Energetic. Breathless. Full of Life.
I’m ready to listen to Prince again.
As silly as it may sound, I’ve been avoiding his music for months now, ever since his passing. Yesterday’s BET Awards tribute to the artist (Jennifer Hudson! Sheila E!!) helped redeem the body of work in my mind and remind me of its power and soul, even after the artist himself is gone.
Hearing it performed with love and breathless energy reminded me of listening to his music with fresh ears as a child. Compared to what he was doing, everything else sounded second-rate. Nothing had the layers, the depth, or the wild-eyed electricity of Prince’s music. I do not expect anything else to ever capture it the same way again.
It was also, in its own way, profoundly spiritual. That’s why I love Prince’s music so much to this day, and a truth perhaps best explained by a singular passage in the excellent book ‘I Would Die 4 U’, where the author describes the LoveSexy tour as not only a performance but a religious experience:
The LoveSexy tour further played out Prince’s desire to evangelize. Woodworth told me it was Prince’s “most direct enactment of the death and transfiguration of Christ.” The show was split into two halves. The first half gave us songs with an overtly sexual component like “Head,” “Erotic City,” “Sister,” and “Dirty Mind.” Alan Leeds and Matt Fink said Prince knew that’s what people wanted; he was luring them in, so that he can then discuss what he really wants them to hear. Just before the midpoint, he did “Bob George” from the Black Album, perhaps his most misogynistic song, one where he insults himself and masculinity, one that represents the depths of evil which the Black Album represented for him. This we can read as the moment of hell just before death in Adventist theology. It’s his always-darkest-before-dawn moment. He would symbolically die and then be reborn by going into “Anna Stesia,” which gives us spirituality, as he sings, “liberate my mind.” As he did the song, he was behind a keyboard on a riser that lifted him higher and higher as he was bathed in a pinpoint spotlight. Near the end of the song, he would twitch and convulse as he ascended into the light acting out a physical conversion. Once again, he is Jesuslike.
For those who know I also love the music of Kanye West, can you see a parallel? It’s this desire to bring faith out of the mind and into the world that I find so powerful. Is it broken? Sure, but it’s trying, and that’s more than most can say.
I published more notes from ‘I Would Die 4 U’ over at my books project. Give them a read if you want to know more about that slightly hidden side of Prince and his work. It was evident last night in the celebratory tributes, and once you’ve seen it, that spirit is unforgettable.
