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Prince: Postmodern Icon

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Abstract

This paper argues that the main dynamic of the postmodern is the deconstruction of the hierarchical oppositions (God/mortal, good/evil, male/female, man/nature, mind/body, etc.) that govern the dominant discourse in the European tradition, and that the questions of identity, difference, and intersectionality Prince posed to a mass audience over the last thirty-five years lie at the very core of the movement. His music provides the basis for deconstructing the obvious hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality, but also those of the sacred and the profane, the writer/composer/producer and the performer, and even Self and the Other. He touched the hearts and lives of a far wider audience than any theorist and helped create a new cultural climate without any apparent awareness of academic postmodernism. This opens the possibility for a deconstruction on the meta-level of another traditional hierarchy, the one between reason and intuition, or put differently, between words and music.

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Notes

  1. Comment from the stage at a post-Soundset party at First Avenue, Sunday, May 29, 2016, quoted by Jon Bream, StarTribune, Friday, June 3, 2016, page E2.

  2. My visit to Paisley Park was on opening day, October 6, 2016. According to Jon Bream, changes have since been made to both the tour and the museum. Most notably, the display of the urn holding Prince’s ashes had been moved to a second floor balcony, at the request of family members, so visitors see it from a greater distance and do not find themselves confronted with it unprepared, as I did (StarTribune, Sunday, January 8, 2017, page E5).

  3. Thanks are due to Yannik Theim of Villanova University for the artful turn of phrase.

  4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

  5. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, Barbara Johnson, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  6. The subtitle of Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, Patrick Mensah, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  7. Breams reports that “The museum was in the works before Prince’s death, according to sources who worked at Paisley Park,” StarTribune, Thursday, August 23, 2016, page A12.

  8. Prince acknowledged Hendrix’s influence more freely later in his career than he did in the early days, for instance in his half-time performance at the 2007 Super Bow1 (see below).

  9. It is both sad and ironic that some of these children may have since been declared/discovered not to be related to him. (On this, see Emma Nelson’s article in the B section of the October 27, 2016, edition of the StarTribune).

  10. Chaka Khan is quoted in a retrospective article in the on-line edition of GQ as saying that “He loved to read about prophecies” (“Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Favorite Prince Memories” by Christ Heath, found at http://www.gq.com/story/prince-stories).

  11. Quoted in Paisley Park: Eternal Celebration of Life & Music (P Park Management LLC 2016), no author listed, pages unnumbered).

  12. W. E. B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1969).

  13. Bream comments in his 1984 book that “Black-oriented radio stations just don’t exist [in Minneapolis] as in the rest of urban America. And the major commercial radio stations have been resistant to much black music. . .” (Jon Bream, Prince: Inside the Purple Reign, [New York: Macmillan, 1984], p. 26.

  14. On this, see my “Purple Passion: Images of Female Desire in ‘When Doves Cry’,” Cultural Critique, 10: 89–98 (Holland 1988).

  15. Photo, date, and location found at DailyMail.com (www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3553491/Prince-s-iconic-outfits.html). The costume may have been in response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King trial (Hodgkin 2016).

  16. Miller 2016 cited at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/12-wildest-prince-moments-20160422/prince-writes-slave-on-face-changes-name-to-unpronounceable-symbol-1993-20160422

  17. Quoted by Kim Palmer, StarTribune, Sunday, May 1, 2016, page SA7

  18. For one example, listen to the first 2 min of the 1982 concert found on the website of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at http://nmaahc.tumblr.com/post/143272050190/a-reflection-on-the-musical-genius-of-prince. Notice also how the lyrics cited there—“How many more good men must die before there’s gun control”—violate the dichotomy between art and politics and still echo into our own time.

  19. Claude Lévi-Straus, The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage, more accurately “wild thought”), trans. unattributed (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1966).

  20. Found at http://www.onpostmodernism.com/architecture

  21. As I remember, the show was “Captain Kangaroo,” but an extensive Google search has failed to verify that.

  22. Chris Riemenschneider, StarTribune, Sunday, May 1, 2016, page SA7.

  23. In “I Know Times Are Changing” at http://anildash.com/2014/07/i-know-times-are-changing.html (Dash 2016).

  24. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Justin O’Brien, trans. (New York: Vintage, 1983), p. 17.

  25. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Bernard Fretchman, trans. (New York, Philosophical Library/Open Road, 1948), p. 74.

  26. Whether her reference here is also to Camus is a topic for another paper.

  27. Quoted in Paisley Park: Eternal Celebration of Life & Music (P Park Management LLC 2016), no author listed, pages unnumbered).

  28. This line of thought is best known in the United States through its later articulation by Frankfurt School social scientists such as Jürgens Habermas

  29. Grant Farrad, Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 56.

  30. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 109.

  31. The term “destrucktion” is introduced in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 41ff.

  32. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, trans. (New York: Harper, 1971), p. 27 (his emphasis).

  33. Quoted in Jon Bream, StarTribune, Sunday, January 1, 2017, page E4.

  34. www.snopes.com/eric-clapton-quote-about-prince/

  35. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics (New York: Rutledge, 2005), p. 11.

  36. Prince’s text in both cases seems to be the Book of Common Prayer.

  37. For example, he wrote hits for Sheena Easton, Sheila E., and the Bangles.

  38. I cannot trace, but must acknowledge the parallel efforts carried out by other performers over the same period of time, notably (but not at all accidentally) in rap and other black musical genres.

  39. For more on this see my Ontological Humility: Lord Voldemort and the Philosophers (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), especially Chapter One (Holland 2013).

  40. Based on Ron Chernow’s biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury, the Tony-winning musical “Hamilton: An American Musical” by Lin-Manuel Miranda chronicles the rise and untimely death of the West Indian immigrant who helped create the United States.

  41. For another, non-Heideggerian version of the same argument about the dependence of the self on a public language, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, trans. (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

  42. According to a guide at Paisley Park, he was working on an album of traditional jazz at his death.

  43. This detail was provided by the first of two anonymous reviewers who made valuable contributions to this paper.

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  1. Hamline University, 1526 Hewitt Avenue, Saint Paul, MN, 55104, USA

    Nancy J. Holland

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Holland, N.J. Prince: Postmodern Icon. J Afr Am St 21, 320–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-017-9363-7

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