The Death of Transgression

Prince is dead. And if you listen carefully to all the news coverage, you will see that there is a lot of talk about a legacy, but not a word about a successor. Maybe this is simply because a genius as multifaceted and prolific as The Purple One cannot be duplicated. This might very well be true, yet there is any hard fact as well: Prince, like David Bowie, received much of his inspiring presence from the depth and profundity of his transgression. And we are increasingly becoming a society that crushs the potential for transgression by expanding the net of acceptability so wide that confrontation with it is nearly impossible. The death of transgression is upon us and what that means for human soul and its creative potential cannot yet truly be known.

I was born the year that Tipper Gore declared “Darling Nikki” the leading threat to American decency. As so many have noted over the last two days , it was the middle of Reagan and AIDS and the Moral Majority. It was a world in which the strange, beautiful creature that was Prince Roger Nelson truly was an intruder, an intruder like so many other strange, beautiful creatures in that gray world. There was a mainstream and one could really, not by choice necessarily, be excluded from it.

So much of progressive politics since then has been devoted to accessing the mainstream. The real lesson of AIDS was perhaps that without membership in it, one’s life was always in peril. And so the battlegrounds of the Culture Wars moved to the bastions of respectability: the military and marriage; corporate boardrooms and the White House; bathrooms in suburban malls and proms in high school gyms.

By my mid-teens, we knew that Mrs. Gore would never be First Lady and “just like everyone else” had become a rallying cry. I turned twenty-five to find that the Gores were divorced and Elton John was married. The new normal was so inevitable that everyone and everything had become normal.

And when everyone is normal, there is no room for Prince or Bowie or a condo-free East Village. We have accepted ourselves into an unprecedented situation in human history: a world in which outsider status is aggressively targeted for elimination by equally aggressive inclusion. It is a world that can never again produce an Oscar Wilde or Isadore Duncan, a Josephine Baker or Alan Ginsberg or Dorthy Parker. It is a world were Janis Joplin drives a mini-van and shows up with ratty hair and tattoos to the PTA, but never screams out vocals that make our hearts bleed. It is a world in which James Baldwin is never an outsider and so can never give the blistering critique that could only be formulated by one standing at edge of the room. It is a world were Prince does not shock or scandalize or challenge and so is rendered mindless entertainment in the place of high art.

This is end. This is the victory (a victory that has created many wonderful and marvelous things too, especially if the measure is the happiness of individual human beings). The party is over in many ways. But as Prince taught us, parties, like life, are not meant to last.