'Electric Word Life': Prince, God, sex and saying goodbye
“Dearly beloved/We are gathered here today/To get through this thing called life/Electric word life/It means forever and that's a mighty long time/But I'm here to tell you/There's something else.” — “Let’s Go Crazy,” by Prince and the Revolution
When the news broke that Prince had died, I was in New York City for my wife’s poetry performance with a jazz orchestra. I was reading the news on my phone while the band set up and fussed with their instruments, as the crew. I restrained a gasp, so as to not disturb the musicians. But disturbance was in the air, and almost instantly my Facebook feed and messages were drowned in the news.
One of those messages was from Brian Goslow, the preeminent authority of Worcester’s musical history, who told me the tale of one of Prince’s several visits to the city — including shows at the Centrum, the Aud and the Palladium — and of a “teen girl who worked at the sandwich shop across from the then Marriott and found herself making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the man himself. He asked if she was going to the show and when she said it wasn't an option for her, he took care of that. At the time, he was probably the biggest star on the planet — even more so with that kind of class.”
Not everyone loved Prince, to be certain: It was his risqué song, “Darling Nikki,” that inspired Tipper Gore to found the Parents Music Resource Center, and he feuded famously with his record labels, and his relationship with Internet streaming was contentious, at best. Right now, his catalog is only available for streaming on Tidal. And for every act of kindness to his fans, like the apocryphal sandwich shop girl, there were also moments of aloofness, although his fellow Minnesotan, Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü, said in a eulogy for the rocker that he felt some of that aloofness came from shyness. The idea that one of rock’s most daring provocateurs was shy is almost mindboggling. But then, Prince was always a paradox in almost every way, and in a very real sense was an artist who was at his strongest when he straddled the culture’s fault lines.
I was young when I discovered Prince’s work, but even in my adolescence I recognized what a departure he was from much of what was being released in the mid-’80s. I couldn’t have told you about the way he married funk and rock in ways that even George Clinton wasn’t doing, the way he integrated R&B-style vocals into his work, taking advantage of his immense vocal range to push the style’s boundaries into something even steamier. As a teenager, I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the obvious influence Jimi Hendrix had on him, or how he and Michael Jackson at the time were among the few prominent African-American artists insisting on using rock instrumentation instead of entirely synthesized music. All I knew was that the music shot through my system like electricity when I heard it. All I knew is that, when he transitioned from the opening sermon of “Let’s Go Crazy” — 'Cause in this life Things are much harder than in the after world/In this life you’re on your own — into the explosion of funked-out guitar and drums, it was one of the most amazing things I’d ever heard.
As I’ve gotten older, my relationship with Prince’s music has deepened. Indeed, even though I loved his music dearly, my first piece of music journalism, for my high school newspaper, took shots at his soundtrack for the movie “Batman.” More than 25 years later, I realize I was wrong, and songs such as “Electric Chair,” “Scandalous,” “Arms of Orion,” “Partyman” and even the much-maligned “Batdance” have a place in my heart. I became deeply annoyed when Tom Jones’ cover of “Kiss” changed the line “women not girls/rule my world” to “women AND girls.” Prince is a particular songwriter … changing one word changes the meaning entirely, and undercuts the subsequent “act your age mama/not your shoe size.” I can’t claim I was always keeping up to date with the Purple One, but I never drifted far. Just today, listening to one of his more recent singles, “Baltimore,” about the shootings of unarmed black men, I nearly cried. I knew the song, but whereas I had braced myself for the emotional baggage I had attached to, say, “When Doves Cry,” I was unprepared how hard one of his newer songs could hit me in my emotionally raw state. Even at the end, he was surprising.
I listen to his music now, and I hear the tension in it, the stark polarity between spirituality and sexuality. The latter was always obvious in his persona — the way he managed to work the paradox of gender ambiguity and femininity in his persona against a stark heterosexual energy — but the former was also always implicit in the music. When I was young, I sort of batted that away. I don’t do that anymore: It’s clear that, for Prince, there was a connection between the two, and the connection was that “electric word life.”
Underneath the surface of all of Prince’s music is an implicit cherishing of life, and an awareness of its finite nature. Even when he’s being seriously political, on songs such as “Sign O’ the Times,” “1999” or ‘Baltimore,” it’s clear that, to Prince’s mind, suffering and needless death were an affront to life, which was a gift from God. Prince believed in God in a serious way, and that belief was never a punchline. “I'm not a human,” he sang in “I Would Die 4 U,” “I am a dove/I'm your conscious/I am love/All I really need is to know that You believe.”
The act of connection — and remember, this was a man a peer described as painfully shy — was an act of belief, of communion. It doesn’t surprise me that one of Prince’s last acts was to throw an impromptu dance party at his Paisley Park studio in Minneapolis, shortly after being briefly hospitalized with what was reported as “flu-like symptoms.” At this writing, the cause of his death has not been reported, but if there was even an inkling that his life was winding down, it would seem in character. “But life is just a party,” Prince sings in “1999,” "and parties weren't meant 2 last.” Still, it doesn’t seem real. It seems like we’re waiting for one more song.Email Victor D. Infante at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: 'Electric Word Life': Prince, God, sex and saying goodbye