Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon

Stan Hawkins, Sarah Niblock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317075936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

The career of the prolific pop artist Prince has become inextricably intertwined with the history of popular music since the late 1970s. This multi-instrumental icon, who remains one of the highest-grossing live performers in America, has been called a genius for his musicianship, composition and incredible performances. But Prince holds iconic status for more than his music. Best known for his racial blurring and extravagant sexual persona, Prince's music and visual iconography has always chimed with the ambiguity of subjectivity at any given moment. 'Prince' the sign offers a space for fans to evaluate and reconfigure their attitudes towards their own identities, and towards their position as subjects within the socio-cultural sphere. This much-needed interdisciplinary analysis is the first of its kind to examine critically Prince's popular music, performances, sounds, lyrics and the plethora of accompanying visual material such as album covers, posters, fashions, promotional videos and feature films. Specifically, the book explores how and why he has played such a profoundly meaningful and significant role in his fans' lives.

Chapter 1
The Making of the Authentic Pop Icon

By common consent, Prince Rogers Nelson is one of the few really significant figures in pop music today. He elevates it to a level of intensity and ingenuity that makes the competition look tired and contrived. Nine albums on from his debut in 1978, he has consolidated his position as a leader and innovator who shows no sign of flagging. (Hoskyns 1988, p. 11)

These words were written about Prince back in 1988, in the wake of his phenomenal rise to global stardom, heralded by the hit film and soundtrack album Purple Rain. Now, after a career spanning more than four decades, Prince’s status has never waned, and he is undoubtedly one of the last enduring auteurs of the pop industry. His ‘21 Nights’ residency at the O2 Arena in London in 2007 ensured the word ‘legend’ is now inextricably tied to his name in all media references. ‘Comeback’ has never entered the Princian lexicon. For more than 30 years, Prince has continuously produced copious innovative musical work. Alongside this, he has mastered his own visual iconography to present a charismatic, mysterious and ambiguous pop identity unlike anything or anyone else. To envision Prince’s enduring career is to conceive of a dynamic set of shifting signifiers. Yet there is also something constant and grounded in his public persona that enables continual close identification and loyalty on the part of his followers.

Prince has become a worldwide icon, selling millions of albums and performing at countless sell-out concerts since he released his first album as a shy 19-year-old in 1978. In almost every sense he has confronted and contested the appropriate norms of behaviour and representation at the moment of production and reception. As such, interpreting Prince offers a significant challenge to the study of popular music as he defies so many conventions and consensual notions. Commonly, he inspires references to ‘genius’, a problematic term imbued with elitist approaches to cultural value as much as discourses surrounding authenticity, yet somehow satisfying when applied to a small black man who can so effectively subvert the phallocentricism of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. With such enigmas and contradictions at the heart of Prince’s inestimable appeal, he is a rich and fascinating subject for consideration.

One of the central terms in popular music studies is ‘authenticity’, which identifies and defends that which is thought to be ‘good’, ‘great’, ‘real’ and ‘original’. It stems from popular notions of value in art and the idealized narratives of late Romanticism. Its binary opposite is ‘weak’, a term generally directed at anything felt to be ‘derivative’ or ‘fake’. In popular music studies, ‘authenticity’ has been rigorously problematized and applied often to that which is ‘non-commercial’ in terms of pure artistry that seeks no accommodation or compromise with commerce or marketing. It doesn’t ‘sell out’. How then do we as authors attribute the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ to a star who has sold millions of albums worldwide, sold out London’s 02 arena, inspired rails of fashion in Topshop and given away his albums free with mid-market and tabloid British newspapers?

‘Just because I don’t like categories, all I can think of is inspirational. Music that comes from the heart falls into that category’ (Prince on Larry King Live, 10 December 1999). This quote encapsulates a theme at the heart of Prince’s work; a defiance of fixity which has undoubtedly secured his longevity as an icon in a fickle cultural context. His very essence is to blur all genres and influences, eliding any singular categorization. This auteurship would seem to be the marker of Prince’s authenticity as a producer of cultural texts. Being a performer of integrity does not sit comfortably with his role as the figurehead of a massively successful business empire. In the idealized narratives of creative integrity, commercialism is anathema. Though undeniably virtuosic, Prince’s musical prowess is not necessarily unique, for he pays overt homage to other artists in his performances and recordings. The authenticity of Prince is located somewhere different, in a place that appropriately evades musicological or cultural studies theorization. This Princian authenticity is situated in the space where the star and his audience interact, which begs us to conceive of popular music and identification in a different way. Prince is, in effect, a set of shifting signifiers of music, ethnicity and gender that permits an active reading of him, opening up many sites of identification and rapport for fans and scholars. In this way, we cannot divorce a musicological analysis of Prince from the context in which his output is produced and received.

Firstly, there is his pioneering acknowledgement of the power of ‘branding’ – while the star acknowledges his heroes and their direct influence on his remarkable sound, he managed at the outset of his career to create an original signature sound, image and cultural rhetoric that defied comparisons with his contemporaries. This ‘brand’ will be unpacked and illustrated in relation to Prince and his collaborators including The Time, August Darnell and Ingrid Chavez. It will be shown how many successors have sought to emulate his approach. Characteristic of Prince’s authenticity has been his simultaneous acknowledgement and undercutting of consensually agreed practices – be they musical, sexual, gendered, ethnic or faith-based or political.

Secondly, Prince has also been highly provocative in his relation to new technology, seeking to undercut the traditional, industry view of the relationship between producer and consumer. Whilst Prince has been at pains to maintain full control over his output – visual and musical – there is something in his desire to forge a singular, powerful rapport with his audience through live performance and through technology that problematizes the organization of the music industry. In the mid 1990s, Prince sought to expose and remove the record industry from its established position of dominance and exploitation in the production-distribution process. He sought a new mechanism of direct access through his website, whereby communication between the musician and the listener is considered a pure and valuable relationship. He did this at a time when the consumer who downloaded music was considered an enemy of the music industry.

Thirdly, Prince’s assault on the music industry coincided with his encouragement of a close rapport with his fans. The combination of his musical virtuosity, visual ambiguity and his rebuttal of any fixed meanings in his visual and lyrical signification, has meant that anyone can find something appealing in him. Analysing Prince also demands consideration of the audience as an active agent in the creation of that Princian authenticity.

We will therefore explore Prince in an interdisciplinary way that reflexively responds to his output and articulates how Prince as a dynamic site of signification and identification manages to intersect successfully with our own histories and feelings. The uniqueness of each of our own experiences when listening to music or viewing a video, and indeed the whole notion of ‘fandom’, has been problematic for popular music studies and Prince offers and interesting place to unpack these ideas. In order to consider these ideas in more detail, we will start by exploring Prince’s emergence into mainstream culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Hyperreality, Authenticity and the Pop Industry

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1994) describes hyperreality as the condition in which culture must continually replicate ‘the real’ in order to stave off a cultural schizophrenia, when we realize that nothing we are is authentic. Our cultural artefacts, such as pop music, are mass-produced, disposable and replaceable. Yet we must pretend they have meaning to ensure their value and reproduction. In other words, ‘authenticity’ is just another commodity, something easily marketed and purchased. This is a seductive thought in the context of mass produced pop, but perhaps it is premature to dismiss the notion of authenticity out of hand when considering Prince. Despite his continuous stream of song writing, producing and releasing his own records, Prince constantly re-invents himself. He always plays live, experiments with his catalogue, tries out new band set-ups, involves a variety of different musicians and imbues his output with whatever faith-based philosophy he is attached to at any given moment. By doing this, he has authority second to none and might be seen as a truly unique operator. Since ending his contract with Warner Bros. Records in the mid 1990s, his work is no longer scheduled or determined by the usual release policies and routines dictated by a record company, but simply out of his own desire to create and perform. It is this very centred-ness and consistency in Prince’s approach that distinguishes his output from transitory entertainment. Allan Moore helpfully detaches the concept of authenticity from the perceived quality or uniqueness of the music, stating rather that authenticity is ‘a matter of interpretation which is made and fought for from within a cultural and, thus, historicised position. It is ascribed, not inscribed’ (2002, p. 210). Whether a performer is perceived as authentic, then, depends as much on the receiver, and what they bring to the listening moment. In later chapters, we intend to take this useful conceptualization further in order to explore how Prince’s authority over his visual signification, including his still images, promotional videos and performances, collaborates with his sonic design to reinforce his uniqueness and integrity.

It is possible to see how the seeds of this autonomous pop identity were laid in Prince’s early years, as his inauspicious upbringing in an ethnically ambiguous environment ensured he was exposed to many cultural and musical influences which can be seen in his work today. Prince was born Prince Rogers Nelson on 7 June 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John L. Nelson, a jazz piano player, and his second wife, Mattie shaw, a singer with Prince’s father’s band. Prince had three older half-siblings from his father’s previous marriage, and a younger full-sibling, Tyka. He grew up in a black, lower middle-class neighbourhood in a city with a mainly white population of Swedish origin. This white culture was reflected in the musical output of local radio stations and clubs visited by Prince when growing up. Prince’s negotiation of his own ethnic origins through his father’s musical tastes, coupled with his exposure to white, middle-of-the-road rock, may help to explain why Prince fuses many visual and musical styles with ease in his own creative output. One of the first distinguishing characteristics of Prince’s sound is his conflation of the hallowed genres of pop and rock. In rock discourse, performers are imbued within authenticity for adhering to their roots and origins; they are raw, honest and untainted by marketing, artifice and image. Rock also has connotations of masculinity and heteronormativity. In sharp contrast, pop has been distinguished as being entertainment, superficial, disposable and primarily targeted at young female consumers who, within some cultural studies theorizations, are more prone to being ‘duped’ by marketers.

If the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘entertainment’ are at opposite ends of the spectrum, then Prince’s identity as a performer is ambiguous. Is he a ‘rock’ performer with the associated responsibility to his art, his public and without any pretence? Or does his commitment to pop and entertainment represent a commercial sell-out? Prince’s ambiguity points to a problem inherent in musical studies. Lawrence Grossberg (1992) identifies how the distinction between ‘authentic’ as opposed to ‘entertainment’ or ‘commercial’ underpins notions of value leading to disagreements between ‘official’ critics and ‘unofficial’ fans as to which genres fall within each category. As Roy shuker (1994, p. 8) points out, these distinctions serve an important ideological function rather than any basis in proven fact.

However, it is interesting and not least arguable that Prince possesses enough ‘serious rock’ credentials to anchor his integrity as a musician performing ‘from the heart’. When John L. Nelson left the family home, Prince was seven years old. He left behind a grand piano, which Prince had previously not been allowed to play. By the age of eight, Prince had taught himself the basics of the instrument and progressed to mastery without any formal tuition. Hoskyns quotes him as saying: ‘I don’t even like the idea of training. I don’t feel anybody can teach you an art. I don’t think the basics can be taught either. Maybe that’s naive and mental, but that’s my way’ (Hoskyns 1988, p.17).

While Prince has explored his ethnic and gender identity in many ways through his creative output, his most abiding and constant characteristic is his control over his output. Identified as musically prodigious at high school, Prince secured his first multiple-album recording contract at the age of 17, from Warner Bros., unprecedented given his youth, but also in the full control it gave him to write, perform and produce his albums. Subsequently, he became one of the most prolific artists of his generation.

‘Before He Wrote the Songs, He Lived Them’

Prince’s early sense of autonomy maps onto another characteristic of authenticity, which is an attachment to or constant referencing of one’s own origins in order to validate the ‘truth’ of the artistic expression. For Richard Middleton, ‘honesty (truth to cultural experience) becomes the validating criterion of musical value’ (Middleton 1990, p. 127). In rock discourse, as Allan Moore has insisted, this validating criterion is reinterpreted as ‘unmediated expression’, by which is assumed the possibility of the communication of emotional content (inherent possibly in the music itself, but certainly at least in the performance) untrammelled by the difficulties attendant on the encoding of meaning in verbal discourse (Moore 2001, pp. 73–5; 181–4). Prince evokes his past in the earlier part of his career in his first feature film Purple Rain, which was surrounded by autobiographical mythology relating to his upbringing.

Our assumption here is that Prince’s listeners believe personal experience gives rise to his passionate vocal and musical embellishments. These features can convey to his audience their perception of ‘real emotion’. This is backed up by his instrumentation – originally a multi-gendered, multi-ethnic rock line-up that recalls the early 1970s, and more recently a jazz funk combo of, as he puts it, ‘real musicians playing real music’. Hence Prince’s musical expression has always been presented as ‘unmediated’ because there is minimal distance between its origins and its reception by the audience.

While Prince alludes to his past in his pop style, he still evades any direct response to questions about his ethnicity, sexual orientation or the nature of his upbringing and family context, as if not wishing to be pinned down and categorized. His promotion of his global identity, his ‘New Power Generation’ mantra, over and above the specificities of his individual history, subverts the globalized music industry’s manufacture of authenticity. Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (2000) express concern that ‘world music’ is about preserving a ‘neomythology of musical and racial origins’ (p. 30). They argue for a deeper interrogation of the conditions and contexts of music production to illuminate real rather than imagined relationships between race and musical authenticity. They question whether ‘the postmodern search for authenticity is fundamentally distinct from earlier attempts to racialise music by insisting on the naturalness of its origins’ (ibid.). Prince’s physicality, gender ambiguity and ethnicity similarly enable him to evade categorization simply as a black R&B or ‘soul’ star. Furthermore, at around 5ft 2ins in height, Prince’s stature and physical delicacy defy the stereotype of the sexually charged black superstud. According to a 1983 Rolling Stone magazine article, the pop singer’s father was of African American ethnicity and his mother was of Italian American ancestry. However his ethnicity is under much debate. Another website states that his mother, Mattie shaw, was of African American, Native American and White heritage, while his father, John Nelson, is of Black and Italian ancestry.

On the cover of his first album, For You (1978), Prince sports an Afro and no make-up, befitting a young soul star attempting to enter the market. But once he gained some critical success, he started to play with his visual representation. On the front cover of his second album, Prince (1979), his curls are longer and more relaxed, and on the reverse Prince sits naked, his body concealed by his acoustic guitar. Certain instruments have been identified by musicologists as carrying more authenticity, and the acoustic guitar is one such item. By his third album, Dirty Mind, Prince pastiches an array of signs appertaining to ethnicity, gender, sexuality and profanity.

The Pleasure Principle

By the mid 1980s, Prince’s oeuvre comprised something more nuanced and complex than even music and image. With the release of Dirty Mind Prince was advocating a lifestyle philosophy, melding sexuality and spirituality as a means to access one’s inner essence. He achieved this musically by mixing up his genres; unlike the synth soul-disco of his previous studio offerings, Dirty Mind was more stripped down, raw and new wave-like with a strong infusion of rock guitar and raw lyrics. This, coupled with rallying lyrics, helped Prince come so much closer to his listener than on his previous albums. For the first time we would hear Prince squealing, imploring, screaming and groaning in close aural proximity, his guitar an extension of his near-tangible physicality as he starts to tout his maxims of hedonism and pleasure.

According to Allan Moore (2002), audiences become engaged not so much with ‘authentic’ musical acts and gestures, but directly with the originator of those acts and gestures. Prince is a prime example of the originator whose utilized sonic gestures and ambiguity offer a point of access and identification for fans. This point is especially pertinent if we consider the moment of Prince’s emergence as a popular artist. While there were economic differences between young people from different classes in the early to mid 1980s, these seemed less important to young people than what they shared – aspirational values and a strong sense of wishing to transcend their situation, if not physically then through music. This meant that youth culture found itself turning its back on the rest of society, rather than addressing the structural contradiction in the way cultural theorists would have liked. Building on Gramsci’s model of hegemony and counter hegemony, cultural studies analysed hegemonic, or ruling, social and cultural forms of domination, and sought counter-hegemonic forces of resistance and struggle.1 But young people, middle-class and working-class alike, resorted to a ‘politics of pleasure, a hedonism (in hard times) – a pleasure for its own sake in times when moral regulation of youth is pervasive and deep economic recession is rife’ (Redhead 1993, p. 7).

Indeed, pleasure became a key word in cultural studies in the 1980s, as a reaction to the ostensible moralizing of discourses such as feminism, which had denounced fashion and beauty culture throughout the 1970s (Winship 1986). However, much of cultural studies viewed a politics of pleasure as not political enough, because consuming cultural products means to support an economic system that thrives on patriarchal social relations. Consumption of popular culture by the general population, especially by young females, has to some extent always been problematic in the opinion of intellectuals, politicians and moral and social reformers (strinati 1995, p. 41).

Pleasures are often … a conditioned response to certain stimuli and should thus be problematized, along with other forms of experience and behavior and interrogated as to whether they cont...