements, I stopped following the pal who had become a world-wide star as closely as I had for almost a decade. I kept listening to his old stuff though, blending in the ever rarer highlights of his later endeavours. Anyway, I couldn't be bothered. Prince to me was the composer of seven, eight of the greatest albums of all time, a body of work ample enough to continue to play on a regular basis. His was a young man's music, as I had been a young man when I got into him.
Yet I was growing older. I turned into a thirty something and inevitably much later a forty something, still a lot later into a fifty something as well. My musical taste would broaden at the front yet not shrink at the back. I never forgot to every now and then clench my thirst for style with a few hours of sheer magic. Hendrix was a great songwriter and arguably the best ever guitar player, Bowie was a fantastic singer, composer and producer, but Prince was it all. There's no facet of music making he didn't excel in. I really liked how he picked up Hendrix only late in life and did him more than good with a stunning tribute. Look out for Spanish castle magic.
There was a small problem, though. I no longer was that young man feeling his lyrics be directed straight at me, inspired to have it off in as many ways and with as many women as Prince was able to come up with. I was, shall we say, growing satisfied. How to sing come back, darling Nikki when the lyrics ever less match one's own experience? It's a dilemma every music fan is faced with. Just as earlier generations reached the moment where singing I can get no satisfaction no longer was considered cool and rebellious, rather ridiculous and sad, for me the time approached where I needed stop blaring you don't have to watch Ab Fab to have an attitude. Unless I came up with a trick.
Whether it was my own growing older or Prince's which inspired me to the thought, I gradually warmed to the idea the you Prince was usually singing to wasn't necessarily the girl of choice he was addressing but rather the big you, in the plural form, as in all of us. Prince was singing to the world. He was saying, I love you and if you were the girl of my dreams I would have it off with you in the carnal sense, but in any other case, read my words in a metaphorical way. Sex which used to be an expression of love became a way of reaching out, the physical desire to mate transformed into a symbol of the need to feel connected. If we as a species are given the tools to turn our need for reproduction into something profoundly beautiful, then we should see our longing for friendship and mutual respect in a similar way. Mind if I sex up our conversation a bit, pal? Twenty-three positions in a one night stand no longer was a bragging show of masculine force, it became the warmth and sympathy we felt towards everyone around us on the dancefloor, on the metro, at the supermarket check-out. She had the nerve to ask me if I planned to do her any harm morphed into an invitation to enters one's mental realm, to show interest into what was going on in someone else's inner world. It is quite possible Prince realised this transition when his love songs took on a distinctly more mature tone on his 1987/8 albums Sign o' the Times and Lovesexy, with If I was your girlfriend an exercise in stretching the boundaries of the sometimes frustrating limitations of sexually charged male female relations by investigating the possibilities of assuming a different role. Would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me? I tripped on this album the first time I heard it.
Now he's gone, shortly after signing up with Jay Z’s Tidal, which is now making the proverbial post-mortem killing. Some commemorators had the nerve to question his relevance in later decades, but the question itself is void of relevance. It is quite habitual for artists to create their best work in the years immediately following their appearance on the international scene and in the case of pop musicians this means during their twenties and perhaps early thirties. Who were they going to propose as an example of superior longevity? The less than a handful who managed to dominate a decade the way Prince did all had to step back afterwards. I can't think of any other artist who was quite as able to present his old work in continuously new arrangements and set-ups, always offering new visions on the essence of what lay hidden deep inside those bursts of creative genius, with the exception perhaps of that other recent absentee, D.B. I leave you with a collaboration of a giant from a previous era, Miles Davis, and while I'm at it, with a steaming rendition of that most subliminal of songs, the cross. And don't forget to check out the tube. After years of suppression the internet is flooding with Prince videos for as long as the world is mourning. Be sure to steal some.
Peace, love, unity, and sex.
Prince & Miles Davis
The Cross
