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.
