It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track

Ian Penman

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781910695883
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musiktheorie & Musikverständnis

When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and 'cross-colour' awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince – black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In 'prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points' (Brian Dillon, frieze ), Ian Penman's first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.

THE QUESTION OF U: THE MIRROR IMAGE OF PRINCE

‘Assiduously and without much constraint, he conditioned his personality, making it as impenetrable and resourceful, as submissive and difficult, as it had to be for the sake of his mission.’

— Walter Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust’

‘To create in myself a nation with its own politics, parties and revolutions, and to be all of it, everything, to be God in the real pantheism of this people-I’

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

‘It is the first or Christian name that counts, that is what makes one be as they are.’

— Gertrude Stein, writing about Ulysses S. Grant

1.

In autumn 1981, hot new act Prince was offered two nights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum supporting the Rolling Stones. His initial impulse was to turn them down flat. The Stones had a new album (Tattoo You) to plug and the supporting tour would eventually bring in $50m in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their whole existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up these old troupers’ thirtysomething blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life & Times (2017): ‘The average Rolling Stones fan still rode the coattails of 1970s rock’n’roll, about which everything was neatly defined. Men played guitars and slept with women, who were submissive and did what they were told.’ In contrast, at this early stage very little about rising star Prince and what he might do next seemed at all ‘neatly defined’. But he had his own new album to plug (called, with exact and extrasensory irony, Controversy) and owed quite a lot of money – and gratitude – to his label, Warner Brothers: the sales of his previous three albums hadn’t met expectations, and there was a feeling that Controversy was make or break. In the end, swayed by his hypo-sharp management team, Prince took the gig.

It didn’t go well. On the first night, 9 October, Prince and The Revolution barely made it through four songs before getting booed offstage. (Accounts differ, some of them wildly, but it seems to have been one track in particular, ‘Jack U Off’, that set off most of the derision and homophobic jeers.)4 The rest of his young band were game to push on, but Prince fled home to Minneapolis in a funk. If he was angry, it was perhaps most of all with himself: at some level he must have suspected something like this might happen. It had been just two years since Disco Demolition Night, when a shock jock and ‘anti-disco campaigner’ had blown up a crate filled with soul and dance records in front of fifty thousand baseball fans at Chicago’s Comiskey Stadium. As the 1980s opened, pop music was still more or less a segregated thing in America.

The second show was scheduled for two nights later, and Prince’s manager, his guitarist, even finally Mick Jagger himself, all got on the phone to lure the tiny man-diva back. And it worked. But news of the previous flame-out had spread, and the audience came prepared. Prince took to the stage flaunting his trademark look: high-heel boots, thigh-high aerobic stockings and a pair of tight, velvety, minimalist briefs. (He very conspicuously had not opted for a bikini wax.) Apart from a matelot’s scarf round his neck, the rest was his lithe, black, naked bod. (For comparison, on this stretch of the tour Mick Jagger mostly wore baggy jerseys representing local American football teams.) The bi-racial, polysexual Revolution likewise came off as a distinctly queer sight in this locale. They were everything that some sections of the LA rock audience despised: disco beats, cross-dressing. New Wave poseurs, aloof and bony synthesizer muzik. The crowd had a collective meltdown. ‘Fruit, vegetables, Jack Daniel’s bottles, even a bag of rotting chicken came flying through the air at the group,’ Draper writes.

In 1981, Prince was an uncomfortable reminder of what lay under the global Good Old Days schtick of the kohl-eyed Stones: an ambiguously inviting/inciting body of colour. Another black innovator stepping up to ‘support’ another bunch of blithe white minstrels. Many inside Prince’s camp saw the Stones gig as a turning point. Already known as something of a control freak, Prince would make sure he was never put in a position like this again – not onstage, not in the media, not in a recording studio, not in any boardroom. He would never again play bottom in this kind of power snuggle.

2.

If Prince had died or disappeared in 1989, he would have left one of the all-time perfect bodies of work. Dirty Mind (1980) to Lovesexy (1988): a dazzling yet subtle engagement ring offered to the world. It wasn’t until I started on this piece that I remembered how much my own life intertwined with Prince’s music throughout the 1980s: I wrote about him more than any other act; I can plot all the high and low points of that shiny/dark hedonistic time using nothing but Prince songs; I attended his first UK gig with the person who was my first serious relationship; by 1987 I’d met, to the endlessly repeated soundtrack of Sign o’ the Times, the person I was to spend the rest of my life with. Looking at all those perfectly designed album sleeves now is like consulting a set of reverse tarot cards: ‘Look! Remember that hotel room in Tangiers…? and that other one in Paris… the shower stall in New York… and so many sunsets, midnights and dawns in long ago North London…’ If there is one song that embodies that whole decade for me it’s ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’: I played it so much it’s now something I can’t really enjoy any more, simultaneously drained of all meaning and the repository for way too many.

In those glory years Prince was, alongside Madonna, the most fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who made us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what form Prince might return, sometimes mere months later. Dirty Mind in no way predicts Around The World in a Day (1985), which in no way predicts Parade (1986), which sounds nothing like Lovesexy. Prince snuck wild swells and shady undercurrents into mainstream pop, with Janus-faced hits like ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Little Red Corvette’ and ‘Raspberry Beret’. His first two albums, in the late 1970s, had given no real hint of what was to come. There was a small but crucial element of luck: after that shaky start, it was the deux ex (hit) machina of MTV that was the key, as it was for Madonna and Michael Jackson. For people of a certain age, the lush, melodramatic promo for ‘Purple Rain’ and the cheeky, pared-down ‘Kiss’ video are unforgettable.

How did he get away with some of this stuff? Controversy came with a full-colour fold-out poster of Prince posing two-thirds naked in the shower. The water drip-drops from his zig-zag briefs; behind him, discreetly positioned on the bathroom wall, is a looming crucifix. On the sleeve of 1999 (1982) he reclines naked like a Playboy centrefold, in a neon-dappled boudoir. (His hobbies include horse riding, watercolours and pop eschatology.) On the sleeve of Dirty Mind he wears little more than a jacket, those briefs again, and a street hustler’s determinedly blank gaze; a tiny black and white badge on his lapel says ‘Rude Boy’. (Yes, we see.) Looking back at such images, two things strike you. First, even before Madonna, he was posing himself as an aggressively passive sex object. (These are images that say: ‘You think you know whose tongue is in whose cheek, here, but you really don’t.’) Second, that self-consciously blank gaze, deployed time after time. Look at how expressionless he is in those shots. Has he simply composed his face, or is he wearing it like a mask? Regardless, these early portraits disclose an everyday kid, someone you might see around the neighbourhood, not the flawless no-hair-out-of-place Prince of later years, embalmed inside a pastel armour of good taste, every last bit of skin hidden behind boots, suits, gloves, shades, neo-pimp hats.

I’d completely forgotten, but in these fledgling days there was also a Prince portrait taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, for Interview magazine, in 1980. Surprisingly, it turns out to be the least risqué pic of all: a simple deep focus head and shoulders – if ‘simple’ is really the right word for this meeting of two such notorious bad boys, at such an ominous and/or propitious moment. There’s doubtless much to be said about the scopophilic clinch between Mapplethorpe’s downtown eyes and black men’s bodies, but the Interview portrait is upfront rather than on the downlow, unabashed, full of the 22-year-old Prince’s downy and as yet wholly unprocessed personality.

3.

Prince always insisted he was drug-free, but by accident or design his 1980s aesthetic chimed perfectly with the first slowly spreading ripples of Ecstasy in transatlantic pop culture. From Dirty Mind to Around The World to Lovesexy we can map the progress of a new form of pop/soul/other music, ambiguously druggy (‘This is not music, this is a trip!’) and strangely clear-headed; deliriously erotic but faux naive. Early profiles emphasized an odd mix of confidence and awkwardness: this postmodern Prince was softly spoken, with a tendency to blush; he promised phallic joy but wore thick lisle tights and high-heel boots. His friends and co-workers report how seldom he slept. The result is like something intuited in a lucid late-afternoon dream: ‘I was dreaming when I wrote this / Forgive me if it goes astray.’ If too many soulful love songs, whatever their merits, are essentially Jack Vettriano, then 1980s Prince was Paul Klee.

The Revolution weren’t a classic funk band either, more a sonic Frankenstein welded together in the sort of nightclub where the DJ alternated joy-to-the-world disco and snotty, punch-drunk New Wave. The line-up comprised a geeky white dude in joke-shop doctor’s scrubs; a muscly black guy with a dyed mohican; and two strong looking white women of indeterminate sexuality. Prince was having big fun with the play of appearances, abandoning strict reverence to any supposedly ‘authentic’ truth of what it is to be black, or male, or soulful.

4.

The front sleeve of ‘previously unreleased studio recording’, Piano & A Microphone (recorded 1983, released 2018) is a gorgeous black and white shot of Prince lost in the deeps of his own gaze, in a big dressing room mirror. What do those guarded eyes discern, or foresee? Readers of Lacan may object that the subject seems a bit old to be having any kind of mirror stage moment, but we all know entertainers are a child-like crew who don’t grow up at the same rate as the rest of us, if at all. How many future Princes does he see in that reflection, waiting to come out? What does he see there that he’s so determined to keep his face blank and give nothing away? You have to wonder: was he trapped inside a wilderness of mirrors, this fatefully curious boy with his nerveless Oedipal eyes? In shots like Piano & A Microphone, I sometimes wonder if I see the shuttered gaze of a child who learned at a very young age to never show any too-obvious emotion, to keep things neutral on the domestic battlefront. Look again at that face, made serial on the covers of Dirty Mind, Controversy, Purple Rain: almost wholly without expression. Is it a mask hiding a world of perplexity? Narcissus in search of some missing echo?

From Dirty Mind on, there is a definite feeling of some other story under it all: a parallel tale, broody young Prince off to one side watching himself enact each dutiful role. From the beginning, a double ‘you’ of two Prince narratives, at least: a public one and a private one; and, echoing between them, a tale which is more to do with race in America, race in the music industry, race where it did or didn’t show its face. And it seems to me that this is the subtext missing from a lot of otherwise OK or unexceptionable writing on Prince: the skin game.

Race isn’t the only way to make sense of Prince; but to try and make sense of him without it is a truly forlorn hope. Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled this head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who also worked in the music industry. In an astute, elegant piece she published in the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with Prince which was still being quoted as fact three decades later, so acute was her impersonation), Cooper wrote about the way black artists routinely have to ‘exaggerate and contort’ their image in order to get media coverage. The ‘doe-eyed sex freak’ was, she notes, just one of many eye-catching constructs the canny Prince used to garner his share of attention.5

Cooper had the requisite sense of what black people were still made to go through at that time just to be accepted at all, never mind on a grander, world-conquering scale. She had a beady eye (as Prince did) for the apparently trivial details, coded put-downs and subtle

sightlines of race politics that usually go unmentioned. Black success is different from white – always the extra pressure of having to be a ‘role model’. No matter what you do, you never please everyone. If you embrace global success you’ll get poison about forgetting your roots; stay close to home and you’ll be criticized for lacking ambition. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t – as the unruly Rolling Stones gig showed. Prince’s black audience had little interest in guitar-led stadium rock anthems; while the rock fans were too hidebound to get that Prince was writing far better songs, and playing far heavier rock, than their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.

5.

Prince was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s formative years it was a volatile household. In one of his biggest hits, ‘When Doves Cry’, we could be eavesdropping on an analytic session: ‘Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold… Maybe I’m just like my mother – she’s never satisfied.’ A song riven with doubt about loving the other, and the other’s love: ‘How can you…? Why do we…? Maybe you’re…’ The story goes that the priapic young Prince was thrown out of his father’s house for ‘entertaining’ girls in the basement music room. And while John Nelson wasn’t perhaps as cruelly overbearing as some soul music patriarchs (Marvin Gaye Snr, Joe Jackson), he seems to have been a man who raised the Bible high at home, but provided enthusiastic musical accompaniment for all the bump’n’grind strippers in the Minneapolis tenderloin.

In early interviews, Prince would tease with hints about his childhood: that his mother showed him Playboy magazine in lieu of sex education; that he indulged in near-incest with his half-sister; forever blurring the question of what race he and his parents were, exactly.6 This was the time of Tipper Gore and her campaign to force record companies to place ‘parental warning’ stickers on some of their more devil’s-spawn LP sleeves. (The kind of dream publicity, it has to be said, most young rock acts dream of.) This sideshow wasn’t provoked by some sleazy heavy-metal outrage: the offending party was Prince, and in particular a track called ‘Darling Nikki’ on the otherwise poptastic Purple Rain soundtrack, in which the titular character is found ‘in a lobby, masturbating with a magazine’. It’s also the only weak song on an otherwise flawless album, a track I routinely skip; even at the time it felt tacky, a self-parodic caricature of the exquisitely economical songs o...