Dig, If You Will, A Picture...

It's tempting on days like today to get sucked down into a tarry vortex of resentment and despair as the relentless march of 2016's Parade of Unexpected Death claims yet another victim. It's already got Alan Rickman and David Bowie and now, most shocking of all, it's trampled over the tiny body of Prince Rogers Nelson, the Artist Formerly Known as [Gender Squiggle].

Now look, I'm not going to pretend I've been keeping up with Prince all these years. I certainly know people who have and who rank him among the all-timers. I don't quarrel with any of that. I can say that in the 80s, some of my earliest, still-cohesive memories of responding with an opinion of my own from something I'd heard or seen were after hearing Purple Rain-era Prince songs. I should tell you that my mother--and parents are always our first exposure to music and musical taste--liked (and still likes) indefensibly awful music. If white people had a subgroup within white people that was the white people of white people, the music she liked would have been the music for and by those people. John Denver. ABBA. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Hoyt Axton. Is everything from these artists automatically awful? No, only mostly! Try taking them in all together though, and nothing else from outside the (hopefully, if you have any semblance of a soul) discomfiting cultural milieu this builds. I could have confronted some (or really all) of it more objectively if there was one fucking Stevie Wonder album in there, for example, to pierce the Aryan veil and give me at least the illusion that music was something to be enjoyed, not a bulwark to stave off the influence of the dusky-hued masses outside the walls.

I should probably point out that my mother isn't an active or even conscious racist. She was just very aware of the types of entertainment (or entertainers) with which she was most comfortable.

We couldn't afford cable back in those early days of MTV, but luckily for a while the independent local channels out here in Greater LA made an effort to bring the mass-marketed cultural revolution of TV commercials for corporate-pressed records to the uncabled unwashed, with shows like Video One. That was the breach in the bleachy limestone walls through which I saw Michael Jackson and New Edition and Whitney Houston and, yes, Prince. I appreciate the fuck out of it now, but the blatant sexiness of "When Doves Cry" was a little much for me at 10 years old. Instead I latched on to the safer, poppier "Let's Go Crazy" first and it's stuck ever since. It's a testament to the quality of that song that it remains a solid top five of all-time songs for me, even though to this day I have no idea what any of the words are.

It would be overstating it to say that everyone else around me was in the Michael Jackson camp and I had Prince songs all to myself. It's easily possible, without even trying, to understate how huge Prince was at the time. He sold (and I've just confirmed this with a quick internet search) eleventy-zillion albums in the mid/late 1980s. The only way it looks small against Thriller is because Thriller is an abnormal event against which no things should reasonably compared. It's an unthinkably large thing. Like a Dyson sphere. Or the internet porn industry.

There was plenty of spectacle in a Prince performance, but what really struck me, what really came across as the musicianship in combination with the spectacle. You didn't get that from a dance act (like Michael Jackson) or even a guitar-based glam hair-band, who always gave me the impression they mostly played their guitars with a combination of pained facial expressions and whatever that muscle is called that contracts the prostate. His performance with a supergroup of respectful stiffs dutifully playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at a George Harrison tribute show in 2007 has been getting a lot of attention today, and it really should, because you can see it all there. The sounds all come out with the fluid virtuosity of a man in full control, but watch the man play the instrument and play the instrument, with magician's flourishes, giving that rendition of that song in that moment its whole justification for being. And look for the smile on Dhani Harrison's face.*

Prince went off and dabbled in genre fusions and socio-musical experimentation that I didn't have enough education or fully formed musical identity to follow, so I drifted off into simpler tunes with fewer notes in them through the 1990s. I wasn't a devoted or great fan. But he was still someone who was crucial to me at a formative period. And, no matter how closely you follow an entertainer's career, I'm learning one should never underestimate the ability of facebook to bum you the fuck out over stuff like this as people you know (some in actual real life!) and love share their testimonials.

But this wasn't meant to be a testimonial really. I started out saying we should avoid getting sucked into the sadness hole or some shit like that. I say we celebrate life instead. Sure, Prince died. But the queen, she lives on. Old Liz has hit 90. And Prince died at 57. That means she was already 33, a mother and queen of the commonwealth by the time Prince was even born. Hm. That was supposed to make me feel all affirmed and better, but somehow in the midst of writing the rest of this, I forgot how that was supposed to demonstrate a value we could all appreciate...

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*He's impossible not to pick out as he looks more like his father than any son has in the history of genetics.