Welcome to 2016- the year that everybody died.
That’s what it feels like right now.
We opened with David Bowie, back in the cruel hollows of winter, and now another otherworldly figure joins the annual lists of the famously deceased- similarly elfish, visceral, distant and unknowable. A conduit or a composer, an embodiment, who didn’t take to the stage to play music, he took to the stage and he was music, in the same way that he wasn’t sexy: he was sex.
He did everything, could play every instrument and produce any track. Performed the hits, ten in a row. Ripped songs to pieces, reassembled them, yelled and intoned, projected and seduced. Shredded his solos and threw away his guitar, and danced, and did the splits. Looked cool. Paraded, strutted and teased. Fucked with journalists, caressed audiences, ignited arenas, drizzled syrup on clubs, and still had enough left over to drop an unexpected double album without warning, or perhaps just stash it all away forever in a mythical vault. A man touched and consumed by spirituality, pleasure and transcendence- at once decadent and moral.
Decadently moral.
Unwaveringly, morally decadent.
A man dressed in tiger striped briefs and thigh high stockings. A man riding a pegasus naked. A man standing on a doorstep in Minneapolis holding a copy of The Watchtower one day, and the next day planting a burning purple flag through the heart of the greatest ever Superbowl halftime performance imaginable. Although it seems impossible, this man is gone, and his name is Ronnie Corbett.
Sorry, wrong obituary.
His name is Prince.
Something that strikes me as unique about Prince is his projection of total ownership of himself and everything that he does. He gave generously, of himself and his talent, to vast audiences globally, but he was damn sure that you were grateful for it. Other performers mumble thank yous between songs, as the audience applauds, but when I watch Prince performing, I get a sense that the audience are transmitting a breathless, psychic thank you, to him, the guy in charge, measuring every song and every expression.
Prince dispenses his precious wares like they’re opium-laced Turkish delight, knowing that we need him, that it is us who must be grateful, because there are no other merchants with his contacts in this town.
His ownership of himself and his product manifests itself obviously through his systematic pulling of material from Youtube, and contrarily, through an act like giving away the Planet Earth album in the Mail on Sunday. In the first instance, he stands up against a vast tide of change, declaring, absurdly, probably tongue-in-cheek, ‘the internet’s completely over’, in 2010. In the second case, like a magisterial, ass-shaking tyrant, he underlines his power through mercy, casting pearls on a whim. Or was it all planned well in advance? Either way, whether he’s making you pay true market rates for what he made, or tossing it with a hint of absurdism into the crowd, we know full well where it came from, and that it’s a valuable commodity.
In the internet age, anything can be synthesised and facsimiled, and a sense of misplaced entitlement defines the modern consumption of music and media. The dominant mindset is that nothing belongs to anyone, so it’s all to be had for free. At the same time, the major labels grasp and pinch, exploitative and without conscience, and somewhere in the middle are the musicians, squeezed and hectored from all sides. Prince stood fast against these assaults, looking out not only for himself, but for his fellow artists, in their rights to control what they made, and to earn a living from it. A real, dollar-backed living, on reasonable terms. Did he go too far in this? And if so at what point? When he displayed the word ‘slave’ on his cheek? When he changed his name to a symbol which had no word attached? Probably when he took legal action against the uploader of a video of some dancing children in which Let’s Go Crazy is almost inaudible in the background, right?
But even in the last example, the point he is drolly, trollishly making justifies the creation of a pointedly ludicrous court case, which he lost anyway.
Basically, Prince was right about all this stuff, and he knew it.
He knew the struggle, conceit and deceit that artists face. He knew the way the industry treated black people, gay people, iconoclasts and righteous non-conformists.
He took on the industry and the media and the establishment and middle America and he ran circles around them all, fedunking them with magnetism, sex and knowledge into total, unequivocal submission.
A resounding image for me is his gun shaped mic in the Sexy MF video. A little obvious, perhaps? Maybe, but it shows exactly what he did: conquered and altered the musical, cultural and political landscape, using not arms or intimidation, but scales, funk, and the seductive art of being an irresistible, sexy, outrageous, beautiful motherfucking genius.
