*
In April the world lost Prince, pop’s foremost utopian. I miss Prince. I miss his fabulousness, his way of being in the world, which was never only for himself alone, because every song he wrote was also an invitation: Move with me towards joy. I miss his sensational beauty, his ski-slope cheekbones and hazel eyes and black hair piled up, his pert waist and perfect arse, the greatest arse in the history of pop music. How ridiculous that anyone should be so beautiful, and how wonderful that he let the world share in it.
I miss the abundance of his musical gift, which he refused to measure against any common schedule. There were songs upon songs and albums upon albums, thousands of concerts, hundreds of afterparties where he played through the night and into the dawn. I miss his playfulness. Nothing was ruled out for being too silly, not zebra-stripe bikini briefs or funk about Batman or the notion of purple rain. The secret of play is to commit to it, and then it isn’t silly anymore, it’s truthful. I miss his commitment to every performance as if moment by moment it mattered wholly, for that moment. He could make time feel entirely present: not passing, not past, but there. Here. And anything could happen here, including the end of time. I miss his eschatology.
There are so many Prince songs concerning judgement days, including some of his best-loved: ’1999’, ‘Sign ‘O’ the Times’, even ‘When Doves Cry’, which takes place on the brink of a commingled ecstasy and loss. ‘Animals strike curious poses,’ Prince sang, summoning a portent in the distinctive, robotic tones that he often reserved for the verses of his songs. Prince is regarded as a consummate funk musician, and he was, but the groove of his dominant ’80s recordings is strangely impliable, the Linn drum machines he favoured on albums like 1999 (1982) and Purple Rain (1984) fixing the arrangements to a grid. Within the shelter of the grid he could go crazy, and did. Lady Gaga learned a lot from Prince.
The stakes are raised in ‘When Doves Cry’ at around the three-minute mark, when the multi-tracked vocals start to pile in on each other, and robot Prince is pitted against another articulation of himself. ‘Why do we scream at each other?’ he asks, but on a separate vocal track he is screaming, that cry-moan-squeal thing he did that conveyed both perfect pleasure and terrible pain. And so the vagaries of desire surface and resurface in pop music, and desire can’t always be put into words, any more than can love, rage or heartbreak. It doesn’t mean these things can’t be heard.
Prince was a great lyricist, because he understood the points at which words fail. ‘I can take you out there and hit this guitar for you,’ he told a Rolling Stone journalist in 2014, ‘and what you’ll hear is sex. You will hear something where you’d run out of adjectives, like you do when you meet the finest woman.’ Desire was holy in his songs, a form of worship; he sang and played as if sex were a way to steal back time, to exist in the present always, to end estrangement forever. Sex was play, and play the opposite of work: ‘Raspberry Beret’ is a fantasy of shirking a job in order to have sex. I used to work in a shop, and my workmate and I would wait until it was nearly six p.m. and the shop was closing to put Prince on the stereo. Sex o’clock, we’d joke. And then we’d dance around the counter. We went to see Prince play on a work night, once. We were so tired the next day.
Like a poet, Prince had his lexicon. Baby and sky and forgive and rain. Car and ride. Kiss and come. ‘To’ was 2 and ‘you’ was u, decades in advance of text messaging. I think he chose the abbreviations because they suggested both interchangeability and intimacy: he was singing to anyone, he was singing 2 u. They also made words into visual symbols, floating through the songs. Stevie Wonder: ‘Prince’s music was so picturesque that even I could see it.’ For a time, Prince changed his name to something that was literally unsayable, a ‘Love Symbol’ that pointed to all directions on the sexual compass. Free. That was another of his favourite words. He was both exuberantly heterosexual and lushly queer: fluid, strange and ungovernable.
The song that follows ‘When Doves Cry’ on Purple Rain is ‘I Would Die 4 U’. Prince sings as Prince, and Prince sings as Christ. ‘I’m your messiah and you’re the reason why.’ In his songs, erotic and religious devotion were the twinned sources of his ever-renewing delight. Both were a means of suspending time. The song is potentially infinite; the arrangement has no real end point.
After Prince died, I listened to ‘I Would Die 4 U’ on a loop. The first four verses are sung on the same note, with no accompanying instruments but the bass and drum machine, hi-hats quivering. During the choruses, the other Prince kicks in, shrieking, begging, being pulled asunder. ‘I would die 4 u / Darling if u want me 2.’ He always asked permission, and it’s hard to overstate just how sexy that could be. He sang of surrender, not of conquest, of mutual and equal pleasure, not of domination, his voice breaking over the words like he was coming, or like he was going. It was the way he sang it.
Publication Details
‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ appeared in A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition, Black Inc., Melbourne, August 2017.
Michael Adams’s ‘Salt Blood’ appeared in Australian Book Review, Number 392, June 2017.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s ‘Bad Writer’ appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, 4 October 2016.
Lech Blaine’s ‘The Bystander’ appeared in Griffith Review, Edition 56, April 2017.
Shannon Burns’s ‘In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 76, Issue 2, Winter 2017.
John Clarke’s ‘Commonplace’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 76, Issue 1, Autumn 2017.
J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Zama: Life at the Limits of Empire’ appeared in the New York Review of Books, Volume 64, Number 1, January 2017.
Richard Cooke’s ‘Bonfire of the Narratives’ appeared in the Monthly, November 2016.
Anwen Crawford’s ‘Towards Joy’ appeared in the Monthly, December 2016.
Nick Feik’s ‘Killing Our Media’ appeared in the Monthly, July 2017.
Tim Flannery’s ‘Extravagant, Aggressive Birds Down Under’ appeared in the New York Review of Books, Volume 64, Number 4, March 2017.
Helen Garner’s ‘Why She Broke’ appeared in the Monthly, June 2017.
Moreno Giovannoni’s ‘A Short History of the Italian Language’ appeared in Southerly, 11 May 2017.
Stan Grant’s ‘A Makarrata Declaration: A Declaration of Our Country’ appeared in A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition, Black Inc., Melbourne, August 2017.
Sonya Hartnett’s ‘Hello, Stranger’ appeared in It Happened Off the Leash, Affirm, Melbourne, November 2016.
Melissa Howard’s ‘Now No-One Here Is Alone’ appeared in Meanjin, Volume 75, Issue 3, Spring 2016.
Barry Humphries’s ‘Up a Wombat’s Freckle’ appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 2017.
Micheline Lee’s ‘The Art of Dependency’ appeared in the Monthly, August 2017.
Janine Mikosza’s ‘How Not to Speak Polish’ appeared in Electric Journal, 18 January 2017.
Amanda C. Niehaus’s ‘Pluripotent’ appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Issue 64, Summer 2017.
Harriet Riley’s ‘Endlings’ appeared in Island, Issue 146, September 2016.
Jennifer Rutherford’s ‘House of Flowers’ appeared in Double Dialogues, Issue 19, December 2017.
Mandy Sayer’s ‘People Power at the Ponderosa’ appeared in SBS Online, 16 May 2017.
Keane Shum’s ‘The Tamarind Is Always Sour’ appeared in Granta, Issue 138, June 2017.
Robert Skinner’s ‘Lessons from Camels’ appeared in the Monthly, August 2017.
Sebastian Smee’s ‘Art Walks a Tightrope’ appeared in the Monthly, April 2017.
Sam Vincent’s ‘Peasant Dreaming’ appeared in Griffith Review: Millennials Strike Back, Edition 56, April 2017.
James Wood’s ‘Helen Garner’s Savage Self-Scrutiny’ appeared in the New Yorker, 12 December 2016.
Notes on Contributors
THE EDITOR
Anna Goldsworthy is the author of
Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny. Her writing has appeared in the Monthly, the Age, the Australian, the Adelaide Review and The Best Australian Essays. Described by the Australian as a ‘musical ambassador,’ she is one of Australia’s most acclaimed and versatile musicians. As a piano soloist, she has performed extensively throughout Australia and internationally, and as a chamber musician she is a founding member of Seraphim Trio.
CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Adams writes about humans and nature. His work is published in Meanjin, Australian Book Review, the Guardian and academic journals and books. He teaches in human geography at the University of Wollongong. ‘Salt Blood’ won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founder and director of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. He is the award-winning author of The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014). Mohammed’s forthcoming novel is The Lebs (Hachette, 2018).
Lech Blaine is a writer from Toowoomba. He was an inaugural winner of a Griffith Review Writing Fellowship. In 2017 he received the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Black Inc. will publish his first book, Car Crash: A Memoir, in 2019.
Shannon Burns is a writer and critic from Adelaide.
John Clarke (29 July 1948 – 9 April 2017) was a New Zealand–born comedian, writer, and satirist. He was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and lived in Australia from the late 1970s. He was a highly regarded actor and writer whose work appeared on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in both radio and television and also in print.
J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940. He has published sixteen works of fiction, as well as several volumes of criticism. In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since 2002 he has lived in Adelaide.
Richard Cooke is a writer, broadcaster and contributing editor to the Monthly.
Anwen Crawford is the Monthly’s music critic and the author of Live Through This (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Nick Feik is the editor of the Monthly magazine.
Tim Flannery is an environmentalist. In 2007 he was named Australian of the Year. He delivered the 2002 Australia Day Address to the nation. In 2013 he founded the Australian Climate Council, Australia’s largest and most successful crowd-funded organisation. His latest book is Sunlight and Seaweed (Text Publishing, 2017).
Helen Garner’s most recent book is Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing, 2017).
Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from San Ginese at the age of two. A translator and writer who has been published in the Age, Island, Southerly, and The Best Australian Essays 2014 he was the inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize. Black Inc. will publish Tales of San Ginese in 2018.
Stan Grant is Indigenous Affairs editor for the ABC and Chair of Indigenous Affairs at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for coverage of Indigenous Affairs and is the author of The Tears of Strangers (HarperCollins, 2004) and Talking to My Country (HarperCollins, 2016).
Sonya Hartnett writes for children, teenagers and adults. She lives in rural Victoria with her dog, Cole.
Melissa Howard is a freelance writer and copywriter. A PhD candidate at Deakin University, she is working on a collection of personal essays – ‘Now No-one Here Is Alone’ is the first.
Barry Humphries AO, CBE is an Australian comedian, actor, satirist, artist, and author.
Micheline Lee was born in Malaysia and migrated to Australia when she was eight. She has worked as a human rights lawyer and before taking up writing, as a painter. Her first novel, The Healing Party, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and is currently longlisted for the Voss prize.
Janine Mikosza is a Melbourne-based writer and artist. Her writing has been published in literary journals, awarded fellowships, and shortlisted for prizes, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is currently developing a non-fiction manuscript through the Hardcopy program.
Amanda C. Niehaus is a writer and scientist living in Brisbane. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, AGNI, Overland and NOON, among others. Amanda was a 2017 Varuna Fellow and winner of the 2017 Victoria University Short Story Prize and is writing a book based on her prize-winning story.
Harriet Riley is a climate specialist who has consulted to the Gates Foundation, United Nations, and EDF. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge and is currently developing a TV drama about climate change. ‘Endlings’ was awarded the 2016 Wildcare Nature Writing Prize.
Jennifer Rutherford is Director of the J.M Coetzee Centre at The University of Adelaide. She has been writing and performing experimental works integrating creative non-fiction and memoir into academic forms for many years. She is currently writing Méren, her first full-length novel.
Mandy Sayer is an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer. Her most recent book, Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History, has just been published by New South Press.
Keane Shum leads the Mixed Movements Monitoring Unit at the UNHCR Regional Office for South-East Asia.
Robert Skinner is the editor of the short story magazine The Canary Press. He lives without a dog in Melbourne.
Sebastian Smee is the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art (Penguin Random House, 2016). He has worked as an art critic for newspapers and magazines in the US, the UK and Australia. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011.
Sam Vincent’s first book, Blood and Guts: Dispatches from the Whale Wars (Black Inc., 2014) was longlisted for the 2015 Walkley Book Award and shortlisted for the 2015 Nib Award for Literature and the 2015 ACT Book of the Year Award. He is writing a book based on the essay ‘Peasant Dreaming’.
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at the New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at the New Republic from 1995 to 2007. He is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 35
