Prince had an incalculable effect on my own blossoming, showed up at that transformative teenage moment where my entire being was newly ravenous for psycho/sexual and fantastical lyrical synesthetic nourishment — and overdelivered on all fronts so extremely that, as many others have shared yesterday and today, it seemed the only way to process it was to live it continually, much of the time half-screaming along, face and neck wet with tears, begging you down on my knees, ecstatically savoring every drop of the consuming experience he led us through. There was a many-month period after Sign O’ The Times came out in 1987 when I listened to nothing but Prince, and felt completely fulfilled.
Although I consciously appreciated this at the time, it’s become a genuine astonishment in retrospect: Prince’s catalog is so diverse, his composition and arrangement so sophisticated and nuanced, his instrumentalism so masterful, his topical diversity, lyrical skill, frankly genius humor and linguistic artfulness so irresistible, that I could subsist on nothing else, desert island-style, at a point in my life of such complex and tumultuous emotion and cultural hunger.
I discovered Prince as I discovered multidimensionality, as I awakened from the dogmatic slumbers of my fundamentalist upbringing into the fantastic and ecstatic mutability of everything. And of all of the everything, Prince played with almost all of it like it was playable — genres, genders, any instrument, any sound, any god or cosmic impulse, any urge or notion or narrative or role or phrase or syntax or beat or expectation — all while exuding a supreme mastery of sexuality, both as performed and as conceptually explored. Everything was sexuality, and sexuality was everything. Lovesexy, arguably his greatest masterpiece, explicitly creates a narrative in which the character Lovesexy is savior, divine, delicious and deliriously intoxicating — and devilishly removed track markers on the CD so there was nothing to do but listen from beginning to end, almost an hour of poetic, instrumental, conceptual and sonic innovation that I played on repeat for weeks, fully in submission.
Crucially for me, Prince consistently created a world in which high romance, raw carnality and transcendent spirituality all existed simultaneously and inseparably, joyfully, making it impossible to remember why I’d ever thought there was such a thing as wrong that feels right, sin that feels so spectacular.
It was everything I needed, and the full-being gratitude will never end.
