April 21st, 2016
One night in 1995, working on my book about Soul Asylum, I stood for hours, under-dressed and alone, in Prince's downtown Minneapolis club Glam Slam. Someone would come out on stage at midnight, and there was always a chance it would be him. It was a fine band (though I forget who), but it didn't matter much; I was in Prince's club. I was in Prince's world....as I had been when I first heard 1999 at my brother's place, when I saw Purple Rain debut in Tulsa, when I used to drive around listening to Dirty Mind grappling with the crazy pull of my not-quite-single years in early college, and as I was when I saw Sign of the Times with my buddy BC, both of us at some points standing, and even dancing, in the art-house theater seats.
Now that he's gone, it's easy to see that, in many ways, Prince was the artist of my generation. Just four years older than me, he synthesized everything that was happening to my people in our formative years--from the legacy of rock and soul to disco, punk and funk--and he built a home for us out of the braided textures.
From the punk-ish New Breed, to the Utopian Uptown to the Revolution and the New Power Generation, he built worlds for us to be our whole selves--where love and sex became sanctifying metaphors for how life might become an unending act of creation.
I know all kinds of people are going to say very smart things about Prince tonight and tomorrow and over the following days, and my first reaction was to say nothing. Hell, for the first couple of hours after I heard the news, I was too shook to even think about reading anyone else's thoughts or sharing my own. But I can't go to bed tonight, I can't sleep tonight, without saying a little something.
We'll never be able to plumb the depths of the music Prince created over 40 years of non-stop, frenetic, activity....and that's a good thing. But we will miss living in a world where there is a Prince, where there is that one human being who might emerge from behind the curtain at midnight and, without question, deliver us to some kind of promised land, one that we never envisioned. There was no finer singer, no finer guitarist (no finer multi-instrumentalist), no finer dancer and no finer performer. Someone may have had him somewhere on technique, but he did everything with such vision and such effortlessness.
The last time I saw him play live, I wondered, absolutely wondered, about this. How did someone combine so much craft into something that seemed so elementally natural? But that wasn't really the important part. The enormity of his talent was always secondary. What I never will get over are the many ways he found to reach out to my lonesome self and assure me....my soul could be set free....and my ass would follow. If that isn't the most fundamental lesson any artist could teach, I don't know what it might be.
Off to listen to "Sexuality," a manifesto for resistance and liberation if there ever was such a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZO5HLRk7KE
