An African Kid deconstructs the devotional nature of Prince’s music

I grew up in a world where, pop-music was the latest attempt by western culture to pollute, the pure christian values of the youth. All of this despite the fact that Christianity and the values it came with didn’t exist in my part of the African subcontinent for longer than 200 years. I remember uncles and guests that walked into the kitchen as I washed dishes and listened to Scarface or Jay-Z, warning me about the spiritual slippery slope that is worldly music. So I would be lying if I said, I was able to fuck with Prince at the time. But Prince came from a similar religious, background. He grew up Jehovahs Witness and I grew up Seventh Day Adventist. Different but similar in that both churches have a penchant for conspiracy theories concerning the pope and catholics. Both churches have very colorful, and deeply held notions about the end of the world. These approaches informed much of Princes music. He managed to take the religious impulse and fuse it with some sexuality. In his hands sex isn’t a dirty word or act, its a form of expression, an attempt to access God. He played with sexual imagery, by going all out androgynous, but still being very comfortably masculine. As a kid I had a thing for Michael Jackson, my western educated parents, had amassed hours and hours of video tapings of english television channels, from the time they where in school abroad. They collected everything from episodes of the Simpsons to Queen concerts. At the time in my country, all the media outlets where state run. So its safe to say we didn’t really have variety or access to a lot. The earliest footage of Prince I can remember was watching a taped performance in Tokyo. He was wearing strange sun glasses, donning his big hair and high boots. Seemingly dancing and gyrating while still holding his guitar and occasionally licking it and thrusting it around. It was all to sophisticated for me at the time but still eye catching. At age 6 my mind registered Prince. He came into my life and kind of stayed in it for a while. I remember liking the song Diamonds and Pearls, because of the video and it played into my love of 90′s R&B. It wasn’t until I became a member of the cult of Okayplayer. It wasn’t until I was fully invested in the Soulquarian world of Questlove, D’angelo and Erykah Badu, that I plunged into Prince. His music was such a revelation to me. It tickled the little religious residue in me, while still allowing me to dance in the church of the erotic and subversive. He taught me being a man, is about being hyperaware of the duality of sexuality. He warned of the dangers of ultra machismo. Once I became a collector of Vinyl, I collected everything I could get my hands on. When I heard he died I was very sad, but I know he somewhere right now trading guitar licks with Hendrix and Chuck Berry while his biggest fan Jesus Christ himself claps in excitement.