Prince
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Prince’s personal isolation was guaranteed by the hiring of the towering, bearded Chick Huntsberry as permanent bodyguard. At six foot six to Prince’s five-foot-depends-onthe-heels, and better built for cracking heads than for getting down on his knees to pray with the rest of the group, Huntsberry seemed an unlikely acquisition. He was, however, impeccably rock ’n’ roll and, after an uneasy start, impeccably obedient and can-do. Big Chick was around from the time of the Controversy tour but his media apotheosis was at the British Phonographic Industry show in 1985, where he escorted a now less than monosyllabic Prince to the podium to collect his award. Even after his departure from the entourage, Prince remained close to him and when Huntsberry died in 1990, arranged a benefit for his family.
The apocalypse of 1999 had been prefigured by a sky turned purple. The album had been made in a basement studio – known as ‘Uptown’ – at Prince’s new mansion, just outside Minneapolis at Lake Minnetonka. It was heavily fenced off to deter visitors; it was also painted purple in case anyone missed who it belonged to, or mistook the signs of upward mobility. For the next few years, that same regal/phallic hue was to be Prince’s signature colour as he alternated between the music pages and the gossip pages, almost always under headlines that punned ‘rain’ and ‘reign’.
7
In 1956, Elvis Presley walked on to the set of Love Me Tender and began the second career that would take him to parts of the world and to an audience who would never see Elvis live. In 1953, seemingly dead and buried as a singer, Frank Sinatra had revived his career with a part in From Here to Eternity. Ever after, Sinatra balanced music and movie work with characteristic brilliance, using the camera, as he had the microphone, to project intimacy, anger, strength, vulnerability, sexual command and robust humour by turns, and always in one take. Parts ranged from demanding character roles to thinly reworked versions of Sinatra the entertainer, to roles that offered carefully ironised hints of other, darker associations. Sinatra both fuelled and protectively negated his own mythology by projecting it on a big screen.
By 1984, Prince was ready to do the same. He was still only an r’n’b star of the second rank, occasionally upstaged by his own entourage, and the victim of his own muddled press campaign, which seemed to alternate between saying too much – and too much that was untrue – and then saying nothing at all. To those around him, Prince had always seemed to be starring in the movie of his own life, self-cast as Greta Garbo. In line with the old Hollywood joke, though, having produced, arranged, composed and performed, Prince now wanted to direct. There had been no discernible narrative to the 1999 show, but it was clear that Prince was increasingly thinking in terms of scenarios. The cinema screen gives a new dimension not just to a tiny physical frame but to an ego as well. When it eventually emerged, the Purple Rain movie was a curious amalgam of autobiography and fiction, oddly literal in places, blatantly self-aggrandising in others. At best it’s a fudge, the darker elements of the original conception softened into sentimentality or slapstick, a searing plotline reduced to a series of album promos and iconic set pieces.
It very nearly didn’t happen at all. The original scriptwriter, William Blinn – late forties, tough, white, experienced – should have been inured to the tantrums of precocious children from his time as executive producer on Fame. In the event, he found Prince unmanageably preposterous and nearly abandoned the project when his star/auteur repeatedly walked out of meetings. He was, however, sufficiently intrigued and sufficiently convinced of the young man’s talent to shape a script out of the dark materials he was given. It is well to keep the original back-story of Purple Rain in mind when watching the mish-mash of ‘emotional biography’ cobbled together by eventual scriptwriter and director Albert Magnoli. It’s also worth pondering how very different a psychodrama and how much tougher a film might have resulted, perhaps something closer to Eminem’s Eight Mile.
Prince’s idea was that his character’s parents should be killed at the beginning of the film, a classic murder-suicide with the anguished father turning the gun on himself after shooting his wife. As a premise, it’s no more shocking, no more Oedipally freighted, if you give The Kid’s mom and dad the names of John Nelson and Mattie Shaw. Knowing what their fictional fate might have been gives a disturbing edge – at least one part bathos – to the weary rowing that punctuates the film and to ‘Francis’’s eventual suicide attempt. It also blunts The Kid’s lonely and arrogant pursuit of fame to know that instead of being violently orphaned he goes back to the family home and a cosy basement every night. Full of dolls and porcelain, Prince’s lair looks more like a teenage girl’s bedroom than a fully equipped seduction den. (It’s hard not to make a comparison with another contemporary rock fantasy which treats family life as a faintly embarrassing irrelevance. Wayne’s World disposes of parents and siblings simply by ignoring them. Given the date, it can be read as a wry commentary on the very different family romance of Purple Rain.)
Once the bleak original scenario – called Dreams – was thrown overboard, the only remaining psychological drama in Purple Rain is The Kid’s emotional deadness. It’s presumed to come from his unhappy home life but it lacks what drama critics would call a convincing objective correlative. It even looks wrong for a film that purports to tell a tale of obscurity to stardom. The leading man is clearly a star right from the off, and equally clearly not prepared to re-enact his callow younger self. The callowness comes through, nonetheless. Prince has a certain genius as a poseur, and severe limitations as an actor, as he was to prove again in Under the Cherry Moon. His most effective narratives are almost always still photographs, like those taken by Allen Beaulieu but carefully assembled and art-directed by himself. The energy and charisma he projects as a live performer disappear when he switches to scripted action. This much was evident from early videos, where even the dancing is clumsy and self-conscious. It’s still more so in Purple Rain.
The two main story strands are his pursuit of Patricia Kotero/Apollonia and his musical rivalry with another of the bands who play at the First Avenue club. The first is languid, knowing, almost entirely devoid of sexual tension, an unembarrassed slice of rock video chauvinism. The second, which was bitter and vicious in Blinn’s first draft, is played for laughs, largely thanks to Morris Day’s clowning as the so-cool-your-teeth-will-chatter super dude who fronts the rival group. (For all their on- and off-camera rivalry, Day would continue to figure in Prince’s life. The Time are strongly featured on Graffiti Bridge, where Day also gets behind the drums on ‘New Power Generation’. His acting career took off with a part in the ABC sitcom New Attitude.)
The real dramas of Purple Rain are slightly harder to decode. In a film that places enormous symbolic importance on colour, skin pigment is the most striking signifier. Unlike Michael Jackson, Prince surrounds himself with white faces. Apart from Day and Clarence F. Williams III, who plays his father, most of the principal actors are Caucasian. The mother is played by Olga Kartalos, a Greek actress. The only member of Prince’s/The Kid’s band not prominently featured is bassist Mark Brown, who was presumably on his way out anyway; his token appearance only underlining the vanilla flavour of the rest, his new name Brown Mark almost crudely dismissive. Stalwarts Matt Fink and Bobby Z are mostly silent presences, but Wendy and Lisa are cast as the agents of The Kid’s epiphany. For the purposes of the story at least, they are the writers of ‘Purple Rain’ itself. As will be seen in the next chapter, collaboration plays an important though sometimes ambiguous part in Prince’s career. Here, it’s turned into the major plot device. The film’s dramatic and musical climax is The Kid’s surrender to the inevitability of working with others, sharing a vision, accepting that his is not the only functioning imagination in this universe.
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Offstage, The Kid’s sound-world isn’t much more convincing than his interior design. His choice of make-out music is a tape of a crying girl, played backwards. It fits in with the weeping dove symbolism of the film’s and alb
um’s second most famous song, but it’s an odd gesture and incongruous enough to disturb – or at least perturb – the otherwise pliant Apollonia. It is, admittedly, the kind of thing a nerdily clever, socially gauche adolescent might lay on to impress a girl, but with all the psychological realism sucked out of Blinn’s original script, all that is left is two young and very knowing adults playing at a form of sexual innocence possibly alien to them both, or certainly left far behind.
There is another element to The Kid’s ‘growth’, an awkward parallelism between his father’s brooding violence and his own casually diffident mistreatment of women. In one notorious incident, he persuades Apollonia to dive fully clothed into a lake; instead of joining her, Prince rides off on his motorcycle. It would have disturbed the feminist lobby less if she’d lost her cool instead of smiling indulgently.
The sheer strangeness of their courtship – a mixture of romantic cliché and soft porn – almost suggests the antics of two young Martians brought up on a diet of films found in a canister sent out by a doomed earth. The affectless oddity of manners, contextless streets, soaked-in colour, as well as the relentless message of the lyrics suggested that the apocalypse promised in ‘1999’ had already taken place and that it wasn’t half as bad as ‘Downtown’ feared, an eruption of sensation that had shorted out ordinary feeling as well as moral convention. Not the smallest sign of Prince’s international apotheosis in the aftermath of Purple Rain was that Pravda picked him out in late 1984 as the latest symptom of American youth’s hedonistic nihilism.
Ever blind to the beam in its own eye, the Soviet government paper wondered at the veneration accorded this tiny black mote with a guitar who seemed to represent himself as the other pillar of capitalist decadence: Jesus Christ. A nation that embalms and makes auto-icons of its leaders shouldn’t be throwing the first stone, but for a bunch of atheistic dialectical materialists, the Russians were very quick to spot the religious dimension of Prince’s mission. It was made explicit in one of the songs on Purple Rain. ‘Die’ probably has an Elizabethan second, sexual meaning in the lyric – like ‘come’ and ‘high’ in a Doors song – but ‘I Would Die 4 U’ also cast Prince as a Christ-like saviour, while ‘Take Me With U’, a duet with Apollonia, hints at a kind of nirvana in sex. There are other themes in play, but the overwhelming atmosphere of Purple Rain is a post-apocalyptic libertinism.
Unlike the usual run of popular music films, anything from 42nd Street to Eight Mile and maybe taking in Bird along the way, there’s no sense in Purple Rain that The Kid is ever anything but a star, not just in his own head, but in reality, or at very least the hectic reality of his peers. At home, The Kid may simply be a kid again, but even his attempts to separate his warring parents look perfunctory and petulant, prompted by jealousy rather than righteous anger. His isolation and self-doubt are dealt with only erratically, as in the device of Wendy & Lisa being the composers of ‘Purple Rain’ itself, and the climactic ‘Baby, I’m a Star’, supposedly the apotheosis of a new rock god, is distinctly anticlimactic.
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Movie culture arguably has a broader cultural leverage than pop music, which still tends to be demographically (and often ethnically) segmented, and it was the movie of Purple Rain that propelled Prince into the cultural mainstream. For all its limitations, it’s a revealing artefact, but it’s the album that stands up better twenty years on. Less original, less dramatic than Dirty Mind, and it might be argued that Prince never again made anything as sheerly powerful as his third album, it’s a curious mixture of bombast and delicacy, a triumphant realisation of the ‘biracial’ sound he’s been sketching in since ‘I’m Yours’ and eventually pulled off on 1999. The songs veer between bubblegum romance and sexual grind on one axis, flagrant originality and magpie eclecticism on another.
The set begins, significantly, with Prince in preacher mode, intoning an idiosyncratic version of the ‘Dearly beloved’ address that precedes a wedding. There is no mistaking that what follows is to be a form of ritual as well as theatre, but one subsumed under the hectic fatalism – ‘we’re all gonna die’ – of Prince’s lyric. ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ isn’t the obvious opening hymn, but it cements from the very beginning the album’s air of amoral celebration and doomed pleasure. Musically, it’s the natural successor to ‘Little Red Corvette’ and very much in the same mould, though it wasn’t until February 1985 and the run-up to Around the World in a Day that the track was released as a single. There was at least one stronger, if less obvious, contender on the album.
‘Take Me With U’ follows and as if to clinch the proof of his ability to write strong generic pop songs, Prince follows it with the moodily romantic ‘The Beautiful Ones’, which betrays a strong influence from British New Romanticism. ‘Computer Blue’ is a strange, two-part idea, co-written with Wendy & Lisa, and musically from a very different place to everything else on the album, though one can imagine a young man capable of listening to backwards tapes of a girl crying having a hand in this kind of experimentalism. It would be a dull track if it were sequenced with another ten tracks like it. Here, it stands out as the work of an artist who chooses – for the moment at least – not to be imprisoned by a style.
Lest anyone thought he was having what twenty years later would have been identified as ‘a Radiohead moment’, Prince followed up ‘Computer Blue’ (a jazz-tinged John Nelson idea) with the savage ‘Darling Nikki’, a cold, snarling punk-funk anthem in which Nikki is presented ‘masturbating with a magazine’. The only 18-certificate moment on the whole album, delivered to the jogging, nursery-rhyme beat which often conceals Prince’s most powerful songcraft, it’s the meanest, almost the basest track in the Prince canon, but as ever it conceals a surprise. Buried away, almost inaudible in its raunchy instrumental, is a vocal line played wrong way round which deciphers as ‘Hello, how are you? I’m fine, because I know the Lord is coming soon, coming, coming soon’. That backwards tape he played Apollonia offered a clue that there was going to be more to these songs than met the eye. Startling as its mix of profane and sacred is, the other great coup of ‘Darling Nikki’ is its brilliant positioning on the album. It’s separated from the ambiguous closing sequence that presents Prince as Jesus Christ, Black Superstar – ‘I Would Die 4 U’, ‘Baby, I’m A Star’ and ‘Purple Rain’; all recorded live at First Avenue during a preview – by one of the most remarkable records in the history of pop.
With its haunted, pleading vocal, ‘When Doves Cry’ is a genuine cri de coeur, saturated with emotion and delivered without a shred of irony. The sly pomp, disposable romance and vicious cleverness that defines the rest of the album is missing at its centre. Whether or not it is autobiographical, the references to family – ‘Maybe I’m just like my father’, ‘Maybe I’m just like my mother’ – make it seem so, and that’s an impression the movie was guaranteed to reinforce. Musically, it’s astonishing, not least because Prince dispensed with a bassline altogether, virtually unheard of in black music, accompanying his vocal with sparse keyboard stabs and a trademark Linn drum track which has been processed and thickened. Prince’s gospelly wails are the only other embellishment.
Released on May 16, 1984, ‘When Doves Cry’ spent five weeks at the top of the Billboard pop charts, eight at the top of the black chart. In terms of musical ‘biracism’, this was exceptional, even in a market that had been transformed by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, released in December 1982. Unlike the legendary Jon Landis-directed video for Jackson’s title track, the promo for ‘When Doves Cry’ was a collage of scenes from the forthcoming movie, cleverly self-reinforcing publicity for the album and film which followed in the release schedule at the end of June and July respectively. Purple Rain was also Prince’s first number one album, outselling everything else for nearly six months. The majority of black music fans remained – perforce but also from aesthetic loyalty – devoted to their vinyl albums, but a new white, middle-class audience also had the disposable income for a new technology. Purple Rain was the f
irst time Prince had been heard on CD, whose hard, clear sound suited perfectly a song like ‘When Doves Cry’.
The demographics were working at last, and so was the symbolism: what better image for a rock messiah than a weeping dove? And what more potent sign of his Christ-like nature than that his greatest triumph should be signalled by his greatest sorrow? The song’s musical uniqueness helped reinforce Prince’s divided nature: carnal and spiritual, defeated and triumphal, solitary and suddenly at the head of a popular mass. It was a position that would define and haunt him in the years ahead.
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If Prince’s carefully confected image was polymorphous, so were his creative energies. The Prince story cannot satisfactorily be told in terms of his recording and performing career alone. Certainly before it, but even after the global success of Purple Rain, a substantial proportion of his working time was always devoted to other performers, sometimes altruistically, often proprietorially, his presence most often pseudonymous but so transparently that no one was misled for long. Aware that the market would only support so much Prince product, he poured himself into any number of side projects.
One argument suggests that the flipside of Prince’s Napoleon complex is a disinterested generosity; another, more caustic line insists that his support of other acts was mere empire-building and his transparent anonymity the sign of a Machiavellian eminence grise – or eminence pourpre. There is no mistaking how differently Prince treated male and female associates – Morris Day and The Time, say, as against Jill Jones, Vanity or Apollonia – but it’s too easy to suggest that while the boys represented a challenge to the alpha male, the women were always willing to play handmaidens to the godhead. The boys were always boys in Prince’s world, cocky show-offs who could be reined in whenever they showed signs of walking the walk as well, as happened to The Time, Dez Dickerson and Mark Brown.