Abstract
Prince’s 1978 debut album For You credits the artist with production, arrangement, composition, and performance. This signaled not only his inimitable musical mastery but also his singular clarity of vision. Central to this vision were Prince’s unique aspirations to Utopia—a thread that would run throughout his musical career. This imagined society was rooted in nonconformity and, among many other things, granted men and women, Black and white, rich and poor equal access to love, sexuality, success, and peace. Utopian aspirations existed within the creative production of Prince’s earliest incarnation as an artist until his untimely death. A fictitious and very real Paisley Park, backing bands such as The Revolution, and record titles such as The Rainbow Children all point to his reach for a different more egalitarian world. This utopia would include significant challenges to constructions of race, gender, and the composition of Blackness. Prince’s singular vision of utopia cast women as essential to its creation. This paper specifically explores Prince’s unwavering support of women artists as well as their function in building and sustaining this vision. This discussion confronts the media focus on women in Prince’s musical life as simply paramours/muses and reinterrogates his commitment to female artistry and, above all, a utopian world.
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Notes
Rushen began releasing albums in 1974 with Prelusion and released another four before working with Prince. Her breakout album Pizazz was released the year she first met Prince in 1979. She had two top ten hits, “Hang It Up” and “When I Found You” and several other top 20 hits on Black radio by the same year. This does not include the several smash hits off of Pizazz, including the classic, “Haven’t You Heard.”
Many of the conclusions that Toure’ reaches are hard to understand. For example, he identifies Prince as a part of the Gen X generation despite his being born in 1958. He also discusses divorce as being a life-defining experience for the artist in lieu of childhood neglect and homelessness. See Toure’s introduction to I Would Die 4 U: How Prince Became an Icon.
Jill Jones was a biracial singer who was of African American and Italian American heritage. She joined the Revolution in 1982 and appears on several top hits, including as one of the opening voices on the single 1999.
Rick James and his band were one of the only contemporary groups that approached this diversity.
For example, Toure’ discusses religious allusions in his work discussed earlier in this paper. This has also been the subject of several articles on Prince.
Prince would repeat this theme throughout his catalog. Early songs such as “Party Up,” “Uptown,” “Sexuality,” “Controversy,” and “Paisley Park” (among many others) question societal norms and include elusions to a utopian society.
The bodies on the cover of the album vary in color. Prince includes people who are both of a darker and lighter hue of brown. The assumption of the viewer is that he is representing a multiplicity of ethnicities, including African American and Latino.
This is taken from a panel discussion at New York University following Prince’s death.
Many news outlets and periodicals reported on his romantic life. The Daily News published a gallery of “The Many Lovers of Prince.” This was published on April 22, 2016 a day after his death. It points to the media’s ongoing preoccupation with his romantic life even after death. This is one example among several others.
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Zahra Caldwell, H. “We Are in the Feminine Aspect Now”: Women Artists, Prince, and Visions of Utopia. J Afr Am St 21, 408–424 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-017-9366-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-017-9366-4