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Prince. Brian Morton
Читать онлайн.Название Prince
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782119753
Автор произведения Brian Morton
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
He’d been widely touted as the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix. In reality, Prince’s guitar style has little to do with the blues and owes far more to the sustained, almost mystical tonality of Carlos Santana. He was eager to oblige, though, playing behind his head and picking strings with those strange pointy teeth he prefers to keep hidden during interviews. There were subtler echoes, not least that just about every song turned into a long, loose, electronic jam, but turning his back on the audience for long minutes seemed an echo of Miles Davis’s most ambiguous gesture, which some said was contempt for whitey, others claimed was a sign of his concentration and empathy with the band. In Prince’s case, it may have been no more than a tease, a way of showing off his ass, but he knew where it had come from. Prince deeply admired Miles’s working methods – taping hours of ‘rehearsal’ in a bid to push himself and his fellow musicians beyond comfortably familiar idioms – and often alluded to the trumpeter’s phenomenal workrate as a model for his own hyperactivity. As Prince left the stage, the band played a rocked-up version of the bebop classic ‘Now’s The Time’, by Miles’s one-time employer Charlie Parker, whose shambolic lifestyle masked and eventually foreshortened a brilliantly intuitive talent. Prince reportedly still keeps photographs of both men on his desk at Paisley Park.
That night in 1988 Prince duck-walked like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry, wailed righteously like Little Willie John, mugged and flounced like Little Richard. One minute he was stock-still, hypnotised by a version of Stevie Wonder’s lateral jazz-soul; the next he was doing endless splits to a relentless funk groove that even James Brown and the JBs would have felt had been taken too far. He sang an intense gospelly song that inescapably recalled Al Green, who took very literally black soul’s sometimes easy, sometimes contradictory blend of sacred and profane by becoming a church minister (albeit a minister who cheerfully ogles pretty girls during his warm-up addresses). British audiences wouldn’t have been so quick to spot references in the stage act to Rick James’s marriage of soul and live sex show; James, with whom Prince toured in 1979, never really made it this side of the Atlantic. They would, though, have recognised the debt to Sly and the Family Stone, primed by the shared vocals of ‘1999’ (one of his first British hits), by a slew of references in the Purple Rain movie, and by the faux-illiterate spelling of songs. In 1970, Sly had released ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’ with a Larry Graham bass groove that influenced everyone from Prince to Michael Jackson. Though Prince stopped short of calling his first album 4 U he’d adopted the street shorthand style, which in those days came from graffiti and school slambooks rather than phone-texting. As well as 4/fors and U/yous, his liner notes were littered with eye/I graphics, hearts and squiggles, something he’d done since schooldays. It wasn’t to be very long before he adopted an unpronounceable squiggle as his name.
What complicated Prince’s clever referencing of black music and prompted journalist Robert Palmer’s rhetorical headline was his parallel interest in white rock and white songwriters. There was a working assumption in the industry that black musicians didn’t – or couldn’t – rock, and neither did black audiences; r’n’b, soul, funk, perhaps a leaven of jazz, but a fundamental resistance to the basic backbeat of rock’n’roll. There were other, concurrent efforts to inject some life into what sprouted capital letters as Black Rock (notably Vernon Reid’s Living Color) but it was Prince who smudged the distinction and desegregated pop demographics. Jimi Hendrix had shown the way in some regards (and was Reid’s role model) and, of course, Michael Jackson’s Thriller had attracted huge sales with an audience who didn’t usually buy r’n’b.
Hendrix’s and Jackson’s success were to some degree accidents of musical history. Jimi’s style, stagecraft, and eager recolonisation of white blues rock came to notice first of all in Britain; the Experience trio was two-thirds white and they had a white manager. In a somewhat different way, Thriller filled what seemed like a creative vacuum in pop music, left since Stevie Wonder’s muse deserted him. What made Prince different was that he was also able to write and play convincingly colour-blind music. Long before the well-crafted psychedelia of Raspberry Beret, Prince was in thrall to The Beatles. He could also windmill and crash out power chords like Pete Townshend of The Who, and one of the unexpected influences of his teenage years in Minneapolis had been the ‘bicep rock’ of Grand Funk Railroad, still possibly the noisiest band ever.
Onstage, Prince didn’t have quite the range of vocal styles available to him in the studio, but a clear and steady falsetto was one of them and, though it made reference to the peerless Curtis Mayfield, there was no mistaking in it an unlikely debt to Joni Mitchell, especially the laid-back mystery and buried tension of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It’s an influence that can still be heard on 1987’s ‘Starfish and Coffee’ from the brilliant Sign ‘O’ The Times album, but it’s pervasive. ‘She taught me about colour’, he said to a reporter, though in this case at least he meant voice and instrumental colour rather than the industry demographics he was in the process of changing. Elsewhere, he credited Joni with shaping his understanding of space and silence. In turn, Mitchell acknowledged the impact she’d had on him: ‘Prince has assimilated some of my harmonies, which because they come out of my guitar tunings, is unusual. A lot of the time my chords depict complex emotions . . .’
* * *
Such eclecticism is not unusual in black music. To some degree, it defines it. So Michael Eric Dyson argues in his book Between God and Gangsta Rap, published in 1996, the year Prince’s grasp on that rich dichotomy seemed to come temporarily unstuck. To what extent Prince’s cherry-picking, not just from within the black tradition but between traditions, was new or merely different in degree is scarcely important. What is beyond doubt is that the music of the 1980s and after would have been radically different without him. His most distinctive albums – Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Sign ‘O’ The Times, Emancipation – are all contemporary classics. Between 1978 and 1988, he matured, not just as a songwriter and musician, but also as an engineer and producer, turning the slightly fussy feel of his first two albums, the antithesis of a home-made, punk aesthetic, into product that major labels and studios couldn’t match. At the same time, his vehement reaction to corporate pressure became a model for other musicians stuck with no-win contracts or creatively restricted by the men on the twenty-fifth floor. (He put in a call to George Michael during the British singer’s battles with Sony.) Whether Prince really created a new, ‘biracial’ music or was merely a gifted eclectic, less an innovator than a brilliant assimilator who fashioned his own creative environment by plunder – sometimes rich grave goods, sometimes overlooked shards – remains the question. The background to it, if not quite the answer, lies in Prince’s upbringing in a quiet Midwestern city.
2
Minneapolis, 1997. A baby boy is playing in the dirt with a purple ball when his attention is diverted by three gold chains half buried beside him. His cries disturb a television journalist standing nearby to report on the start of a rock tour that is going to reverse ‘the low concert grossing of even the biggest of the superstar acts’. The baby jumps into his teenage mother’s arms and shows her what he’s found. ‘The young mother holds the chains to her bosom and begins to remember back, back . . . five years ago.’
* * *
Minneapolis, 1992. Warner Brothers release, its non-verbal emblem a combination of the astrological signs for male and female. It’s the work of the label’s most charismatic but also most troublesome artist. The album is supposed to come with a video programme that links sixteen funk songs into a narrative about a rock star and a teenage Egyptian princess. The inheritor of a sacred relic, the ‘three gold rings of Turin’, she is being pursued by the seven men who murdered her father. In an attempt to find them first, she sends a tape of her dancing to the legendary rock star. He falls in love at once, as princes are supposed to fall in love with princesses. But he fears emotional entrapment and consoles himself in sex with others. In so doing, he also destroys seven older versions of himself who are, of course, the old king’s killers. A double destiny is thus enacted. The 320-year-old pretender