Notes from ‘I Would Die 4 U’

With the BET Award’s tribute to Prince on my mind, I thought it’d be a good time to re-explore my notes from the excellent Prince biography ‘I Would Die 4 U’ by Touré.

I most appreciated Touré’s insight into Prince’s religious beliefs, and he starts with a bit of perspective on how the artist might have seen himself. How did one justify singing about sexuality and spirituality, sometimes at the same time? Well, easy — by seeing one’s role as bringing the least of these into the kingdom:

He was not preaching to the choir, unlike most gospel artists. He was outside the church on the street, preaching to people who didn’t hear him coming as he put spiritual messages in their head. Jesus ministered to the least, the last, and the lost; He sat with prostitutes and lepers. In a way, Prince did the same by taking his spiritual message to the pop world, to the uninitiated.

Indeed, Prince’s music was in a sense simply a way to gain the trust and adoration of a population he wanted to reach:

Imagine America as one house on a suburban lane. Years before he became a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince knocked on America’s door through his music. He came to the door holding a guitar and an umbrella while concealing a Bible. He flirted his way inside the door and told us he had a dirty mind and was controversial, and then he sat down in the living room on the good couch. And, when America’s guard was down, because we thought we were having a conversation about sex, Prince eased out his Bible and said, let me also tell you about my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the place in which this duality was most encapsulated was with Prince’s LoveSexy / Black Album duality, and the tour solidifies this truth:

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.

It is very, very hard for me not to draw major parallels between Prince’s LoveSexy tour and Kanye West’s own Yeezus, where a similar path of destruction and ascension is acted out by the artist on a stage in front of a (very unassuming) crowd. For those wondering why I love both of these artists, look no further.

Prince’s religious convictions were not only some exterior show, but truthfully internalized to the fullest. It was good to read this passage, on death, directly after his passing:

In “Sometimes It Snows In April,” Prince is in mourning, but most of the time when he mentions death, especially his own, it’s something he’s thrilled about. A central tenet of the religious philosophy advanced in Prince’s music is that death is something joyous and to be looked forward to because it means we’re going to Heaven. On “Sign ‘O’ The Times” he says, “Some say a man ain’t happy, truly, until a man truly dies.” That’s his philosophy of death. He believes so faithfully in resurrection and Heaven that it seems like sometimes he can’t wait to die. In “Let’s Go Crazy,” he says, “We’re all excited, but we don’t know why, maybe it’s cuz, we’re all gonna die!” In “Controversy,” he sings, “Some people wanna die, so they can be free!” He knows death is not the end but the moment of transition into the greater life. In “Reflection,” on Musicology, he sings, “Still it’s nice 2 know that, uh, when bodies wear out, we can get another.” He opens LoveSexy with “Eye No” where he repeatedly chants, “I know there is a Heaven! I know there is a Hell!” His conviction is rock solid.

Amen.

Prince lived a full and breathless life, and that too was a component of how he viewed this world:

Prince spends much time presenting himself as the greatest and most badass preacher that pop music has ever seen. “Let’s Go Crazy” gives us Prince pretending to be in the pulpit while laying out his theology in the form of the coolest sermon ever heard on top-forty radio. A Baptist churchy organ riffs in the background as Prince preaches, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” The sound of it all makes me feel like I’m in a little wooden church where Prince is in the pulpit, resplendent in a beautiful white suit filled with but- tons. “Electric word life. It means forever and that’s a mighty long time! But I’m here to tell you! There’s something else . . . ! The after- world!” That sermon would fit in so many churches on so many Sunday mornings. It’s Prince laying out his religious philosophy about the afterlife being a better world where you’re not alone and where you’re truly happy, as opposed to this world where people rely on expensive psychiatrists and medications to get themselves through. Prince told Chris Rock in their 1998 VH1 interview, “ ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ was about God and Satan. I had to change those words up but ‘de-elevator’ was Satan. I had to change those words up cuz you couldn’t say God on the radio. Let’s go crazy was God to me. Stay happy, stay focused, and you can beat the de-elevator.”

This mentality extends to Prince’s own ‘voice’ for God, perhaps most notably seen in 1999’s opening lyrics:

You understand there’s benevolence behind God saying, “I won’t hurt you. I only want you to have some fun.” He’s saying, “You can trust me, this will help you. I want you to enjoy the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the beginning of your real life.” And what about “Don’t worry?” A religious scholar pointed out to me that in the Bible, when God or an angel appears to someone the first thing said is usually something along the lines of, “Do not be afraid.” Don’t worry would fulfill that and also show Prince fashioning his message from God in the same form as the messages in the Bible, especially Revelations.

Lines like this of course can dangerously point to a God-complex (another delightful parallel to Kanye West), but some of his biggest fans say that Prince had no illusion that he was a part of a kingdom bigger than himself, and in no way in the center:

Questlove, who has studied both Prince’s music and Christian music, explains, “I think in his mind he was lending voice to what he perceived as being the gospel message. I don’t think he’s literally saying he’s the messiah but in his own way he’s speaking for the messiah. That’s a lyrical device that, if you look at gospel music and contemporary Christian music, that’s a common club in the bag. That’s a consistent lyrical device. A lot of Christian songs have you singing in the voice of God and Prince takes advantage of that.”

…and this thought is backed up by members of his live bands:

“There was a running subtext when I was in the band,” Dez Dickerson told me, “a theme of ‘We were sent to help people see.’ That was a recurring theme. Not in the music but in the inner conversation of the band that he initiated. He didn’t have this overt, I’m Jesus, thing. It was this sense that there was a certain enlightenment that he, and we, by default, were messengers of and we were there to bring this enlightenment to people who needed it. That was part of the musical mission. So, why the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of ‘Controversy’? There’s some redemptive purpose in exposing people to the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of this other jam. Because we are the messengers of some higher level of understanding in the guise of punk-funk or whatever the hell we were doing. He had a sense of being called, if you will. Of being a special messenger of some sort. And, frankly, he had people at different intervals who told him that.”

Look deeply into many of Prince’s most popular works, and you’ll see a Jesus-theme:

Prince figured out how to write his own power ballad and came up with “Purple Rain.” “It’s telling,” Questlove said, “that Prince purposely toned down the record as he worked on it, taking 90 percent of the sexuality out of it, knowing that would ruin his moment.” But what is “Purple Rain” about? It’s about salvation. Redemption. Deliverance. Classic Christian themes.

For all of this, Prince was human, and playful, and above all very interesting. The author shares a personal story of playing basketball with the artist, and I love what is says about his as an individual:

Once, I was dribbling the ball at the top of the key when I saw he was in good position under the basket. I flicked a quick, no-look pass his way. The ball zipped past both defenders but then I realized he didn’t know it was coming. I started to yell out to him, the man I had known, sort of, for over fifteen years. I called out, “Prince!” But this was during the Symbol period, when his name was unpronounceable and you weren’t supposed to call him Prince. Titanic faux pas! Would he storm out and banish me from Paisley Park? I had this thought process as the word “Prince” was coming out of my mouth so really what I said was, “Pri . . . !” like the first syllable, then caught myself and slapped my hands over my dirty mouth as if to keep that sound and any other from getting out. The ball sailed past him and out of bounds. He jogged off to retrieve it and as he walked back he had a badass smirk on his face. I looked at him, like, “What?” I had no idea what would happen next. Then the man laughed as he said, “He didn’t know what to call me.” He loved the confusion, loved that I didn’t know how to connect with him, that I was off balance and couldn’t even call him by a name much less really know him. That symbolized so much.

Prince’s life was full of mystery, and he will likely remain misunderstood by the majority of the world, forever. That’s likely just the way he would want it. An ambassador to this world from another planet, now gone. He left his mark.