Prince, the purple unicorn

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/23/prince-tribute-neon-indian-alan-palomo

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About five years ago, I was a given a collection of unreleased Prince demos. I was experiencing a sophomore slump after my first album, and my friend Nic thought it might help to know that even someone as mythical as the Purple one himself worked through material like everyone else. After all, great pop stars seem to just materialize; beamed down to Earth rather than plucked from obscurity. But what I realised blasting that collection of lost hits like Wonderful Ass and Purple Music, was the realization that his songs were in fact written. And that even when the hits sounded effortless, they were the result of a tireless, insatiable obsession with music … and of course, sex.

His passing feels biblically tragic not only for the man, but also for his medium. Prince, to me, represented the last of the self-assembled pop stars. There’s a spectrum of things that contribute to pop stardom: the ability to sing, play instruments, write hits, produce albums, dance on stage or in videos, and all the while look great doing it.

Most performers manage to combine a few of those attributes. It’s unheard of, unicorn-like, to see someone be all of those things at once. Even Michael Jackson had the help of Quincy Jones. Prince however, practically embodied the spectrum. It was right there in the liner notes of his first album For You, which read, “produced, arranged, composed, and performed by Prince”.

And what’s equally striking is that for someone who had each one of the traits of a pop star, he was so unequivocally unlike the rest of them. His touch was inimitable. Not that people didn’t try to emulate him (like 80s cohorts Andre Cymone, Morris Day, and Mazarati to name a few), but even when they donned the eyeliner and pumped out the funk, it never quite matched Prince’s full-on gestalt. The missing ingredient was always the man himself.

Not only must one wield all the attributes of a superstar, but also a personality to compel others to notice it. A big part of that was his transparency about sex. I think about everything from his punk-funk incest anthem Sister, to the Gary Wilson-level strangeness of If I was Your Girlfriend. He explored what were then unutterable concepts for pop songs: love’s a mess, sex is messier. He made a career out of shooting sparks from that timeless friction.

Prince’s trademark sexual anarchy is something you just don’t find tuning through the stations; where every song is about love but never, and to use Raymond Carver’s phrase, “what we talk about when we talk about love”. Sign O’ The Times, perhaps the first true postmodern pop album, was a lyrical revelation to me in that way. Anyone who may have heard my most recent work knows I’m indebted to its songs. And it doesn’t just stop there. I can still think back to blasting The Beautiful Ones on repeat as a teenage hormone grenade or studying Purple Rain on TV, the tonal embryos beginning to quiver in my brain.

Like Bowie, he represented something music is slowly losing in one way and gaining in another: autonomy. He’s perhaps the most fully-realised, self-made pop star we’ve ever had. And his influence on music as a whole will only accrue so long as car stereos continue to blare Little Red Corvette. It’s no coincidence he was deeply spiritual; he simply saw a bigger picture. My heart goes out to his family and friends. I don’t think we’ll ever have someone quite like Prince again.