More than any other artist, Prince — who died today at 57 — broke me out of the bland, white homogeneity of my childhood.
As an adolescent in Erie, Pa., I sought identity in music, a template for how to act, what to think and how to make sense of my emotions.
My teenage world was dominated by classic rock: The Doors, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Who, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Dylan, Springsteen. There wasn’t much room for anything that was “different.” In my almost-all-white, all-boy Catholic high school, listening to the wrong music could get you labeled a “fairy” or a “fag” and beaten up. Artists that strayed from margins were generally mocked, ridiculed, even feared.
Black musicians were particularly suspect. Except for Jimi Hendrix — an indisputable guitar god — black artists were dismissed as simply weird, different, uncool. Pop, soul and dance music were not serious art forms. Disco sucked, it went without saying.
Prince’s commercial breakthroughs 1999 and Purple Rain came out when I was in high school. “Little Red Corvette,” “When Doves Cry” and “I Would Die 4 U” were always in heavy rotation on the radio and the nascent MTV. I loved these songs, though I would never admit it.
But the release of Sign o’ the Times in 1987 was a watershed moment for me. I bought it on cassette and simply could not resist the pop masterpiece, which remains weird by conventional standards (Prince’s notions about Jesus, sex, politics and relationships are on full display). The album upended my notions of what great music is.
The opening track, with its ominous computerized drum beat, is heavy and anxious. From there, Prince jumps all over the place, through funk romps to a Joni Mitchell-inspired ballad to perfectly crafted pop tunes to a gospel song.
Buried in the album is a song unlike anything I’d ever heard at the time: “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”
The opening seconds reference an orchestra tuning up, a street preacher and a church organ before giving way to a drum beat and Prince’s unmistakable falsetto. It’s a love song about a man who is jealous of his girlfriend’s girlfriends. He fantasizes about picking out her clothes and washing her hair. Even as he longs for some platonic ideal, his sexual desire overtakes him and he moves from playing dress up to oral sex until he sees them both lying together trying to imagine “what silence looks like.”
I was obsessed with that song and puzzled by it. It remains one of my favorite Prince songs, because I love the way it upended my closed-minded view of the world.
After Prince, I left behind my earlier attitudes and embraced whatever music that caught my ear: the weird and the conventional, the dense and infectious — sometimes all at the same time. Because of Prince, I was able to hear the beauty in country, rap, funk, avant garde chamber music, disco, electronica and teen pop songs like “MMMBop” and “Shake It Off.”
Prince taught me not to be dismissive. The guy was a brilliant weirdo and because of him, I learned that beauty and weirdness are things to be embraced, not shunned.
