Nothing compares to Prince

Already, 2016 has sadly taken two seminal artists from us. And I must confess I’m more shaken up about Prince.

Bowie was an artist you discovered, his handful of chart hits pointing to a fantastical world build just over the next hill. Prince pitched his tent right in the middle of everything, where he simply couldn’t be ignored.

The two artists, who died too young just a few months apart, were monumental. But while Bowie will be an interesting historical figure, dancing somewhere on the edge of both the music and art worlds, Prince got his hands truly dirty, changing the culture at its heart, on the charts and in people's bedrooms. You never had to seek him out to hear him, who he was influenced by and who he influenced.

Which is not to say that Prince failed to build imaginative worlds as elaborate as Bowie. Unlike Bowie, who relied on costumes, dramatic changes in genre and references to history and other forms of art in order to conjure his vision, Prince, for the most part, built his worlds right there in the songs. You didn’t have to read a novel or know the backstory to see “Raspberry Beret” unfold in your mind’s eye. In fact, you didn’t even have to see 1984’s Purple Rain to “see” the soundtrack. Prince’s roles as a musician and storyteller were much more inseparable and intertwined than Bowie’s.

Oh, that Purple Rain soundtrack. It landed right in the middle of my teens like an atomic bomb. A bomb that got played on the radio. “Darling Nikki,” which wasn’t played on the radio, was the first song that I knew for a fact I couldn’t let my parents hear. Lyrics didn’t get much more sexually overt than “masturbating,” especially when masturbating was just the tip of the song’s iceberg, a hint that life and relationships could be much different than what I saw on TV sitcoms. The sonic texture was loud and carnival-like; nothing about “Darling Nikki” could be ignored. But it was not smut, or merely smut. It created a new moral universe that I only was able to parse out with age and experience. Sex was not just a component of romance and love; sex could be its own thing.

While Bowie came across as a mostly solitary artist, despite his many collaborations, Prince populated his world with characters that enriched what he had to say about desire, power, beauty and sex. Wendy and Lisa, Sheila E., Vanity 6, Morris Day—Prince was a school of thought, a way of life. And notice that four out of five of those names are women. Though womanizer was part of his brand, Prince’s erotic power did not come from dismissing women or controlling female sexuality. Neither did Bowie’s, of course, though Bowie’s oeuvre was always something less than erotic. Bowie was thinky sexy—an abstract prelude to the act, perhaps—not messy sexy.

Despite the musical community around him, Prince often did seem alone in the industry. His genius came much closer to mania than did Bowie’s; the thought-outness of Bowie’s personas and outfits suggested investments that were as methodical as they were fantastical. Prince’s name changes and reinventions seemed more personal than strategic. His Slave period—perhaps his weirdest and the one that perhaps lost him his many mainstream followers, not because they disagreed with him, but they lost a sense of a regular supply of music—seemed devoid of caprice. He was mad at his record company for claiming ownership of his music—his soul—and for all his wiliness, Prince lacked a polished retaliatory strategy.

With the charts as Prince’s main vehicle for disseminating his work, his singular sound, inherited from the best of soul and funk, left him standing outside current commercial trends later in his career. But whenever you checked in, there was always genius there. The rest—the interviews, the gossip, the packaging, the posturing—seemed irrelevant. All you needed to know was in the songs.

I don’t mean to detract from Bowie, who I admired. He created an abundance of serious art atop the humble platform of pop music, and more importantly, became a beacon for those in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond who felt they were outsiders. (Though I will always feel Bowie’s walk-back from his 1976 claim to be bisexual showed him to be as much a politician as showman.)

Bowie made weirdos feel it was cool to be weirdos—an astonishing accomplishment.

But Prince? He sang directly to the outsider freak in each one of us. And our freaks couldn’t help but dance.

Fully Furnished

I met David Furnish at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto's Yorkville and staff seemed to have no idea he was something of a big thing--we got bounced around a bit trying to get seated and had to firmly ask for a corner table even though the inside of the hotel restaurant was mid-afternoon empty.

Furnish was honest and humble. I think being chosen as parade marshal in his hometown had made him reflective about his life's journey from Scarborough to LA/Windsor/Etc. But I would say that our interaction was pretty formal until my prepared questions ended and we started talking about the cult Canadian musician Jane Siberry. I had interviewed her in 1996 for a Vancouver magazine I was editing; he had interviewed her the same year for Interview magazine, when her album Teenager came out.

We both agreed that she has cleared the way for the commercial success of the many female Canadian singer-songwriters who had followed (especially Sarah McLachlan). Even though Furnish had already talked to me in great detail about how he and Elton John parent their two kids, it seemed like his enthusiasm for Siberry was our first totally unguarded moment.

When you're married to one of the world's most famous men, I suppose, you probably welcome moments where you can speak about something with passion, where that passion won`t likely end up in the tabloid headlines.

Read the exclusive IN magazine here.
interview

My response to Sky Gilbert's critique of my IN Toronto piece on celebrities coming out

It's always flattering when someone you admire takes issue with something you said, since, at the very least, you were worth responding to. 

So I'm glad Sky Gilbert took umbrage with my piece in this month's IN Toronto magazine, which asks the bratty question "Does coming out even matter anymore?"

Sky's critique is here.

I responded to Sky directly and wanted to share my response here, for the record.
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Hi Sky,

I appreciate your thoughtful essay and feel delighted and honoured that you took the time to respond to what I wrote.

My piece was meant to be a playful riff on a series of ideas around coming out. (It all started when a friend of mine complained that there were too many out actors and not enough out scientists, which was a weird notion I wanted to unpack.)

It might have been hard to figure out what I was saying in the piece because I was deliberately trying to be non-prescriptive--evasive even. I didn't want to tell anybody what to think or do with their lives, nor give a thumbs up or thumbs down to different celebrities. Rather, I was throwing some ideas and stereotypes into the air to see them crash into each other, hopefully provoking readers into examine their own feelings about famous people coming out. I purposely eschewed answering the headline's question so readers could answer it themselves. And you've done so yourself quite forcefully and I'm glad of that.

But I hope I was clear, especially when I write about the "enduring value of coming out"--that's the bit near the end where I laid my cards on the table--that, despite my cavalier approach and the provocative headline, I still think coming out is very important. Perhaps I buried the lead.

I just think coming out publicly has a very different social meaning than it did a decade or 20 years ago. That's progress, though not the end of our labours.

Was Brüno mostly filler?

Was it just me or was there something desperate about Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno?

Baron Cohen and his producers devised mis-en-scène after mis-en-scène to entrap the squeamish and the homophobic (and I don't think they're automatically the same thing--the movie was as much about our fear of sex and eccentricity as it was about homosexuality). But his chosen victims were, for the most part, so controlled, so on message, so "I'm out of here as fast as I possibly can?" that he only managed to squeeze a few brief moments of discomfort out of each of them.

I mean, the setup for Congressman Ron Paul was spectacular--the hotel room, the champagne, the photos, the disappearing act with the pants--but the man did get out of there in the least embarrassing way possible. It was all build, build, build--then the person fled or, like the hunters out camping, turned silent and uncooperative, cinematically speaking.

(Which may be why so much of the movie felt set-up--the spider couldn't attract enough flies into his web. Possible exceptions: Paula Abdul taking about human rights work while, ahem, sitting on a person and the penultimate set piece, where the grudge-match fans cheered on the violence but freaked out on the same-sex kissing. But then, as if to offer an anecdote to all the hate of that scene, Brüno sings a song with celebrities he should be deflating, a set-up that had obviously been negotiated and constructed, which retroactively makes you reevaluate all the "real" incidents you've already seen.)

To fill up the holes in running time, the "plot" was pushed to the forefront with many scenes of Baron Cohen "acting" rather than "intervening." But without an audience, Baron Cohen's flamey performance is something a drag queen would do at home in front of the mirror: overwrought, self-indulgent and self-congratulatory but deeply unconvincing. When people complain that the move made them squirm, I wonder if it's Baron Cohen's interpretation of Brüno, rather than the world around him, that made them feel that way. Who'd want to watch a scripted movie performed this way? I blame the bad acting, though it could be that some audience members have not spent enough time in the underbelly of the gay world in order to set their flamboyancy meters to appropriate tolerance levels.

Even as a stereotype, Baron Cohen was one-note. Where was the defeat, the sliding of the mask in the face of the humiliation of "failing" in Hollywood? Where were the tantrums, the acting out? It's true that gay men construct studier and more ostentatious public personae than others, but it's also true that these constructions frequently falls apart. In this, Baron Cohen was very much a straight man putting on "gay face," afraid to deviate too far from his shtick for fear of striking a wrong note and alienating gay and gay-friendly audiences.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the success of Borat. And I suppose reality TV shows in general. Even if people don't know it's Baron Cohen, they see the cameras, imagine a scenario where they will be humiliated and pull back.

Success seems to have made Baron Cohen pull back, too. It's the worst mistake a satirist can make: wanting people to like you. You can unflatteringly impersonate a Kazakhstani journalist without ever winking at the audience, because, I'm pretty sure, Kazakhstanis don't buy a lot of movie tickets. Who cares if you hurt their feelings? But the queers--cross them and they can bring you down. With Brüno Baron Cohen has tried to have it both ways--social criticism and conciliation. They are not compatible modes of expression.

Previous generations of gay men identified with Dorothy the escapist or Judy the victim. But anyone who grew up in the 80s or with 80s reruns wanted to be Sophia, who never missed an opportunity to be a bitch. But not a Bette Davis bitch. An old, scattered-brained bitch who is essentially harmless, tolerated because of her seniority.

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