Prince Did That
A letter to my students about the musical genius we skipped
Nine minutes. That’s how little time I spent teaching my Freshman pop music history class about Prince on the day before he died. Nine minutes as part of a three-hour class on the music business of the 1980s, teaching about the birth of MTV and the costs of crossover to two dozen undergrads studying the music business, teenagers who’ve never known the kind of segregated music business Black artists endured then, a feast for few and famine for most.
The Prince segment had shrunk from previous semesters, especially since Prince pulled his music from Spotify. Back when I spent more time on him, I sometimes said: “Prince is one of the few artists crossover didn’t eventually kill.”
Now those nine minutes seem paltry and that statement woefully glib.
So this is for you, my students: The things I should have taught you about one of pop’s most genius minds on the day before he left us. And this is for him, because he deserved much more.
I’m going to make an argument about Prince that supersedes another one you’ve heard me make about the Three Kings of American Rhythm, the three musicians who symbolize African-American music’s difference from the European: Louis Armstrong, who encoded “swing” into American pop; James Brown, who turned every instrument into a drum; and J Dilla, who defied the digital grid and warped the fabric of time.
I think Prince belongs in there too. If syncopation can be described as rhythmic surprise — a placing of notes where we don’t expect them — then Prince introduced a rhythmic style that induces surprise by not placing notes where we do expect them. Prince — on whatever instrument he played or programmed, be it drums, bass, piano or guitar — was a master of sonic implication. He chopped phrases in half, gave you the first part but not the last. He blunted notes, barely playing anything but making you hear everything. I listen to the bass line on “Irresistible Bitch,” or to the guitar solo on “I Want to Be Your Lover,” and it’s what he doesn’t play, not what he does, that makes me bob my head. The rhythmic information isn’t there, but it is.
This sonic trickery extends to his melodies and harmonies. Before Prince lands on the notes we expect to hear, he lingers on the leading tones, leans into them like a lover’s tongue just before hitting the right spot. Listen to the string fugue at the end of “Purple Rain.” Listen to all those seemingly wrong-ass notes played by the lead synth on “The Beautiful Ones.” And yet they’re right, because they always resolve or imply resolution to the note we expect to hear.
Prince loved to and lived to fuck with our minds. Like Louis and James before him, and like Dilla after him, his time-feel has been oft imitated (hear D’Angelo’s “Untitled”) but rarely duplicated.
Half of Prince’s musical genius was in his composition, but the other was in his instrumentation.
Prince used synthesis to mediate man and machine. Unlike many new wave artists, Prince didn’t fetish the synthesizer in an effort to subtract the human from the music making enterprise. Instead, like the character Neo in The Matrix, he seemed to enter his machines, humanizing them. Ever hear machines cry? Listen to “Automatic” or “Something In The Water” from 1999. Synthesis had long been an important part of Black pop via the innovations of Stevie Wonder and P-Funk, and Sly first used the funk box. But it wasn’t until Prince that the drum machine became de rigeur for funk and R&B.
Prince used synthesizers to mock traditional instrumentation — synth stabs stood in for real horn sections, pads replaced strings. But he approached programming and playing these machines with the same virtuosity that he reserved for his guitar or piano playing. And in Prince’s able hands his “synth horns” stopped trying to be “horns” and just became something new. Listen to the high synth drone at 3 minutes 8 seconds into “Baby, I’m A Star.” Is that supposed to be a horn? It is, but it isn’t. It is Prince’s sound. His soundcrafting — the particular envelope of his clap sound, for example — became a sonic hallmark of the 1980s. In the process, Prince made traditional instrumentation — the sound of a horn section, real strings — sound passé, and set the pace for 1980s music. Until the 1990s, when it no longer did.
None of this musicological mastery would mean anything without songcraft. Prince was a master of the pop song form. However experimental his musicality, he was unabashed about his hooks. His melodic sense was intuitive. He always knew what buttons to push, and that went double for his lyrics. Much has been written of Prince’s career-long dance in the duality between sexuality and Christianity. In so doing, he tapped into a particular American struggle that won him the empathy of millions of fans. But there is something more to Prince’s particular appeal to a generation of 80s kids, something that the writer Toure nailed in his book, I Would Die 4 U. We know that the Vietnam War galvanized our parents generation, shaping the musical values of both artist and audience. But what great event, he asks, defined Generation X? Divorce, he answers.
When I read those words I knew instantly they were true. We were, so many of us, in that first great wave of marital disruption that came as our parents challenged traditional roles and long-held taboos. I spent a childhood trying to repair a hole that can never be mended, as I suspect Prince did too. Maybe Prince’s bottomless loneliness and his deep yearning for sexual and spiritual completion may have been an adolescent’s transmutation of a longing to close a broken family circle. Or maybe not.
He was one of the great singers and players and songwriters of our day. A genius. But much of Prince’s great contributions — and the things that made him such a compelling pop figure — were extramusical.
Being a Prince fan in the suburbs of the early 1980s taught me much of what I needed to know about race in America: that my white friends had no idea who Prince was, because the radio stations they listened to didn’t play his songs; that there were, indeed, such a thing as “Black” radio stations; that I was, as a white kid, a social outcast for listening to them; that, although we lived in one of the most class- and race-integrated suburbs in the country, fractious musical schisms belied an enduring and ironic cultural divide. White kids who adored rock and metal — essentially electrified Black blues — yet lumped all funk and soul into these overlapping, pejorative designations: Disco. Jungle music. N****r music.
I was only 14 years old but I knew it was all Black music, from Zeppelin to Zapp, and that rock radio and MTV created the cultural bubble in which many white kids still lived. A middle-school friend, a hard rock fiend, took one look at Prince’s eponymous album cover — with feathered hair and song titles like “Bambi” — and dismissed him thus: F****t. Then I forced him to listen to the guitar intro for “Bambi.” The memory of his shocked, chastened expression still makes me smile. What’s a man now? He’s a huge Prince fan to this day. I employed Prince to burst those bubbles, over and over. It’s all Black music. I was the proverbial broken record.
Oh how they all came around in 1984, after MTV finally relented, after pop stations started playing “Little Red Corvette” and “Let’s Go Crazy,” after Purple Rain sold out theaters and Prince sold out a half-dozen shows at the Capital Center outside Washington, DC. Then everyone who wasn’t a Prince fan, was.
I stand 5 feet 2 inches, the same height as Prince. I learned, through Prince, that 5 feet 2 inches is just tall enough to see over some people’s heads.
Prince’s rise was not inevitable. Quite the contrary: The music business of the 1980s wasted a generation of Black talent. It is only Prince’s intellect and persistence (and the help of an equally dogged team) that cracked the resistance. When promo man Russ Thyret brought Prince’s demo to Warner Bros. Records in Burbank in the late 1970s, he and executives like Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker touted him as the “next Stevie Wonder,” a teenager who produced, composed, arranged and performed all his own music. But what good was having the “next Stevie Wonder” during the disco backlash of the early 1980s? Prince gained a respectable following among Black audiences, but barely charted in the pop world. Warner Bros. stuck with him and stuck to their guns for five albums over six years before the pop world started paying him proper attention. They were probably the only record company that would have done that for a mid-level artist.
By contrast, Michael Jackson had been an international star for years when MTV refused to play the video for “Billie Jean,” the first single off his 1983 album Thriller. It took the full weight of CBS Records, a threat to pull MTV’s license for their entire catalog, to get that video on the air. And while Jackson deserves much of the credit for punching the first hole through MTV’s apartheid wall, the effort to satisfy the requirements of crossover — the things Black artists were encouraged to do to get their music played — also poked holes in his aesthetic. Rock radio wouldn’t play “Billie Jean.” He had to go get a white rock guitarist, Eddie Van Halen, to shred a few bars and cosign him. “Beat It” doesn’t sound like “Billie Jean.” It sounds like Michael Jackson trying to make a rock song. Thriller is brilliant, but it is a brilliant mish-mosh variety show patchwork of different styles carefully curated to deliver maximum commercial punch and maximum exposure across a variety of radio formats.
Prince did the same thing. But he didn’t. “Little Red Corvette” was indeed the guitar-driven song with the requisite guitar solo that got him onto pop radio. But “Little Red Corvette” didn’t sound like Prince’s “rock song.” It sounded like a Prince song. Prince made some creative leaps that were commercially shrewd — like the rhythmic post-punk of Dirty Mind. But through it all he had a unified aesthetic. His crossover efforts may have been every bit as calculated as those of Michael Jackson, but Prince made it sound holistic and organic, because it was. Prince wasn’t just “making a rock song” when he made “Little Red Corvette” or “Let’s Go Crazy.” He was reclaiming rock for Black artists. He wasn’t pandering to white gatekeepers; he was playing them all for the fools they were. Prince knew more about music than all of them put together. He knew the tropes, the cliches, the idioms, the code language and manipulated them at will: The little Elvis mumbles and rockabilly trills in “Delirious.” The five-and-dime, Mr. McGee Americana of “Raspberry Beret.” And why not? As an American Prince, they were all his rightful cultural inheritance. They all belonged to him.
Thus Prince became, arguably unlike Michael Jackson, a Black pop star on his own cultural terms. Perhaps that’s unfair to Jackson. Maybe Jackson’s aesthetic trade-offs opened a window for a generation of Black artists. Maybe he sacrificed his proverbial nose so that an artist like Prince wouldn’t have to. It’s clear now that the crossover Black artists of the 1980s all made huge personal sacrifices to do so, sacrifices that white artists did not have to make.
They worked harder, for sure. With every pop gesture, they risked Black rejection. We will never know how much toll that process took over the years on Whitney Houston. We will never know how much of Jackson’s mental and physical health was consumed in his drive for pop dominance. Nor will we know for sure how much of Prince’s relentless touring, playing, dancing, jumping, leaping came from his love of the game or from the game he was forced to play. Lest we forget, while opening for rock acts like the Rolling Stones, he endured the full-frontal racism of segregated rock audiences. What Prince and his fellow crossover artists shared was a music business version of DuBois’s double consciousness: Loving Black people yet constantly aware of the gaze of white gatekeepers. Having the world and knowing, at base, that their product was still owned by someone else. That had to take a toll, did it not? “Don’t make me Black,” Prince told Warner Bros. executive Lenny Waronker when he was a younger man. Prince knew what that meant. And maybe he didn’t.
Prince was a star, and then he wasn’t. In the late 80s, a thousand miles away from Minneapolis, to the East, producers like Marley Marl and Rick Rubin and Scott La Rock and Ced Gee and the Bomb Squad and Prince Paul were curating a very different aesthetic; and lyricists like Rakim and Chuck D and KRS-One crafting a very different kind of message. Rhythm was now to be rubbed, scratched, and cut into pieces. Snatches of sound were gathered from worn vinyl and pasted together to make accidental, illegal, dissonant harmony. Synthesis was out, and the sounds of the ancestors were back: That fat old kick drum, this rare snare. Love songs were a distraction, a sexual sleeping pill. It was time to awake, be fully conscious, and fight. While Public Enemy was talking about “Panther power,” Prince was singing about taking a bubble bath with his pants on. The year they released It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, Prince gave us the Batman soundtrack.
“You hated Michael and Prince/all the way ever since,” L.L. Cool J rapped, “if their beats were made of meat then they would have to be minced.” Mince they did: L.L. rocked Prince’s bells and chucked the rest. P.E. lifted the noise of “Let’s Go Crazy” and discarded the rhythm. And we all learned to program drums by listening to Prince. Hip-hop took a lot from Prince, and it didn’t.
It was a mutually contentious relationship. Prince made his feelings clear on the bootlegged Black Album in 1987: “Riding in my Thunderbird on the freeway/I turned on my radio to hear some music play/I got a silly rapper talking silly shit instead/And the only good rapper is one that’s dead.” He was inhabiting a character, but he wasn’t. In interviews, Prince decried the practice of sampling, and behind the scenes, instructed his lawyers to deny licenses to those producers who tried to clear them.
When Prince came around, sort of, it was too late. He dabbled in rap. “Sexy MF” sounded like a very good wedding band giving a nod to the youngsters on the dance floor. It was embarrassing. Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, once his proteges, had by contrast an admirable fluency with breakbeat and hip-hop. Prince seemed, in the 1990s, to be speaking a dead language to an older generation. “My name is Prince!” he insisted, “And I am funky!” It sounded desperate. You are, Prince. But you aren’t.
After Prince rejected hip-hop, I pretty much threw him away. That says more about me than it does about him. Somewhere in my youth I got the idea that in order for music to be important, it had to push at the edges, that it had to progress.
Of course it doesn’t. Plenty of worthy artists build a home for themselves and never move out. Prince’s home, literally and proverbially, was Paisley Park. He never left. That certainly does say something about him.
I saw Prince live on the Purple Rain tour in 1984 and didn’t see him again until 20 years later, in 2004, on his Musicology tour. He was glorious. He rapped: “Warner Bros. used to be a friend of mine/Now they’re just a motherfucking waste of time/If it ain’t worth doing on your own, it ain’t worth the fame.”
I got it. We were, after all, both refugees from the Warner family. In the midst of my own reinvention, exhausted after decades of fight — and short on love — I had a renewed empathy for this guy who had something that comes all to rare to human beings: He knew who he was, and he knew what was important.
Prince is, in fact, one of the reasons why I tell you all not to worry so much about innovation as recording artists. It’s about bringing yourself fully to whatever you choose to do, whether it’s the 12-bar blues or 12-tone composition. You are what’s new.
To see him again live was certainly about hearing his music, but it wasn’t. It was just as much, I discovered, about seeing someone vital. It wasn’t about his product. It was about him.
And he’s gone now. But he isn’t.
If you enjoyed reading this, please log in and click the heart below.
This will help to share the story with others.
Dan Charnas, an associate arts professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts | New York University, is the author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. He worked for Def American/Warner Bros. Records in the 1990s.
