The Effect of Prince's music on my Life

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

Maybe a year after I discovered Guns N' Roses, I discovered the music of Prince. I think, at first, I had found a copied tape at a yard sale for maybe 25¢ of Parade: Music from the film Under the Cherry Moon by Prince & The Revolution. The quality of the tape was pretty shitty, didn't even last me six months of regular playing, but I remember being very blown away for all sorts of reasons. "I Wonder U" was weird and minimalist; "Under the Cherry Moon" and "Do U Lie?" kind of reminded me of my grandmother's Noël Coward and Cole Porter records; the man can fucking sing, and musicially, when he writes songs he can pull from all sorts of multi-genre influences and make something both distinct and well-crafted — kind of makes up for the frequency with which he's lyrically insipid.

I think my father had a bigger problem with Prince's music than with Guns N' Roses — something that I've only really understood in retrospect. In fact, I know that my father was coming after my GN'R tapes after the fuck-head had already come for my Prince collection and dragged me out of the house with him while he tossed them all on the burn pile.

Aside from the obvious accusations that Prince was a "faggot" (something that has only ever been evidenced by the man's flamboyant attire and eccentric personality — which you gotta admit, is a pair of traits that seem disproportionately higher in gay men than most other demographics), my father was convinced this man was some sort of harbinger of the anti-Christ, an accusation that always struck me as incredibly bizarre, even today &mdash though now I can sort of see it, if I suspend personal beliefs for a second and try to see it through the eyes of a Christian zealot who can see "blasphemy" in a bowl of creamed corn.

There are several glaring examples from Prince's career where he's mixed Christian imagery, from the vague to the blatant, and highly sexualised imagery in the same album — and most of his albums throughout the 1980s are frankly "concepts with the concept removed", sort of like Appetite...: There's a theme, the soundtrack albums contain tiny bits of story interspersed with songs that can very easily stand alone, but even everything that wasn't specifically made for a soundtrack (all his 1980s albums, excepting Purple Rain and Parade:... — I'd include Batman, but he's practically disowned that one). To a man who got this look like he had just shit his pants when he discovered that one of his children (id est, me) knew what masturbation was, and who specifically asked my mother to Bowdlerise the "where babies come from" talk to the point of it being essentially useless, who specifically circumvented the "puberty talk" to myself and my younger sister despite our mother's rightful pointing out that we needed to know this before something happened and we freaked out (of course, at some point during their debacle over basic sex-ed, I had learned it all by reading books at the library, and some time after that, my mother got "permission" to talk to me, I told her that I knew everything already, and proved it, and she said "OK, that's great. If you can dumb it down and tell your sister so I won't have to, then your dad won't yell at me in a year when I was to tell her all this"); it's completely understandable why the juxtaposition of The Dirty and The Divine would drive this man up a freakin wall and then some.

When i first picked up Dirty Mind, I had no idea what half of this lyrical content was. I was a very "innocent" and unsullied eleven-year-old, and all of my knowledge of sex was in the most clinical terms about how reproduction, PIV coitus, and masturbation worked. I had a scant knowledge of a few popular slang terms, largely due to the fact that the other kids in my class didn't like me, so they never told me anything. I remember, at some point, my mind just naturally came up with the concept of oral sex all by myself when I was eight (around the time that I learned that genitals were used for more than masturbation — it just made sense to me that 1. it's sort of like kissing, and thus affectionate, 2. it would be an easy way to avoid pregnancy, and 3. this is "how two boys would do It"), but aside from thinking "sucking on penis" (after all, I knew nothing about "blowjobs" or "head") was some revolutionary idea that I didn't think was ever talked about by other people, I knew nothing, at eleven, about the most of the shit I do now. It was all just catchy pop songs to me.

Despite being "forbidden" to be a fan throughout the 1990s, I still watched his career from afar and influence still continued in some ways. I initially became attracted to his character (after his music) because, again, of similarities: He's short (still taller than I am, though), flamboyant, favourite colour is purple -- things that were already identifying characteristics of myself by the age of seven, much less eleven. Hell, I'm a shitty lyricist, even.

Anybody who listens to me talk long enough will realise that The Sacred and The Obscene are two driving forces in my creativity, and Eros cultus alone even prevents me from keeping the two completely separate. Granted, since converting to Jehovah's Witness, the man can't even bring himself to swear, but he's also been shrugging off his past abilities for more Zappa-like complexities — most of his early stuff, as my friend Jeff and I have suggested, plays out like kind of a "Black Marc Bolan: you can hear this intense genius boiling under there, but instead he's been very prolific at producing very good and very catchy insipidness, as if he isn't even trying." Hell, even Jeff said "all through the 1980s, I always felt that if Prince would take even an extra year between releasing albums, yeah, he'd produce a lot less in quantity, but he could write Quadrophenia or Tommy or even Joe's Garage, and each one would be absolutely brilliant and ground-breaking."

And, like Zappa, Prince has abstained from drugs and alcohol throughout his entire career — apparently, he's always felt he's weird enough without 'em. Of course, my room-mate says that I'm the only person he knows who can be up drinking whiskey all night and get progressively less weird, my friend Ben once even said "yeah, Ro's the only person in the world who can drink a fifth of whiskey and suddenly get morals". Maybe they're all four onto something.