The nineties saw MTV’s carefully curated bubblegum tunes explode on Indian television. It was also the decade that allegedly killed good music. Nevertheless, for a kid who lived on a diet of random cassettes supplied by uncles in Europe, video brought radio to life.
I had heard Purple Rain and Little Red Corvette on some assorted hits tapes, and had liked the sound; but I was 10 and names on jackets meant little. It would be another two years before I got lit on the artist, who had, by then, changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol.
It was 1994, early evening. Crossing the room, I stopped dead in my tracks. In the corner, on the telly, there was a man in yellow matador-ish pants writhing live on stage with his half-naked entourage. I watched in a daze as Prince turned around to show off a perfectly naked butt to a raving wild audience. This was a 1991 music awards performance and the channel now ran his name as “The artist formerly known as Prince”,
Agent provocateur
Not too long before, Madonna too had made her debut in my universe, dripping Erotica. And although, her work remains one of the defining prepubescent preambles to sexuality, Prince turned out to be something else. Looking back, nothing, not even regular exposure to the staid and lurid pool parties of MTV Grind, had prepared me for the androgynous genius and shocking sexiness of Prince.
Some years later when my mother caught a glimpse of him in The most beautiful girl, she found him “freaky”. Was it a man, woman, or bird? Indeed, for middle class Calcutta (as it was then called) who bothered a bit with contemporary Western music, seduction by a skinny black dude in tight pants and mascara was the pale it would not cross. Prince had none of the soothing calmness of a Diana Ross, nor was he the family friendly talent like MJ. Even within the broader spectrum of more current black acts like Boyz II Men or Notorious B.I.G., he stood out like a scream in a church hall.
Prince’s exploitation of visual media to push the boundaries as a male performer got everybody’s attention. I still find him the industry’s most expert manipulator of sexual energy. Coupling straight lyrics with transgendered performances, the agent provocateur in heels, panties, garters, and make up, owned every stage and set. Even in the era of strawberry boy bands, he was the sexiest thing in each frame, constantly titillating, confusing, intimidating, instructing, and playing with his audience.
As shorthand for his incredible musical range, I divided his music into badass art or corny funk pop. The first aimed to break taboos, and the latter came steeped in sass. Both were liberating. However, to simply leave this description at a political plane, high and dry, would be an injustice to the King of Kink. Tracks like Do me Baby, Head, and Peach, are nothing if not undeniably and instantaneously erotic. Prince was outstanding in his ability to arouse, to sneak in the thrill, to help you transgress lines. I didn’t lose my virginity to Darling Nikki, but I secretly lit my first cigarette at 16 to When You Were Mine, singing along to “I never cared/I never was the kind to make a fuss/When he was there/Sleeping in between the two of us/.” Would I later fail to be that generous in love? Yes, absolutely.
The iron Prince
Having said that, I don’t know it all – I am still discovering some of the early albums. I am yet to watch Purple Rain, the movie, and have over a dozen albums to explore. In fact, the beauty of Prince’s music lay in the fact that it allowed me to get to know him in bits and pieces, to return every three or four years and discover something new each time. After all Prince was a prodigious musician who played over 20 instruments and wrote, composed, arranged, packaged, and oversaw everything so that he literally birthed 37 album-babies.
This very flexibility the corpus offers – of going back and forth – rubber-stamps the uncanny wholeness of Prince’s artistry for me. I am not sure if growth or evolution are words one can or should use for the man, for, like a perfect clafoutis hitting all the right notes, Prince seems to have arrived in 1978, ready for the tasting.
Few years back, blasting Gett Off at home got us talking about Prince (who had changed his name back to Prince in 2000). My friend told me about Prince’s brilliant swipe at Dave Chappelle. We both laughed hard over the genius move and waxed nostalgic. Seemingly, these occasional dispatches of his wacky humour and un-negotiable divahood were all that we needed to rest assured that the icon still reigned supreme despite his reclusive life. Besides eccentricities, what made Prince even stronger in his tower was his consistent advocacy against corporatisation, racism, and inequality. It wasn’t until I saw his Larry King interview did I realise what a calm, collected, and iron-willed man Prince could be. This was a man who took on Warner Bros, who refused to give frenemies a pass, who won the fight before even picking one. When he remarked “Albums still matter, like books and black lives,” at the Grammys last year, he warned us against the folly of separating the arts from the human condition. He warned us against our easy virtue and victories, and in a line reminded us why we needed The Artist Formerly Known As *symbol.*
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