For a long time, my image of the Ugly American was a thick-necked Prince hater I met (early in the Age of Reagan) when he drove me around the Upper West Side as I delivered Christmas gifts for a package store. This piece of work (who had a familial connection to the owners and wanted me to know he was tight with my bosses) had seen Prince open for the Stones in 1981. He’d been among thousands in the overwhelmingly white crowd who booed the “faggot” unmercifully. I remember biting my tongue—I needed that 9 to 5 or I’d be back to making a meal out of one chocolate croissant and two green peppers—but I couldn’t shut my pastry-hole. I still recall the intensely awkward stretch in his wheelhouse after I let him know I was down with the pan-sexual imp. Seems almost unimaginable now, but American dailiness was once suffused with such taste tests and clashes over sound effects.
Prince nearly cost me that job, but he gave me a… vocation? Not quite—I’m a pop lifer without portfolio. Yet Prince was surely a commander who gave me orders. The first time I heard “Do Me Baby,” his sexy act of mimesis amped up my faith music made by my peers—Prince was a couple years younger than me—might amount to something qualitatively different from what had come before. And that, in turn, bolstered my sense I must try (someday) to join a cultural conversation larger than, say, back and forths with that prick from the liquor store. I’ve written about my first shot at cultivating such discourse—a Columbia U series of seminars in the mid-80s on Black music (“Start Making Sense”). Forgive my return to events that barely registered back in that day beyond a few oddballs on a mission, but I can’t help recalling one Am Studs prof/overseer who freaked about having his fiefdom linked with the louche Prince and other “love men” invoked in our program note’s first draft. (Call me rewrite.) This was back before the advent of cultural studies. (Be careful what you wish for!) And long before Prince performed at a private party in the Obama White House. I wonder if that stiff academic still thinks Prince’s dirty mind was beneath the nous of Morningside Heights. What’s certain is class-bound distinctions between high and low culture persist, though masses of Americans seem less sure of their own tastes.[1]
The prof wasn’t the only one involved in those C.U. seminars who wasn’t hot for Prince. After Stanley Crouch had given one of the talks, riffing well on jazz and Renaissance painting, I had a little tiff with him about Prince’s pop, which Crouch disdained. But, what the hey—he was stuck on jazz. My opposing self got more stoked by rock critics, including Prince fans like the Village Voice’s “consumer guide” Robert Christgau. His Prince obit, by the way, brought that all back when he talked up “how much [Prince] owed both bizzers and rock critics.” (He quoted nada yadda by a Rolling Stone critic, “my sister Georgia Christgau’s Village Voice review” and an “A&R Goddess.”) At risk of being charged with reviving a narcissism of small differences, let me cite a credo Christgau laid down in a 1984 piece which hints why I came to believe he wasn’t made to love Prince. In the course of resisting rock-is-over screeds by doomy boomers, Christgau insisted he was still getting what he’d wanted since he first heard rock ‘n’ roll: “more.” But “Do Me Baby” had got me hoping for mo’ better. It was a work of art and I began to think Christgau’s process of grading product deflected attention from such singular creations (even as that method elevated his status as rockwrite’s “Dean”).[2]
Not that “Do Me Baby” (or Prince’s genius) was sui generis. His screams echoed James Brown’s and Marvin Gaye’s as well as a bunch of firey divas: “STOP the Wedding!” (N.B. When I got around to making my bluest R&B mix tape late in the 80s, Prince’s cries didn’t ache so great as Eddie Levert’s prostrate/prostate wails at the top of the O’Jays’ “Stairway to Heaven.”) OTOH, nothing compares to the hushed rush of “Do Me Baby’s” last orchestrated little death.
“Do Me Baby” may be the most explicit sex song ever, yet it’s less than transparent. What’d the doer(s) do? Who knows for sure? “Do Me Baby” doesn’t reduce lovesexy sensations to a porno rut’s various positions. The climax of Prince’s song from that empty room where lovers begin by staring each other down is the opposite of a gape.
A track called “Strollin’” (from late in Prince’s classic era) suggests he sussed what made his inside out approach to eros the antithesis of money shots. “Strollin’” swings easy. Prince urges listeners to beat the clock as a trebly, trilling guitar fuses with a funky but Chic bass: “Take a break from 9 to 5.” While Prince would become a Jehovah’s Witness later in his life he wasn’t on the stroll with them here:
“We could walk up the mezzanine/Buy a dirty magazine/Laugh behind it/While we’re eating ice cream”
Yet porn is only good for a yuck. It’s not enough to satisfy this multitasker’s appetite. Prince hooks up the song’s free time with art-work. Picking up his vocal after a catchy guitar/organ break, he drops a reflexive couplet:
“See the man with the blue guitar/Maybe someday he’ll be a star”
Maybe this isn’t a nod to Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” but “Strollin’” is surely in line with Stevens’ case for imagination: “We shall forget by day, except / The moments when we choose to play / The imagined pine, the imagined jay.” (“She wore a raspberry beret…”)
Stevens’ poem was sparked by Picasso’s painting by that name. And that may be what was in Prince’s head too, though I wouldn’t be shocked if he’d stumbled on Stevens’ poem and been struck by the first canto:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
Prince’s passing makes me wonder which young R&B artist will inspire the next gen of earthy transformers. Kendrick Lamar has a knack for evoking “things exactly as they are.” And Kanye West might still be the One. But there’s another avatar on the come who’s tuned to the (darker than) blue guitar. Frank Ocean is doing it different. His sexy acts are as mindful as Prince’s. When he updates Antony and Cleopatra’s “immortal longings” in a 9-minute track that jumps from Ancient Egypt to a Strip Club: “She’s working at the Pyramid tonight”—he trips over the id in that Pyramid, stuttering toward instinctive sources of the song’s oceanic feelings. “Pyramids” ends with a trippy phallic guitar solo that sounds Princely, though it’s more languid than the Purple one’s archetypal shredding. [3]
Ocean treats the tradition gentle even as he makes it new. (His “Pink Matter” is Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” for millennials.) So I wasn’t surprised he posted (on Tumblr) a soulful response to Prince’s death and “his deep catalog of propellant, fearless, virtuosic work.”
Ocean, who famously came out before he released his last CD, credited Prince’s “flirtatious brand of genius” with helping him come to terms with his own sexual orientation….
[Prince] learned early on how little value to assign to someone else’s opinion of you. an infectious sentiment that seemed soaked into his clothes, his hair, his walk, his guitar and his primal scream… he was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee high heeled boots, epic. he made me feel more comfortable with how i identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity etc. he moved me to be more daring and intuitive with my own work.
Ocean zeroed in on Prince’s “fight for his intellectual property”—“‘slave’ written across the forehead, name changed to a symbol… an all out rebellion against exploitation.”—and noted Prince wrote:
my favorite song of all time, ‘when you were mine’. it’s a simple song with a simple melody that makes you wish you thought of it first, even though you never would have.
Ocean flashed me back to that crafty song and a love of my life (You get three, right?) who was mine when I locked on it. I went with her to see Prince in the Village in 1981. That evening, Downtown felt like Prince’s “uptown”—“black, white, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin’.” My girl had confessed she wanted to see Prince’s royal ass, which he was more than ready to show the world. I suppose I might’ve taken her wish to see his ideal booty as a sign she wouldn’t stick with my white ass for too long. But nothing seemed threatening that night. Maybe that was because Prince was 5”2 and the jockey that’d been there before me had been 6”11. But I doubt that was it. We just seemed to be strollin’ in a world of love where everything and everybody everybody fueled the heat between her and me. I’m guessing Prince wouldn’t have minded if I allowed our desire lives larger in my memory than his moves on the Ritz’s stage. After all he wrote “Erotic City”—a song that not only mapped the graced spot we danced in that season but also justified our un-procreative urges: “If we cannot make babies, maybe we can make some time.”
It occurs to me that line in “Erotic City” must have become hard for Prince to sing due to travails he endured along with first wife. He married Mayte Garcia in the mid-90s but the couple divorced a few years later after they’d suffered through her miscarriage and the death of their infant son who lived only one week due to a rare brain deformation.[4]
I’m afraid there’s another bit in a Prince song—”Do Me Baby’s” coda—that seems sadly prophetic too. His shocking death has magnified the pathos of “Baby’s” post-orgasmic shiver: “I’m so cold.” That chill now brings to my mind verse sampled on the liner notes of a classic album by Prince’s (divided) soul brother, Marvin Gaye…
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
Notes
1 An Age of Uncertainty has an upside. Crowds are less likely to feel impelled to trash those who don’t share their tastes. But Americans’ incapacity to trust themselves has left an opening for awards-mongers.
2 To be fair to Christgau, I should underscore he had solid reasons beyond careerism to resist equating pop life with art life. His concept of rockwrite was anything but unconsidered. There’s more about his approach (and that of other rock critics) in this post.
3 The solo was played by John Mayer.
4 I once witnessed Prince and Mayte Garcia enjoying a promesse de bonne heure during an inspired gig at the Palladium in 1994. Ms. Garcia was an expert belly dancer who worked the stage like one of Fela’s brides except there weren’t 40 others with her. She was the beloved. Prince was definitely jacked by her and his new dance-first band. It was all about good grooves that night at the Palladium. (Thanks to those creative beats the show beat the hell out of the late 80s’ one I saw Prince give with his old band, The Revolution, at MSG where most fans stayed in their seats, until they began to leave early.)
The Palladium gig took place during Prince’s “Interactive” tour where he played almost nothing from his back catalog of hits, even as he refused to flog new singles. His war with Warner Brothers had begun:
Prince did not wish to follow the typical wishes of the company by releasing one studio album, promoting it with singles, and then touring, as he felt it was too restrictive, thus he rebelled against this and claimed his freedom to write, produce and leave if he so chose. This explains why the tour was an irregular one, as every concert was exceptional and held on Prince’s own accord. The content of most of the concerts came from the albums “Come” and “The Gold Experience,” and from June ’94 onwards, excerpts from the album “Exodus.” Many of these pieces were not commercially available at the time of the concerts…
Twenty years after the Interactive tour, I’ll cop to leaning on Wikipedia (see above) to learn things I hadn’t known about Prince’s Palladium gig. But I don’t need any help to recall the frisson I got from his sounds of freedom.