Of all the tributes paid to Prince, from the president to the Empire State Building lit up in purple, one point can’t be stressed enough: Prince made the world come to him.
He was an exquisite freak who began on the margins, a tiny, androgynous, ethnically ambiguous being who seemed to alight from the same home planet as David Bowie. But unlike Bowie, who projected performance-art aloofness, Prince was aggressively, joyously carnal, and for a long time, it freaked America out. Deeply.
In 1980, he released his third studio album. He called it “Dirty Mind” and posed for the cover naked but for an open Renaissance waistcoat, neckerchief and black bikini bottoms. It was a declaration and a challenge to the conventional culture, and according to those who knew him in the early days, Prince always had a vision.
“Don’t make me black,” he told Warner Bros. VP Larry Waronker upon signing with the label in 1978. “My idols are all over the place.”
He was 18 years old.
That inner fortitude, so rare among performers and regular people alike, served him well. In 1985, when Tipper Gore and a bunch of other Washington housewives formed the Parents Music Resource Center, then went to Capitol Hill to complain about the corruptive powers of Prince, he never said a thing.
Instead, he went to work on “The Black Album,” a highly erotic record that became legendary after Prince pulled it right before its scheduled release in 1987.
He never said why, but those in his circle later said a bad Ecstasy trip caused Prince to have second thoughts. It was finally released in 1994 and is considered a classic.
“I don’t really care so much what people say about me,” Prince told Tavis Smiley in 2004, “because it usually is a reflection of who they are.”
He did what he wanted and never explained. In 1985, at the height of celebrity sing-alongs for Africa, Prince was the lone major artist to refuse recording “We Are the World.” It was read as arrogance and selfishness, but as his protégée Wendy Melvoin later explained, for Prince, it was all about quality control.
“He felt like the song was horrible,” she told author Alan Light for his book “Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain.” “And he didn’t want to be around ‘all those muthaf—kas.”
Let it be said: Prince wasn’t wrong!
Instead, he gave his money to charity quietly and often, donating $1 million to the Harlem Children’s Zone in 2011. “I want to thank Prince — I am touched and blown away by his generosity,” CEO Geoffrey Canada said at the time. “This is unprecedented in my lifetime to see an artist come forward and invest in today’s children.”
Even before social media, Prince understood the value of mystery. Most of his fans don’t know that he was epileptic, or that his flamboyance was overcompensation for childhood bullying. Most don’t know that he was a news junkie who had intellectuals to dinner, or that he most identified with the black boxer Jack Johnson, or that in 1996, he and his then-wife Mayte Garcia lost their infant son, Boy Gregory, to a rare genetic disorder at one week old, and another baby to a miscarriage.
As the culture became increasingly confessional and other artists eclipsed him, Prince never sought attention or validation for anything other than his music. He was so supremely gifted — a self-taught virtuoso who could play 27 instruments, a prolific songwriter and magnetic performer — that he likely didn’t need it.
He had the confidence to know he was a true original, sui generis. In many ways, we’re mourning the loss of that kind of artist — pure, private, one who spoke to the inner freak in everyone. Prince himself would probably be surprised by this outpouring.
In later years, though, as the culture came around to Prince — sex tapes and crotch flashes became so boring, so common — Prince became more available to us.
“I try to stay in the now and live in the now. I think it keeps you young,” he told CNN in 1999.
And, finally, on the culture catching up with his uncompromised vision: “Cursing was cool when nobody was doin’ it. If everybody wears the same clothes, it ain’t cool no more,” he told Smiley. “You’re trying to be different. One can’t be different by being racy today. It’s not interesting anymore.”
How ironic that we have Prince to thank for that.
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