{"id":7632,"date":"2010-11-15T08:44:45","date_gmt":"2010-11-15T13:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=7632"},"modified":"2018-12-10T14:48:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T19:48:39","slug":"the-tao-of-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/15\/the-tao-of-prince\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tao of Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Scott Penner<\/p><\/div>\n

If you\u2019ve felt a frisson in the air lately, it\u2019s probably because Prince has announced a new tour<\/a>. The sky\u2019s all purple, there are people running everywhere\u2014this is exciting news. Prince should\u2019ve faded long ago from the public consciousness, but his mystique is oddly resilient. Even his failures adhere to some kind of Princely internal logic. What makes him such a strange, potent pop-cultural force?<\/p>\n

The answer has something to do, I think, with his elusive persona. The most convincing explanation of Prince is a tautology, something you\u2019d hear from a stoned teenager: Prince is, like, Prince. At the risk of sounding more like a stoned twenty-something, I\u2019ll call him a man of dialectics, a brazen mess of binaries. He\u2019s the living refutation of Lincoln\u2019s \u201cHouse Divided\u201d address. A house divided against itself can stand, Prince says, and it\u2019s a great place to throw a party. As early as 1981\u2019s \u201cControversy,\u201d he asked us if he was black or white, straight or gay, God fearing or navel gazing.<\/p>\n

By 1984, when Purple Rain<\/em> came out, Prince was all slashes: black\/white, straight\/gay, male\/female, rock\/R&B, voluptuary\/ascetic, cocaine\/peyote, garish\/understated, Hendrix\/Little Richard, gothic\/ecstatic, authoritarian\/anarchist, apocalyptic\/Panglossian, hip\/square, selfish\/selfless. Any thesis about him came bundled with its antithesis. He was so at odds with himself that the odds synthesized into one whole, perplexing person.<\/p>\n

That synthesis is borne out by his lyrics, which are as subversive as that bikini-briefs-and-trenchcoat ensemble he wore to open for the Rolling Stones. In his best songs, Prince hews to classical poetic forms only to swerve from them at unpredictable intervals; as with his persona, opposites abound.<\/p>\n

Take \u201cRaspberry Beret,\u201d basically a pastoral courtship. Peopled by such rural mainstays as Mr. McGee (the hardnosed boss of a five-and-dime) and Old Man Johnson (a farmer, of course), the song testifies to the bucolic joys of \u201cdoing something close to nothing,\u201d shirking workaday life, and having a literal romp in the hay. All\u2019s well and good until this arcadia is interrupted by another form of pastoral, the elegy. It creeps in with the beautiful, obscure line \u201cOvercast days never turned me on, but something \u2019bout the clouds and her mixed.\u201d Then comes a quiet reference to lost youth: He \u201cwouldn\u2019t change a stroke \u2026 with a girl as fine as she was then.\u201d The last line brings a full-on lament, as Prince sings, \u201cTell me, where have all the raspberry women gone?\u201d We could argue all day about what a raspberry woman is\u2014for my money, it\u2019s got nothing to do with fruit\u2014and this is Prince\u2019s inscrutable charm. Having lured us in with a frothy romance, he ends by mourning something we can\u2019t even fully understand.<\/p>\n

I would\u2019ve forked over a hundred-odd bucks to see Prince live. But no dice. This December\u2019s pair of Madison Square Garden shows sold out in thirty minutes, and I was not among the elect. I suspect all the raspberry women got there first.<\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is on the editorial staff of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve felt a frisson in the air lately, it\u2019s probably because Prince has announced a new tour. The sky\u2019s all purple, there are people running everywhere\u2014this is exciting news. Prince should\u2019ve faded long ago from the public consciousness, but his mystique is oddly resilient. Even his failures adhere to some kind of Princely internal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[1332,1329,1331,1330],"class_list":["post-7632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-elusive-persona","tag-prince","tag-purple-rain","tag-raspberry-woman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Tao of Prince<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 15, 2010 \u2013 If you\u2019ve felt a frisson in the air lately, it\u2019s probably because Prince has announced a new tour. 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