Reflections upon the passing of Prince – Part 2

A school friend named Bolanle was the person that first introduced me to Prince. It was 1984. I never registered his existence until then. We read Right On! magazine for information about American groups we were into, like: Shalamar, Dynasty, The Commodores, The Whispers, and Kool and the Gang. Right On! must have featured Prince too, but he was off my radar altogether, until that day at my friend’s place. It was the era of Betamax and the Musical Video Show on Lagos Television (LWT on weekends), and my friend was a connoisseur of everything Prince.

This was the most amazing musician in the world and his songs were incredible, she told me as she slotted in the video. I was unimpressed. The first television screening of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ in Lagos was such a spectacle, it was the major topic at school the following day. Same with a video by the group Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, whose pneumatic lead singer held much fascination, especially for the boys. We were already dancing to Madonna’s ‘Holiday’. But Prince? I sort of understood his foppery dressing. The film ‘Amadeus’ was out, and I placed Prince’s sartorial style within that aesthetic.

Besides, I was already into the music and looks of the New Romantics, bands like Spandau Ballet, Eurythmics and Culture Club whose sounds were filtering in from the UK. But try as Bolanle might, I didn’t fall under Prince’s spell. The euphoric intensity of the song, ‘Purple Rain’, eluded me then. Or maybe I just didn’t listen. And then there was his lecherous prancing about onstage, tongue sticking out. Prince repulsed me, and I told my friend so.

Fast forward a couple of years. London, and finally really seeing – soaking in – ‘Purple Rain’ the movie on British television, and Prince’s towering achievement of 1984 finally hit me. In one scene, the character played by Prince, The Kid, is taunted by his screen father: ‘You’re the only one who understands your music’. I got the sense of a musical genius whose art one could not fully comprehend. He said as much himself, in ‘I Would Die For U’ – “I am something that you’ll never understand.”

I was fairly up to speed with some of his music by then. ‘Raspberry Beret’, aside from the saccharin sweetness of young love in the song, appealed very much to the storyteller in me. “She wore raspberry beret / The kind you find in a second hand store.” The track ‘1999’ is one of two standout millennial songs for me; Pulp’s ‘Disco 2000’ is the other. While Pulp hopes to meet up with a first love in the new millennium, Prince proffers a funky antidote to the doomsday scenario – might as well party.

Like many of my generation living in London in those days, I experienced the release of some of his greatest albums at the height of his powers – from ‘Parade’ to ‘Sign O’ The Times’, to ‘Lovesexy’ right up to ‘Diamonds and Pearls’. The atmosphere when the tracks hit the charts, his appearances on ‘Top of the Pops’, his 21-day residency at London’s O2 Arena; his ever evolving bands, dancers, protégés – and the impact of it all on the culture. London had a special relationship with Prince, as evident in his total domination of UK front pages the day after his death.

Save for ‘When Doves Cry’ on some mix tapes, we Nigerians did not play much Prince at parties – but his music was all around us. I was a Prince devotee by the time ‘Kiss’ hit the airwaves. The Welsh singer Tom Jones did a cover version that became a smash hit. Sinead O’Connor went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic with Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares To You’; and some of us discovered, belatedly, that Chaka Khan’s ‘I Feel For You’ was also by him. He was boundless.
His music spoke to the times. In the late 80s when apocalyptic ad campaigns warned of HIV/AIDS (‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’), Prince addressed the epidemic in ‘Sign O’ The Times’ (“a big disease with a little name”). He presented himself naked, like a figure in a renaissance painting’, on the cover of ‘Lovesexy’. The album contains one of my beloved Prince tracks, ‘I Wish U Heaven’. His fans came to realise that for Prince, Love, Sex and God were one and the same.

His use of letters and symbols anticipated the text language and emojis that awaited us in the future.

And what of his women? Vanity gave way to Apollonia and so the trend continued. Sheila E, once his fiancée, was a constant, pounding away on the drums as if in vengeance. His impact on female artists and their careers was at its astonishing best with Sheena Easton, the virginal girl-next-door singer of ‘Morning Train’. Hooking up with rumoured lover Prince, Easton transformed into a sultry, chest-pumping vixen in the video of ‘U Got The Look’. His prowess with the ladies reached its apogee with Hollywood star Kim Basinger, the biggest blonde bombshell of her day, famous then for the steamy film, ‘9½ Weeks’.

She was starring as Vicki Vale in ‘Batman’ and Prince was responsible for the soundtrack; the rest is history. Svengali-like, he surrounded himself with muses whose careers flourished under his tutelage, mostly of the race-neutral kind. The very last was the black model, Damaris Lewis, who attended his memorial at Paisley Park and proved herself a worthy muse in interviews after his death.

Which brings us to the race question. It seems every time a black entertainment icon dies, voices have to be raised against Western media’s obsession with declaring that the deceased ‘transcended race’, as though it were not possible to be so great while black. Admittedly, in Prince’s case the confusion was real enough to have inspired some articles about the biracial aesthetic early in his career. Aside his ambiguous looks, he played The Kid in Purple Rain as biracial. But Prince, a supporter of Black Lives Matter who wore an afro in his last years, was unequivocal about his blackness over time.

He evoked the African American experience in the fight to break free of his restrictive record contract in the 1990s (“If you don’t own your masters, your masters own you,” he said). In a secret letter shared with fans online during the period, he was clear about which side of the racial divide he stood, saying of his predicament: “It seemed reminiscent of much that had been experienced by other African Americans over last couple of hundred years. They had turned me into a slave and I wanted no more of it.” His 2006 song, ‘Black Sweat’, doesn’t skirt the issue either. The siren of the video was a dark skinned model with West African features, Celestina Aladekoba.

Prince was a conjurer who magnetized us with his music. He seduced us into dreaming in alluring new ways. ‘I was dreaming when I wrote this,” goes a line in ‘1999’. In ‘U Got The Look’, he declares, “Here we are folks, the dream we all dream of!” His artistic legacy will keep us dreaming into the future.