I’ve had Prince and Prince criticism on my mind a lot lately, and am grateful to McInnis for responding to my questions on the subject (which were sent in two email installments, allowing me in my second batch to respond to some of his initial answers).
You’ve described your upbringing in Mississippi as “religious, conservative, and academic.” Where and how did art and poetry fit into all this?
Let me start by saying that most African Americans are socially conservative and politically progressive. So, the conservatism of my parents had to do with a utilitarian way of approaching education, work, and the work ethic. Yet, both my parents were involved in civil rights work to some degree. With my mother, it was mostly advocating for special needs children as a special education teacher, especially fighting for the concept of “mainstreaming” or finding ways in which students with special needs could have as close to a regular and complete education as possible. My pops, on the other hand, was active in the community with grassroots activism so much so that he was run into the military by a local white sheriff who told my grandfather, “If that li’l nigger is here much longer, he’ll become real familiar with a tree.” So, my grandfather put my pops in the military because Vietnam was safer than Mississippi. Yet, when my pops returned from his tour of duty, he returned to grassroots activism, which included being arrested for Movement work at least three times. With all of that being said, my parents loved all forms of art and exposed me to it from the womb. Although my mother was a teacher, she didn’t think much of perfect attendance. So, she would often have me miss a day from school to visit an art gallery in Memphis or some orchestra in Jackson, or some play. My pops was the same, but music and literature were his primary loves. And, he acted as a teacher, exposing me to great writers and musicians. Yet, it was his collection of Negro Digest and Black World, literary journals of the Black Arts Movement, that captured my mind most. Along with listening to records, I would spend hours with those journals and all of my parents’ books. At one point in my childhood, I had more books than toys. Words, sentences, and language in general just grabbed my attention. And, of course, front porch storytelling is a major activity in the South, so hearing so many great oral stories combined with my childhood reading developed a fire in me for the power of language.
Not including Prince, who we’ll get to, who were the key early thinkers or artists (in any capacity) whose work reached you at a young age? Can you point to a particular figure and say, “[x] made me want to be a writer”?
Again, books and records have been my world since I can remember. Being from Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Home of the Blues, of course, blues and gospel were my first loves; yet, rock, and I mean ’50s and ’60s rock, were my passion. Living in Clarksdale in the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, music was like air. You didn’t really need a record collection. Music was literally in the air, everywhere. If I walked from one side of town to the next, I always heard music: flowing from folks’ windows, some musician (old or young) practicing on the porch, coming from cars that passed me, creeping from the doors of old juke joints and cafes that I passed on the way downtown. I don’t remember a moment without music. Thus, the blues poets, especially B.B. King, were key to how I first understood turning a phrase. That combined with my pops introducing me to Richard Wright, Margaret Walker Alexander, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, and Toni Morrison in my preteen years. These were the creatives who shaped my initial way of thinking, especially about art. All of these artists helped me to understand life more precisely, while also helping me to understand how to use my mind to shape the world in which I wanted to live.
You’ve written that you were turned upside down by Dirty Mind in 1980—that you were “drawn to the music and controversy.” How did this go over at home and amongst your peers? In your 10-years-old world in 1980, was Prince a polarizing figure?
That’s interesting for me to think about now. Of course, older church folks thought that Prince was the preeminent sinner. In that sense, Prince was the latest music trend that was going to take that generation of youth to the pit of hell. But, my pops dug Prince even if he thought he was a bit too sensational and, from his perspective, reaching too much to assimilate into the white power structure. Yet, in Prince, he could hear the genius of the African-American music tradition that came before him, such as Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Parliament/Funkadelic, Earth, Wind, and Fire, and more. As such, my pops didn’t give me as much flack as some other older folks did. As for the teens and young adults in my world, Prince was just an example of Baraka’s “changing same” in the evolution of black music. Today, most so-called scholars love to cite Dirty Mind and Controversy as Prince’s new wave records. But, the black folks in my Clarksdale and Jackson, Mississippi, communities didn’t see it that way at all. It was just black music. I don’t remember a black person making a distinction between Hendrix or Wonder or even the Temptations. It was all on the spectrum of black music. So, yeah, if you wanted to draw a line between church culture and café culture, then Prince was polarizing. But, as far as how the community engaged popular and/or secular music, he was just the next evolution of blackness and black music.
However, because Prince was considered more street or raw, there was a small rift that Prince was the alternative to the squeaky-clean entertainment of Michael Jackson. (Today, it’s difficult to get young people to fathom that Rick James and Prince were the bad boys of the music industry and that other artists were seen as safer than them.) Yet, even that “rift” between MJ and Prince was mostly cosmetic because most everyone I knew who had MJ’s records also had Prince’s records. While Right On, Black Beat, and Rock and Soul magazines sold a ton of issues pushing the MJ versus Prince narrative, most black folks had both of their records, even if they claimed to have only one. Prince probably became more polarizing in the African-American community after the success of Purple Rain and the release of Around the World in a Day and Parade, as some folks felt that Prince was now catering too much to a pop audience.
You’ve written extensively—a 673-page book, no less—about Prince’s lyrics (The Lyrics of Prince Rogers Nelson: A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller). What was the impetus for that?
When I was a college junior, my American Lit professor asked us to do an oral presentation on the writer who had most influenced us. After reviewing the entire literary canon, I realized that none of them moved me like Prince, none of them made me want to be an artist like Prince. And, I guess I must split hairs a bit. Prince made me aware that the poems and stories I was writing were artistry, per se. He made me want to be an artist. But, Wright and Alexander made me want to manifest my artistry through writing. Art or even artistry is the spiritual thing that abides in each of us. Yet, each of us manifests or executes that artistry differently in a physical form, either through music, literature, dance, painting, sculpture, basket weaving, etc. My poetry and short stories are merely physical manifestations of the metaphysical thing inside me that must be expressed. The blues and rock may have sparked that fire, but Prince increased the heat and made it a necessity that it is released, especially in how he showed me all of the creative ways that one can do the same thing. With each new album, it was like Prince was becoming a new person. It amazed me that one person could cover so much musical and literary ground. And, his growth as an artist and a person seemed, in many ways, to parallel my growth, which inspired me to create. As such, writing about Prince became my manifesto, my version of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self, or Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Writing about Prince was me acknowledging him as the primary artistic force in my life and what type of writer I wanted to be.
You call The Lyrics of Prince a work of “literary criticism.” I feel this is a risky proposition, to sever lyrics from the context of the music they are associated with—but how did you approach this? And how well do Prince’s lyrics translate on the page for you?
Because Prince was a well-crafted lyricist (master of literary devices), it’s not a risky proposition to sever his lyrics from his music, unlike others who weren’t as well-crafted and used music as a crutch to hide their literary shortcomings. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is my favorite album, and I was raised reading its lyric sheet. And, because my pops also loved Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, engaging lyrics as literature was the norm in our household. As such, I simply applied my literary background to analyzing Prince’s lyrics, especially since Prince often included a lyric sheet in the album, which indicates that he wanted his lyrics taken seriously. For instance, when Graffiti Bridge was receiving negative reviews, Prince stated, “They are not talking about the lyrics. I knew that I should have included a lyric sheet.” Also, after he died, his longest-tenured band member, Morris Hayes, aka Mr. Hayes, stated,
“I asked [Prince] one time, because he could do so many things great, ‘You know man? What do you consider the thing that you’re the best at?’ He kinda thought about it, and then he said, ‘You know, Morris, at the end of the day, I’m a songwriter. I’m a poet. Nobody reads anymore. For me, the biggest thing is my lyrics.’ And, I said, ‘You know what man? I completely agree.’ You could pick any era, and you may not like the keyboard sound. You may not like the drum sound or whatever. But, if you strip away all of the music from his lyrics, He’s always clever in how he wrote because he read all the time.”
(See Hayes’ comment here.) As such, Prince’s lyrics translate to the page exactly as poetry and short stories. Whether it’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Raspberry Beret,” “The Exodus Has Begun,” “Dear Mr. Man,” or any other of his songs, Prince mastered the intertwining of the literal and the metaphoric to provide dual impact. Moreover, in many of his songs that seem to be about sex on the surface, he’s using sex as a metaphor to explore human neurosis. It’s the inversion of the double entendre. Where Chuck Berry and the blues poets before him used cars and other items as metaphors to discuss sex, Prince, in songs, such as “Little Red Corvette,” “AUTOmatic,” “Lady Cab Driver,” and “Tambourine,” and in the entire Lovesexy album, uses sex as a metaphor to show how humans use sex for escape, for power, for release, to alleviate boredom, and for many ways other than purely for sexual pleasure. This allows him to discuss how people grapple with the dualities of their lives, be it gender, class, race, and the desire to reconcile the flesh to the spirit. Rarely, do you find a Prince lyric that is nonsensical or cliché.
Of course, not every lyric or song is “genius,” but most of his lyrics follow a narrative arc of exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement, and they are often driven by creative and vivid imagery that impresses meaning on the intellect and emotions. “Tambourine” is a veiled song about masturbation only to use masturbation as a device to explore how humans deal with isolation and loneliness. And, from his very first album, For You, Prince gives us the song, “Baby,” about the response of a male having to deal with an unexpected pregnancy. Who writes a pop song about that? Furthermore, the song provides all of the emotions from surprise, to fear, to acceptance. Even then, as a critical thinker who wanted to say something serious about life, he doesn’t provide a flat, one-dimensional “love will save the day” platitude. By the end of the song, listeners understand that love is about work. And, whether it is romantic love or the love of a parent, both require commitment, which includes understanding all that entails being a husband and a father, as he sings, “I barely make enough money for two.” Again, most pop singers are not writing these types of songs or engaging this topic in this way. That’s what made Prince special. He was blending sounds, addressing topics, and using images and phrasings in ways that hadn’t been done before.
To listen to “Baby” click here or here.
What did you learn about Prince by conducting such a thorough examination of his lyrics?
As Hayes stated above, Prince being highly well-read gave him a variety of topics or themes and informed how he utilized literary devices. When I met him, and we discussed various books, it affirmed what I could see in his lyrics. Like all artists, his work is metatextual and self-referential, but his work is more intricate in how it references other works and his own work as if he wants you to do some digging. So, in “Moonbeam Levels,” when he mentions Saturn, we understand from the tone and imagery of the lyrics that he’s referencing Wonder’s song “Saturn” because both songs are about escaping world destruction caused by human hubris. Also, Prince was quite a genius in how he used sound to supplement the message of the songs. The easy examples are how the music in “Something in the Water (Does not Compute)” and “AUTOmatic” sound like computers as the lyrics discuss a robotic, preprogrammed way in which the speaker of the songs reacts to the female. Then, there are the traffic sounds in “Walk Don’t Walk” that are designed to emulate how a pedestrian is controlled by the flow of traffic, in a song that’s about embracing one’s individuality and walking against the normal flow of society. Thus, writing a full analysis of Prince’s body of work affirmed why I fell in love with his work by helping me to deconstruct his songs to learn the science or literary devices behind them. He is one of those well-crafted artists who affirms Horace’s The Art of Poetry that the how (craftsmanship) of art is often more important than the what (the subject matter). All of us are writing about the same things. But, it’s the most creative of us who get remembered. Prince is one of those who get remembered.
In your extensive reading about Prince over the years, can you cite any essential works (articles, reviews, profiles)? Who are some writers who really contributed to your own understanding of his music?
The three most critical works that helped me to know that I could write a full analysis of Prince’s lyrics were LeRoi Jones’/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Miles Davis’ Miles: The Autobiography, and Dave Hill’s Prince: A Pop Life. Next, as a teen and college student, I loved reading the music articles of Carol Cooper, Nelson George, Greg Tate, Michael A. Gonzales, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Charlie Braxton, and Kevin Powell. All of these writers gave me the knowledge, craftsmanship, and courage to proclaim Prince as a lyricist worthy of study. I’ll also add that reading rock magazines in the ’70s and ’80s, such as Rolling Stone, Musician, and a few others, was a great help because, then, the writers were doing more serious deconstructing of the work. I’ll say the same about some of the music writings in Ebony and Jet. By the ’90s, I got bored or uninspired by a lot of music writing. The easy response is to say that I got bored with much of the music, which is true. But, a lot of what passed as serious writing about popular music after the ’80s just felt flat to me. That’s probably not necessary to say in this discussion, but…
Through your years-long research, what are some of the most common misconceptions you’ve encountered about Prince as an artist?
Most critics and fans treat Prince like he’s some alien or nymph with magical powers, rather than as someone with a talent who worked diligently to hone his skill. Yes, Prince wrote a great deal. But, he also edited a great deal so that songs that were eventually released were sometimes older songs that sat on the sHelf until he decided to revisit and edit them. I try to tell young writers that editing is writing, and Prince is a perfect example of that, whether it’s “Tick, Tick, Bang,” “We Can Funk,” “Kiss,” or making a last-minute edit to “When Doves Cry.” These are all songs that exist in various versions, showing how Prince often edited his work. One of my favorite quotes by Prince is: “I was working. When they were sleeping, I was jamming. When they woke up, I had another groove.” There are a lot of very talented people. But, very few get as much from their talent as Prince because very few invest the work necessary to do so.
Next, lots of white critics and white fans, especially after his passing, tend to deny that Prince was a black man from a black community and treat him like a “special Negro” because, again, it fits their Prince as an alien, exotic nymph child fantasy. Of course, Prince contributed to this by lying about his race to get his songs played on rock and pop stations. Yet, as I detail in my book, Prince didn’t seem to care enough to keep the lie straight as he changed the racial construct of his parents in three magazines in three consecutive months, and not one journalist called him on it. As such, this became a major issue for many of Prince’s white fans later in life as Prince became increasingly more intent on discussing issues specific to the black community and the struggle of black folks to obtain full citizenship. The Rainbow Children almost imploded Prince.org, the major Prince fansite at the time because so many white fans felt betrayed by Prince constantly addressing issues of racism, such as writing “Baltimore” to denounce the murder of Freddie Gray.
Even some of the more prominent white people who worked with Prince, such as engineer David Z, have worked to distance Prince from his blackness and the black community. While being interviewed on the Sunset Sound YouTube channel, Z stated that “Black people didn’t support Prince in the beginning because he didn’t look and sound like the Temptations.” That’s just a lie. Yet, when a prominent engineer for Prince makes that claim on a major platform like Sunset Sound, people without knowledge of history tend to believe that lie even when there is a mountain of empirical evidence to refute it. One, Prince’s first four albums only charted on the black charts. Two, Prince’s first three-and-a-half tours were patronized by majority black audiences, almost seventy to eighty percent black audiences. Three, all of Prince’s in-person radio station promotions for his first three tours were at black radio stations. Four, as I stated earlier, Prince was a regular in the black fanzines, Right On, Black Beat, and Rock and Soul, from 1978 – 1979, and didn’t get any coverage in white fanzines until 1980 or ’81, once he started lying about his race. And, five, Prince did not have his first hit on white radio until “Little Red Corvette” was placed into heavy rotation on MTV, which, of course, increased the number of whites attending the 1999 Tour aka The Triple Threat Tour only halfway through the tour. Yet, with all of this evidence, people like David Z are still pushing a narrative that lessens Prince’s blackness and his connection to the black community. However, I must give props to Andrea Swensson’s Got to Be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound for refuting this lie and showing that Prince is holistically the product of a black community. And, I must, again, acknowledge Hill’s Prince: A Pop Life, which also highlights the black community that gave birth to Prince. And, finally, I was fortunate to have Pepe Willie—the man who helped teenage Prince hone his talents—give me great insight into how Prince’s community helped to shape him. As such, Prince spent the entirety of his career fighting to be and to illuminate the entirety of himself. What David Z and many white fans and critics don’t seem to understand is that, when Prince said to a manager, “Don’t make me black,” he didn’t mean “black” culturally. He meant don’t let the record company put him in the R&B department. This would limit the type of music that he could create, which would limit how he could express the totality of himself.
Yet, I would be remiss if I don’t address that, since his death, Prince and his body of work have been narrowed to Purple Rain, mostly, because that’s the most popular album with white people. The Prince Estate even went so far as to present the Sign “O” the Times Deluxe Set as more of the last hurrah of the Revolution, which it isn’t, rather than as a new beginning for Prince, which it is. Angela Davis once stated that one of her greatest fears was being marginalized into a caricature on a t-shirt. I often fear that the same is being done to Prince when I see so many people wearing Purple Rain t-shirts because that’s all they know of him. Prince is one of the most prolific artists of all time, one of the few who is known for creating his own sound, and all of that output is being castrated into one album.
Finally, most people don’t know just how political Prince was, or that much of his work addresses socio-political issues. To most, Prince is the dude who wore panties on stage or wore pants with his butt showing on the MTV Music Awards. Ultimately, for them, he’s the Prince of sex. But, as I stated earlier, there is so much more to Prince than that. When I was a teenager, someone asked my pops why he didn’t mind me listening to Prince. My pops said, “Prince is one of the few artists who are taking listeners farther than the sheets. Don’t get me wrong. Prince will take us to the sheets. But, the sheets aren’t his only destination.” Most people don’t know that “Partyup” is an antiwar song. Most people have never heard of “Ronnie Talk to Russia.” Most people don’t know that Prince comments on Desert Storm in “Money Don’t Matter 2nite.” I’ve already mentioned “Baltimore.” And, many of his songs are about the liberation of the individual from the mindless masses. Furthermore, most completely missed that “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is about how most romantic relationships fail because people are taught to communicate as gender and not as humans. Thus, men and women don’t talk to each other because most believe (have been taught) that they naturally don’t understand each other. In the song, “What’s My Name,” Prince states, “You never would have drank my coffee if I had never served you cream.”
Maybe Prince was often guilty of being so sensational that it was difficult for most to see or hear the substance. Yet, I wonder how much of that has to do with race. Traditionally, white artists seem to have more latitude in what they can be and do whereas black artists are often confined to one thing. For instance, it seemed that, mostly, white folks were shocked by Prince’s solo during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at the 2004 Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, as those of us who had been Prince fans since 1978 were well aware of songs such as “I’m Yours” from the first album, “Bambi” from 1979’s Prince, and “Temptation” from 1986’s Around the World in a Day, that are traditional rock jams. Similarly, when Prince broke the internet by stating during the 2015 Grammys, “Albums, like books and black lives, still matter,” the only people who were surprised by that statement were those who had not been listening closely to his lyrics his entire career. Carlos Santana stated that “Prince is one of the greatest guitarists that we have, but he must do a strip tease to get noticed.” So, yes, one can argue that Prince, himself, due to his antics is a reason why more people haven’t taken him seriously as a writer with something substantial to say. Or, is it that black artists aren’t given the same latitude to explore more slices of their human pie chart as their white counterparts?
FOLLOW-UP EXPLORATIONS…
You wrote above: “But, a lot of what passed as serious writing about popular music after the ’80s just felt flat to me. That’s probably not necessary to say in this discussion, but…” In fact, it would be of some interest here. What felt flat to you about music writing after this period?
Not to denigrate the film critics Siskel and Ebert, but much of the writing about popular music became more about giving art thumbs up or thumbs down rather than a serious deconstruction of the work based on some understanding of an aesthetic or an ideological approach toward the art. And, to be clear, Siskel and Ebert only used the thumbs up or thumbs down language to get us interested in their discussions. Yet, once we were there, they provided actual film analysis, rather than discussing everything about the artist except the art. Moreover, I think that a negative of social media is that it has worsened this trend because now so-called artists can be famous for everything except art. Often, people will admit that they like a certain artist, not because of the art, but because social media makes them feel like they know the artist. Once popular music journalism stopped being primarily about an exegesis of the work, I stopped reading it.
Thoughts on the critical dictum, “Trust the art, not the artist”?
Oh boy, this topic has gotten me into some trouble. First, my parents, especially my pops, raised me to view art like Horace presents poetry in The Art of Poetry. The creation of art is based on skill. Yet, before Horace, folks accepted that art or artistry was merely a gift from the gods and that artists were the few special people with whom the gods communicated. Horace becomes one of the first figures to assert that writing is a skill that can be learned, developed, and mastered and not something solely from the gods. That’s how my father taught me to engage and appreciate art. Artists are not gods or special people. They simply have a skill that some invest more work than others to master their craft to touch us in meaningful ways. I don’t think someone is a good person or even good/smart in other areas of life simply because that person is a well-crafted artist. Thus, I have no problem separating the artist from the art, and I tend not to respect the intellect of anyone who can’t separate the artist from the art. But, when I wrote a commentary about my Mount Rushmore of Comedy and Bill Cosby was still on it, I got a lot of angry emails. My reply was simple. If Cosby harmed those women, he deserves to be in jail. But Heathcliff Huxtable hasn’t done anything to anyone. Then, I had the nerve to double down and state that I can read a poem by the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that’s about the destruction of all black people and denounce the evil of that sentiment while also saying that lines six and seven of that poem are well-constructed. I don’t see where one sentiment conflicts with the other. For another example, other than Don Cheadle, I think that Johnny Depp is the greatest character actor of his generation. Yet, as much as I love Depp, I can’t watch any of the Pirates of the Caribbean films or The Lone Ranger. Pirates were some of the most heinous beings that humanity has produced. As such, I can’t watch anything that glorifies pirates. Yet, having seen at least one of the films in the series, I can attest that it’s well-made. Two (seemingly opposite) things can be true. Those films offend my sociopolitical sensibilities even though they are well-crafted. As for The Lone Ranger, I can’t watch a white man play a Native American. I just couldn’t believe that in 2013 Hollywood was still casting white men to play Native Americans. The other problem of The Lone Ranger is that it’s based on the life of a black man—Bass Reeves. Yet, neither of these two things impacts whether or not the film is well-crafted. Self Made, the Netflix series inspired by the life of Madam C.J. Walker, is a very interesting and gripping film except for the historical inconsistencies and untruths. The same can be said for Chevalier, a film that I love but also criticized greatly for its historical inaccuracies.
The problem is that most simple-minded people have only two simple-minded thoughts about art. One, if they don’t like something, it must not be enjoyable or pleasing to anyone else. Two, if they don’t like somebody, that person must not be talented. And, of course, both of those are idiotic statements. Whenever I’m having this conversation in a room of black folks, I’ll say, “Every black woman in this room should agree with me because I’ve seen black women do something that I’ve never seen anyone else do.” At that point, the room gets extremely quiet with everyone, especially the black women, having very concerning looks on their face. Then, I’ll continue. “I can’t tell y’all how many times I’ve seen two black women see another woman that neither of them likes, and one will turn to the other and say, ‘But, that heifer was wearing those shoes though.’” Then, the room will explode into laughter. I’ll conclude with, “Black women have always understood that the aesthetics of life must be appreciated as one of the essential components of life despite who may be presenting the aesthetic. I’m just sad to see that humanity is losing this understanding as we devolve into overly emotional beings who are no longer equipped to be nuanced in our engaging of complex situations.” The art is all that I want from the artist. Does it “feel good” to support an artist, especially financially, who shares my sociopolitical sensibilities? Of course, it does. But, if I am unable to separate my subjective notions from my objective understanding, I’ll be just as hypocritical as white literary editors who don’t publish black writers because of their sociopolitical themes or sensibilities even though the black writers are as well-crafted as anyone they’ve published.
Relating this to Prince, he has been forthright in his sociopolitical sensibilities since his first album. Yet, once Prince started moving toward more orthodox religious positions and also becoming more intentional about addressing sociopolitical issues directly related to African Americans, many of his fans coined the term, “judgy Prince,” as if he all of a sudden became “judgy Prince.” To counter this, I assert that anyone who was shocked by the religious and pro-black themes on The Rainbow Children or any of his mid to late-nineties work was simply not paying attention to those early albums. Prince was always “judgy.” It’s just that during his early albums, on songs, such as “Uptown,” “Party Up,” “Annie Christian,” “Ronnie Talk 2 Russia,” “Sexuality,” “All the Critics (Love U in New York),” “Lady Cab Driver,” etc., he was “judging” people that us early Prince fans wanted to be judged. But, once Prince began to “judge” sensibilities that were aligned with some of his early fans, now, all of a sudden, Prince was “judgy” and, now, his art suffered because he was “judgy.” That’s bullshit. I don’t have to agree with every one of Prince’s sociopolitical sensibilities to enjoy a particular song. Yet, I can also be honest when a particular song’s message is off-putting to me. For instance, many white fans love to tout Prince’s song “Race,” from 1994’s The Gold Experience, as a better or more well-crafted song than “The Exodus Has Begun” from 1995’s Exodus, “Family Name” from 2001’s The Rainbow Children, “Dear Mr. Man,” from 2004’s Musicology, and “Black Muse” from 2015’s HitnRun: Phase Two because “Race” doesn’t indict white supremacy as the primary problem of the world. The first time that I heard “Race,” I thought, “Man, what a waste of a funky groove with such childish lyrics.” To be clear, the lyrics didn’t stop me from liking the song even though I realized that the sentiment of the lyrics would not solve the problem being addressed in the song. Prince sings, “D-d-down with H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and all this BS propaganda / Keepin’ you from me and me from you as we grow / I don’t wanna know / Why those before us hated each other / I’d rather believe they never did / I’d rather believe / That there’s hope for a kid / And if he imitates the best / I guess that’s what I’ll try to be.” Many of Prince’s fans love that sentiment because they are not forced to face the fact of white supremacy and that Prince and many of his fans still struggle against white supremacy as indicated by “The Exodus Has Begun,” “Family Name,” “Dear Mr. Man,” and “Black Muse.” Being blind to history will never stop the evil of the past from becoming the evil of the present. Learning and understanding history is the first step to stopping the evil of the past from poisoning our present.
To be clear, no one is obligated to listen to any artist who offends one’s sociopolitical sensibilities. Again, two things can be true. It can be a well-crafted work of art that is also an affront to someone’s sensibilities, and we all have the right to engage that art according to our ideology. But, to denounce the art as poorly crafted simply because it’s an affront to one’s sensibilities shows a lack of intelligence. With that, let the angry emails issue forth.
You’ve written about how Prince synthesized years of black music tradition, from Stevie Wonder to Funkadelic to Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, and beyond—and how this lineage has been downplayed (if not erased) from his story, particularly by white intellectuals. But I want to press a little in the opposite direction. Are there ways in which Prince (particularly with the arrival of Dirty Mind) did cause a rupture in that lineage?
The biggest way that the black music lineage has been downplayed from Prince’s legacy is by promoting Purple Rain as his best album because it’s his so-called rock album with noticeable white faces in the band. The moment that Wendy Melvoin (who’s a great musician and songwriter) replaced Dez Dickerson (an equally great musician and songwriter), the love affair with the white media increased. It smacks of what Miles Davis asserts in his autobiography.
But the record companies and white people liked [Hendrix] better when he had the white guys in his band. Just like a lot of white people like to talk about me when I was doing the nonet thing—the Birth of the Cool thing; or when I did those other albums with Gil Evans or Bill Evans because they always like to see white people up in black shit, so that they can say they had something to do with it. (Davis, 293)
Even Prince admitted this in an interview for Rolling Stone with Neal Karlen, “Prince Talks: The Silence Is Broken”: “Wendy makes me seem all right in the eyes of people watching. She keeps a smile on her face. When I sneer, she smiles. It’s a good contrast.” The question is to whom does Wendy make Prince seem all right? The obvious answer is to women, in general, and to white America. Davis would later add to his quote when discussing Prince in the documentary, Prince: A Musical Portrait, by stating, “White people don’t understand that [Prince] doesn’t hear Ravel when he wants to make love to his woman; he hears drums. They don’t understand that shit.” [Listen to Davis’s quote here.] For many white people, nothing worthy from Prince comes before Purple Rain or after Parade, because those are the albums in which the band is seen as white. To be clear, I’m not saying that lots of black people don’t love Purple Rain. Respected sports journalist and cultural critic Bomani Jones chose Purple Rain as his favorite Prince record during an interview with music journalist and cultural critic Touré. But, I’ve also heard Jones talk intelligently about earlier and later Prince albums in ways that many white fans and critics don’t. And, for the record, Touré chose Sign ‘O’ the Times.
The Prince Estate, so far, has focused more on “The Revolution Era of Prince,” along with most of the white critics. But, of course, that’s where most of the mainstream money is to be made so I don’t begrudge them for doing that. I’m just hoping that the Estate will begin to expand what they present as Prince’s legacy. Yet, to say that Dirty Mind aided in this rupture is to narrow what black music was, is, and has always been. A rock record shouldn’t be considered a white record since black people created rock-n-roll. And, again, most of the black people I knew liked the music of Dirty Mind even if the visual and lyrical imagery were a bit much for their tastes. I think that not doing much press with African-American outlets from 1984 through 1986 or so caused more of a rupture than the actual music. There’s the infamous interview of jazz and funk legend James Mtume who blasted Prince and Michael Jackson for not appearing on BET’s Video Soul. And, many black critics complained about Under the Cherry Moon featuring two black men spending an hour and forty minutes chasing a white woman with the face of a black woman being used to put the fear of God into Prince’s character, Christopher Tracey. Yet, during that time, “Kiss” was burning up the black charts and the dance floors of black clubs. So, there has always been an interesting dance that black folks have done with each other as we navigate white supremacy. What rupture there may have been between Prince and some in the black community wasn’t evident on black radio stations, which always found something to play from the latest Prince album, even if it wasn’t the latest single. B-sides (especially those not on the album) of single records, such as “Erotic City” and “She’s Always in My Hair,” and deep album cuts have long been the spaces where Prince’s black fans lived, and black radio often played those types of songs when Prince could only get the one or two company-pushed singles on white radio. “Adore” is a Prince classic because black people and black radio made it one despite never being released as an official single.
To listen to “Adore” click here or here.
You mentioned that Sign “O” the Times marked a “new beginning” for Prince (as opposed to “the last hurrah of the Revolution”). How so? What kind of break did it signal from what he’d done up to then?
Let me start by saying that I’m not one who proclaims that a certain band or band lineup is the best Prince band or band lineup. One of the genius traits of Prince was choosing the perfect people to execute the sound that he had in his mind at the time. Whether it was the pre-Revolution, The Revolution, The Counter Revolution, The Band with No Name (as coined by Prince scholar Harold Pride), the various incarnations of The New Power Generation, or Third Eye Girl, a new Prince band meant a new Prince sound. That being said, The Band with No Name, which is the band for Sign “O” the Times and Lovesexy, reflects a band with more bottom, more flexibility, and more diversity in sound. The Revolution was a funky, rock-oriented, kick-ass band. Yet, there are levels or layers of jazz and soul that they could not do as well as The Band with No Name. Additionally, Sign “O” the Times highlights, even more, the genius and courage of Prince to end The Revolution phase of his life because he knew that he had even more to give. Most people don’t know that there were three projects (Dream Factory, Camille, and Crystal Ball) between Parade and SOTT that were eventually edited to SOTT, which was originally presented to Warner Bros as a three-album set before they made him reduce it to a two-album set. Thus, if we follow the progression of Dream Factory, Camille, Crystal Ball, and SOTT, Prince is clearly shedding the skin of The Revolution and returning to his one-man band approach with ideas that couldn’t be executed by The Revolution in the manner that he needed them executed. By the time Prince gets to SOTT, 11 of 16 songs have no Revolution connection, and I could argue that 13 of the 16 songs have no Revolution connection, depending on if we include former girlfriend and Family band member Susannah Melvoin as a member of the Revolution.
Next, Sign “O” the Times followed two very metaphysical and eclectic albums, Around the World in a Day (1985) and Parade (1986), which, of course, heightened Prince’s mad genius, pop/rock icon status, but also worked to lessen his grip on the black charts as hip-hop was becoming the king of the community. As such, Sign “O” the Times reminded folks of the vastness of Black music that Prince had coursing through his blood. The album combines all that had come before him with more possibility of what could be. It is James Brown as the sweat and funk of “Housequake,” especially the live version. It is Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield in the message of “Sign ‘O’ the Times”. It is the funky horns and grooves of Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic in “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night.” It is Al Green and Luther Vandross showing that soul music is rooted in gospel as “Adore.” It is Jimi Hendrix’s physical questioning and metaphysical answers in “Play in the Sunshine,” “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” and “The Cross.” It is the nasty cafés and juke joints of “It.” It is the great poetry of Smokey Robinson in “Forever in my Life” and even more well-crafted poetry in “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” with a groove that would inspire a new generation of neo-soul folk like D’Angelo, Angie Stone, and Maxwell. It is the Saturday night slow grind groove of “Slow Love,” which evokes the memory of every soul singer who never made it out da hood. It is the experimental form of digitized soul with jazz sensibility in “Hot Thang” and even more experimental sounds laced with poetry that celebrates the beauty and power of positive self-esteem in “Star Fish and Coffee.” It is Prince’s Stevie Wonder, Gaye, and Mayfield ability to craft poetry and sound that reflect the dichotomy of being flesh and spirit in “Strange Relationship.” And, it is the funky simmer of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” with the unapologetic metaphysical thinker/poet who didn’t care if most radio listeners aren’t analytical enough to follow subtly or irony. Plainly put, while many critics assert that Around the World in a Day—with its psychedelic funk and roll and daringness—being released after Purple Rain elevates Prince to icon status, it is Sign “O” the Times that made him a legend because it fulfills two needs. It provides a plethora of sound while boldly asserting, as do most of his albums, that physical problems are merely symptoms of or results of metaphysical problems, and as long as we try to solve metaphysical problems with physical solutions—drugs, sex, money, and status—we will continue to travel the road of chaos and destruction. Thus, it was only appropriate that the album following Sign “O” the Times is the third greatest concept record of all time (after Wonder’s Secret Life of Plants and Gaye’s Here My Dear), Lovesexy, which is the apex of the metaphysical journey until the much later Rainbow Children (2001).
Unfortunately, Prince canceled the US leg of the Sign “O” the Times tour, opting to use the concert movie as an alternative. The cancellation of the US tour and the release of “If I Was Your Girlfriend” all but killed the momentum that the album had been building. As former road manager Allen Leeds stated, “Sometimes, Prince could be too smart or daring for his own good.” Radio wants an uncomplicated jam, not a lyrical puzzle that questions how gender perceptions affect the relationships between men and women, with an easily misunderstood title that causes most males to think they now have affirmation of Prince’s sexuality. While few Americans saw the film, Ricky Graham (my closest non-family friend) and I saw Sign “O” the Times sixty times in thirty days at the old dollar movie just down the street from Jackson State University. There was a 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. showing, and we would pay a dollar and stay for both showings. But, in truth, the theatre manager stopped charging us after the first week and even gave us a bag of stale dollar-movie popcorn and flat sodas for free. The first night he offered this, the look on my face prompted him to say, “Purple people gotta stick together. We are surrounded by fools that either don’t kno’ the funk or be tryin’ to fake da funk.” With that, we took our stale popcorn and flat sodas and enjoyed a month-long run of one of the greatest concert films.
What is Prince’s most undervalued song or album?
All mane, don’t do that to me. I am very conscious of my subjective self and my objective self. For instance, Prince is my favorite guitar player, but I don’t have him in my top ten of greatest guitar players of all time. My top five are B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy. I haven’t gotten to Carlos Santana, Eddie Hazel, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend, Albert King, Freddie King, and more. So, I’m not sure how to judge Prince’s most undervalued song or album. I would say that, historically, there’s no way to understand Prince without understanding Dirty Mind and Controversy. But, most people overlook those albums and go straight to 1999 and Purple Rain because, again, that’s when the mainstream success began. Yet, a song like “Colonized Mind” from the Loutsflow3r/MPLS set proved that in 2009 Prince was still one of the best guitar players on the planet. Each Prince album was designed to have a particular effect, and Prince was very calculating in that manner. Because most of those albums hit the mark of the desired effect, it’s difficult to say which is most undervalued. I would say that many serious/diehard Prince fans sometimes minimize the artistic caliber of 1991’s Diamonds & Pearls because Prince was trying to write a pop hit, and he did. And, lots of Prince fans don’t like the overly polished or what they perceive as the overly produced sound of Emancipation. But, again, Prince was consciously making an R&B record that accomplished its goal of going platinum. What’s not usually told about Emancipation is that, as his first release after leaving Warner Bros, he earned a combined 25 million dollars on album sales and touring. That’s not a bad liberation at all, especially for an album that most don’t consider one of his top works.
A common trope in arts criticism is that artists do their greatest work when they are young and striving—when they are most hungry for success. Prince’s trajectory as an artist might challenge that line, whereas I would argue that, say, Stevie Wonder, an artist of comparable ability and genius (who you’ve also cited as a personal favourite) simply stopped pushing in as many different directions after his run of great works in the ‘70s (right up to the end of the decade; I can’t say I love The Secret Life of Plants from start to end, but there’s no other album quite like it). Do you agree that Prince belies the “too old to rock and roll” idea? And if so, do you consider him unique in that regard?
It depends on if we are differentiating between creating new music and being a quality live act beyond one’s forties, which is a very arbitrary line, I might add, even though I’m the one drawing the line at that age. Just five years ago, my wife and I went to see The Time in concert with two other iconic funk bands that will remain nameless. I was amazed at the difference in performance as The Time could still do all dances, play all the grooves, and hit all the vocal notes. However, one of the other bands made me sad that most of them could barely move or sing. I felt guilty, like it was my fault that these old dudes might die on stage. So, in terms of being a live act, I think increasingly more artists have been able to maintain an aspect of prowess, with Prince being one of them. Live, Prince’s voice sounded as sharp and crisp in 2016 as it did in 1979. Now, in terms of creating new music, it also depends on if we are using sales, critical acclaim, or fan popularity. Prince’s last number-one album was 2006’s 3121, which is also Prince’s only album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. That was just two years after his number-one album, Musicology. So, twenty-seven years after his first album, Prince was still generating number-one albums. But, I’m not completely comfortable with judging whether or not Prince belies the “too old to rock and roll” idea on record sales alone. In 2009, Prince was still enough of a name that people wanted to see that Jay Leno had him on The Tonight Show for three consecutive nights debuting new songs from his Lotusflow3r/MPLS set. In 2013, Prince appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. And, in 2014, Prince was able to secure a spot on Saturday Night Live to promote his Artificial Age/Plectrum Electrum set. While neither of those albums sold particularly well, the television ratings for those performances indicated that a good number of people wanted to see/hear Prince, even though music tastes had drastically changed. And, Prince continued to sell out arenas, stadiums, and theatres until the day that he died. People forget that Prince had just played a sold-out show a few days before his death.
A final point that might separate Prince from others is that Prince never stopped making new albums or performing new songs. At some point, Tina Turner, Elton John, and the Stones all toured off older material and rarely, if ever, played new songs. I’m remembering the joke: The eight words you never want to hear at a classic rock concert are “Here is a song from our new album.” In contrast, Prince fans wanted new music and were often upset if a new tour didn’t include new music, which rarely happened. Even during his last tour, Piano & a Microphone, in 2016, Prince was performing newly written songs, such as “Free Urself” and “Black Muse.” So, yeah, until he took his last breath, Prince never stopped creating, recording, and performing. This is the epitome of who he was.
Please summarize your interactions with Prince. I understand you spoke to him with regards to collaborating on a book project. What was that about, and what struck you most about your conversations with him?
From our very first phone call to our first meeting and all other calls and meetings, Prince was chatty, which surprised me. I think he often carried much of the conversation. Like always, he was on a mission to create something new that he thought the world needed. Having just converted to being a Jehovah’s Witness, he wanted to produce a book that discussed how African Americans had always used music and spirituality as part of their liberation struggle. Yet, as we talked, it became clear that this book would also be about him, where he was spiritually, and as a man, ready to embrace a leadership role. He wanted to discuss his life, his relationship with his father, his desire to be a father, his desire to mentor other young musicians, and his desire to lead more artists into artistic and economic independence. I loved every idea and was ready to work. Our only major disagreement was that he was obsessed with and pushing Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I did everything I could to get him off that ledge. I understood why he was on that ledge. In a vacuum, the novel is about the creative individual breaking free from the oppression and bureaucracy of the government and other agencies, which is how he saw himself. Yet, because he had tunnel vision against Warner Bros, he didn’t understand that Rand was also pushing the notion that individual freedom is more important than laws or sanctions that protect the masses from corporate exploitation. It took a minute, but I was able to get him off that ledge. At least, he stopped trying to put quotes from it in his book. Also, he wanted the title of the book to be The Truth, and I kept pushing for Radical Man, because of his song, “Radical Man: 2045.” Of course, he would have had final say.
While we didn’t finish our book, much of what he wanted to address can be seen in how he embraced younger artists, especially younger black artists while continuing his philanthropy work in secret. Unfortunately, at that time, 2002 – 2004, the book industry didn’t want a book from Prince about spirituality and black liberation. They wanted a tell-all book with sexual exploits, and Prince wasn’t interested in delivering that. I wasn’t privy to conversations he was having with possible book executives at the time, but I was able to gather that there wasn’t much interest in that type of book from Prince. One of my regrets is that I never pushed for him to self-publish the book. Even in those eighteen months of periodic conversations, I never felt comfortable enough to raise the idea. I wish that I would have. But, I was so concerned about just making sure that what he wanted to say made it to the page. We produced a twelve-page introduction and another page that includes a working outline for the rest of the book. Then, as quickly as he came into my life, he was gone. And, I never heard from him after 2004.
Finally, you’ve participated in a fair number of conferences and online panels about Prince, as well as guested on various podcasts. For the sake of readers not familiar with your work, is there a particular online talk or dialogue you would like to point them to?
A few in no particular order: my presentation on Dirty Mind at the Prince Symposium at NYU (here), my discussion of “Moonbeam Levels” on What Did Prince Do This Week? (here), my presentation of Prince reclaiming Rude Boy at the Purple Takeover (here), my interview given on the day that Prince died (here), and two links from a six-part interview about myself as a writer in which I discuss Prince mostly from the midway point of part two and all of part three: here and here. There are lots more, but these will get folks started.
RockCritics.com 