Prince


PRINCE (1958-2016)/FIVE TAKES ON GENIUS IN A DIFFERENT KEY

1.   By the time Prince Rogers Nelson got the attention of my ears and eyes, I was thirty-something.  I only heard music through the filter of blues/jazz/soul and thought mainly of visual presentations of the self as one stereotype challenging another.  Age was more than a number.  It was a prejudicial wall constructed by the ideologies associated with the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement.  My initial impression of Prince was "This dude is androgyny personified, a  quaint shock of recognition."  I heard his musical genius but severely questioned his motives and commitments.  Age ensured that  I would  never be attuned to  Prince the way I was to Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Etta James. The Berlin Wall of suspicion was never breached or dismantled.



2.  Prince was never one of my favorite artists.  It wasn't a matter of disliking him.  It was a matter of not understanding him any more than I understand hip hop as a logical progression of the blues.



3.  As a poet, Prince exists  in my mind with Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Cassandra Wilson,  Stevie Wonder, and Gil Scott-Heron, with figures who braid words and music in ways that intrigue, challenge, or baffle at different times in uniquely different ways.  I am not willing to play the funky, obscene  game of pitting one against the other for the amusement of a cruel, absurd, fucked down and up world. It suffices that I acknowledge Prince as a genius, a tormented genius,  in a different key.



4.  I take a very small number of Prince's creations ----"Purple Rain," "Party Like It's 1999," "When Doves Cry," "I Wanna Be Your Lover," and "Mary Don't You Weep" ----as touchstones for engaging socio-political issues.  These engagements, the only ones I enjoy,  are surreal and very appropriately mysterious.  They are as mysterious as was/is Prince's location in the field of gender.



5.  Prince's most noteworthy use of literary device is fractal metaphor.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 20, 2018

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