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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

Musings, February 8-9, 2021

    MUSINGS OF THE DAY   The mother- and father-ships of sanity have landed   Let our enemies of whatever color they be know this as we eradicate them with the tools of insanity.   Mr. Ramcat informed me this morning that I need to tie up loose ends and thank all the people who have made my life a rich and satisfying experience of 77+ years.   If you deserve my gratitude, you know who you are.   Four quotations to brighten the day------   "I don't regret my years as a prosecutor assigned to juvenile court.   In some ways, I think it is why I was put on this earth." ---Daphne R. Robinson   "While there are books and articles concentrating on young black men in the social sciences and education, thee has been comparatively little input from scholars in the arts and humanities/" Howard Rambsy II   "The hashtag 'black lives matter,' which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and int
Read more