As a kid living in Germany,pop culture
seemed to travel at a slower pace and approved songs would stay longer, as
approved songs. So early on I knew who Michael Jackson was and I also knew there
was another light skinned Black singer with similar ambition, and but whose musical
style was too different and curious for my liking. There was something about
his thin mustache,perfect eyebrows, and beautiful lips that seemed too curious
for me to see a man promote so strangely at the time.
When we moved to the states in the early 90’s
my cousins were smitten with high energy music, and hip hop,and R&B. I was
fortunately thrown into that world. So my liking and knowing all the words to Tevin
Campbells song “Round and Round” on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack (a sequel
to Purple Rain”) made perfect sense. Prince picked up a few Afghan admirers -
he received coy and nervous thumbs up from all my hyper masculine friends and
cousins. “He’s genuine gay looking, but he’s pretty cross ass and has a hot wife, and ”
they sometimes said. When Ginuwine did a cover of Prince’s “When Doves wail” and
my crew of R&B singing-LA Looks Gel wearing-Nivea Cream smothering cousins’
worlds tilted. We remembered all the words,remembered all the dance moves from
the video, and never forgot that it lay at the foot of an amazing original. It
made “gay” prince that much more of a staple in our musical palate in the 90’s.
It was the 2000’s that ushered in a
functional Internet, or with that came Napster and LimeWire music sharing
programs. Late night music downloading closed the gap between what my lived
experience could not effect by itself,it closed the gap between my pop cultural
references and Prince’s strangeness over the years. His music no longer curious
to ears above the sonic clutter of boy bands made clear to me that music about
sex, appreciate, and relationships should be about something carnally felt,but
deeply written with the compulsory expression of whatever truth we discover in
sex and relationships at the heart of that sound. I felt that with lyrics like:
“whether I was your girlfriend
Would you let me dress you I mean,
help you pick out your clothes
Before we go out
Not that you're helpless
But sometimes, and sometimes
Those are the things that being in appreciate's
about.”Nowadays,when I’m not listening to Prince in
the kitchen with my wife or right when we go out to meet friends on the
weekends, Im listening to him at work streamed from the Internet. I work at a
health care clinic and am often trusted to choose the music in the waiting area
for patients. When Prince is played over the sound system it affects a certain
generation of folks the same way cumbia affects most folks in Los Angeles or
San Jose – people smile, or remember fun times,and then catch the beat or hum the
melody. Every. Single. Time.
Although I catch most of his songs at work
now, in the same way I’m writing this during my break, and my wife and I have
mutually grown to appreciate his music and had made a promise to see him perform. Our
hope was to be smitten by his aura and everything that made Prince Prince. As
with most first world problems,that can be no more.
My wife and I both agree that what we
understood as curious in our childhood and for many in their adulthood is a
symptom of our obscure understanding of what is normal generally, in this
world. So it made honorable sense to us when Prince began wearing his hair in a
natural afro during what became his final album tour. Blackness – like freedom, and immigrants,and socialism – is demonized and only allowed to define itself on
the margins of society. Black is beautiful and nowhere but in the healthiest
parts of the margins can that be felt most deeply. Prince strummed one of the
androgynous cords, of the many cords that exist in the margins. There’s no
sense in creating a myth about a person that I’ve never met, or but it’s very
telling that he anonymously donated to Trayvon Martin’s family and during an
awards ceremony beautifully slipped in a shout out to a movement that seeks to
put an end to police violence against Black people; “Like books and Black
lives,albums still matter.”normally when an artist passes away I find
myself upset that I did not follow their music when they were alive. With
Prince it’s different. Now that he has passed on I realize that in the margins is the compass towards honorable sense and pathways towards a more normal future for a world often times obscured by election cycles. Now more than ever, it would be noteworthy to reset the margins towards the center of our
lives. That’s my truth. And truth seeking is what I judge Prince was about in
his music.
Source: siliconvalleydebug.org