NEW YORK, April 24 — At work, propped against a wall, near piles of stuff, stands an Elvis Presley cutout. It’s made of cardboard, pretty beat up, taller than I am and not the greatest photo. (He looks drunk. So does his lamé suit.) But I pass that cutout almost every day, and every day I have the same thought. Elvis was hot. He was a musician, but he didn’t have to be playing music for you to feel this way. Cardboard would do.
That’s charisma. And the only star who had more than Elvis was Prince. His hotness differed, of course; it came from somewhere else. Cardboard won’t cut it for him. If Elvis was sex, Prince was a sexual orientation. His own. And it was oriented toward you. And you. And you.
Name a pop act from the 1980s, and, amazingly, androgyny was somewhere in the mix: Thompson Twins, the Human League, pick a hair-metal act. For Boy George and Jermaine Stewart, it was the whole mix. Most of these guys were vague on gender and passive on desire: Hold Me Now; Don’t You Want Me? Guys, if you have to ask ...
Officially, Prince wasn’t gay. But was he straight? Did he blow out his hair, love heels and platforms, and own every look, from flouncy Romantic consumptive to bathhouse matador to Easter Sunday deacon? He did. On Controversy, he rhetorically poses the question: “Am I straight or gay?” And yet it never seemed to matter. Even after he changed his name to the symbol of the male gender sign overlaid atop its female counterpart, he was always only ever Prince.
And how not vague was he? How not passive? He always knew what he wanted, and most of the time that was you. He could plead, the way he does on If I Was Your Girlfriend, from Sign O’ the Times, a magnum opus from 1987 where Prince tries seduction by hypothetical role-play. But he keeps hitting a wall, and gets testy. It’s a gorgeous conflation of sexual intensity and sex comedy, Prince as feminist and Pepé Le Pew.
Carnality was to Prince what photosynthesis is to plants. And in this metaphor, as befits a man famous for playing all his own instruments, he’s also the bee, pollinating pleasure. On his records, he could be artistically and sexually promiscuous. But he was curious and studious of whomever he was with, too. And sometimes it could all make him seem ridiculous without equal. Take The Continental. It’s a jam in the middle of 1992’s Love Symbol album, the least properly rated of his underrated records (it’s the one with Sexy MF and 7, one of his vaguest but very best songs). On it, he makes an entreaty: “Tell me how you want to be done,” and it conjures images of a man standing at the sex grill in a “(bleep) the cook” apron.
This is to say that Prince, in his music, wasn’t shy. (The first song on the Love Symbol album announces, “My name is Prince, and I am funky.”) Some of that was the music: the thump of a kick drum; the way his drum programming could sound as if it was knocking on crates, doors, clouds; the wizardly keyboard work; his alchemical synthesis of James Brown’s precision, Parliament-Funkadelic’s shape shifts, the fraying blues of Jimi Hendrix and Betty Davis’ grit.
Some of this was the songwriting. He was a terrific poet. And terrific poetry can be thrilling to recite, even if it gets you sent to the principal’s office or slapped in the face. For Sheena Easton, he wrote a song that no nine-year-old could resist. It was called Sugar Walls. Take it from me: Sugar Walls will land you in detention. Prince knew. On that one, he used the pseudonym Alexander Nevermind, presumably so that when the song enraged Tipper Gore, the head of the Parents Music Resource Centre — and it did — he could restring his guitars in peace.
Obviously, Prince saved his best stuff for himself. None of his peers had better randy songs about attraction. No one had a better falsetto ad-lib for lust, either: “Owah!” You’d have to go back to the blues or forward to hip-hip for rivals. Consider Raspberry Beret, the first single from 1985’s Around the World in a Day. After the hard edges of the songs on Purple Rain, here was something totally new: melting strings, finger cymbals and a melody that sails upward like a let-go balloon. Lyrically, it’s the first cousin of Little Red Corvette, a filthy one-night-stand song that should also get you in trouble but whose metaphors — and singing — are too virtuosic for condemnation.
The story Prince tells in Raspberry Beret is practically a short one. A girl walks into the store where the narrator’s half-working, and he rides off to some idyllic place that’s ideal for doing it.
This is a song I favour at karaoke. I like the complete sentences, and the confident language makes me feel sexy. But the bridge is the reason I like to sing it. I haven’t found a better one. “Rain sounds so cool/when it hits the barn roof/and the horses wonder who U are/Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees/U feel like a movie star.”
For lots of other artists, that would be enough. But there’s more, because he was clearly on a roll: “They say the first time ain’t the greatest/But I tell you/if I had the chance to do it all again/I wouldn’t change a stroke/'cause baby I’m the most/with a girl as fine as she was then.” By the end, he’s caught the horny ghost.
The story is so gorgeously worded that I can see what’s happening. Prince was never a big fan of music videos — the ones he does appear in aren’t great. But with lyrics this good, they didn’t have to be. Too many of Prince’s sex songs are too perfect to assert that any one is better than the rest. But if you made me pick the best composed, conceived and executed of that class of songs, I’d choose Raspberry Beret.
His interest in partnership and flattery and pleasure were hot — to his partner, but especially to him. In his music, he offers to dance naked ballets and catch the other person’s germs. He would brag about himself. He would also spread the boasting around. His name was Prince, and he was funky. But the hot thing? That’s U. — The New York Times
