Prince - And Getting Through This Thing Called Life

  by Cila Warncke

published: 16 / 6 / 2016

intro

Long-term fan Cila Warncke pays personal tribute to Prince's maverick and eccentric genius

Only an idiot would volunteer to write about Prince. This thought dogged me since my Tempranillo-fuelled email late on 21 April begging for precisely that privilege. It was an impulse a part of me regrets because no words that rise from my primordial emotional stew of disenfranchised grief, disbelief, nostalgia, and adoration will come close to doing him justice. Paying tribute to Prince is like holding a candle to the sun. There is much we don't know about Prince, including how he died. The one thing everyone knows, from fellow musicians or far-removed fans, is that he was the best. Genius is a word rendered thin and flavourless by overuse; as are icon, legend, unique, and inimitable. That doesn't make them any less true when applied to Prince. My private theory, long-held, is that the only reason he didn't supplant Jimi Hendrix in music mythology as the ultimate guitar god is that he was too sexy, too queer in the old fashioned sense for the (mostly) straight, white male rock journalists who oversee the beatification of six-string saints. The marvel is: Prince was so good he forced them to pronounce his brilliance despite the yellow laser-cut trouser suit he wore to perform 'Gett Off' at the 1991 MTV Music Awards, and his lavish lyrical praise of women who really, really like sex. Pre-Prince, men had a monopoly on the pocket full of Trojans (some of them used). Then an androgynous imp who played every instrument, arranged every note, and took no shit from anyone came straight outta Minneapolis and turned the world upside down. He made people nervous. Most famously, Tipper Gore whose horror at Nikki masturbating with a magazine birthed the 'Parental Warning Explicit Content' label. From 'Darling Nikki' to 'Raspberry Beret' to 'Cream' to 'Peach' to 'Head' to 'When You Were Mine' Prince sang about women who dug sex and had fun doing it. He unapologetically refused to adopt the rock'n'roll paradigm where men are Subjects and women are Objects (in the De Beauvoirian sense). Refusing assent was one of the many things Prince did better than anyone else. From Warner Brothers to the internet, there was no Goliath he wouldn't sling a pebble at. He didn't always win these battles, but he never lost. In the end, the record labels, the critics, and the world wide web kowtowed to his sublime talent and awesome willfulness. This we must celebrate. There aren't many artists like that. Even, or especially, the most successful musicians play the game. They get slick, learn to give the right answers, straighten their teeth, take up knitting, buy trout farms, get into right-wing politics, advertise butter. Prince though, never played the game by anyone's rules but his own. Magnificently onery to the end, he holed up at Paisley Park, recording, performing, throwing dance parties, hosting movie nights for the assortment of musicians, protegees, sound engineers and technicians who he routinely sacrificed on the altar of musical perfectionism. "The thing about Prince," one of them told me, "Is that he was better than everyone, at everything." I can't think of one lick of evidence to the contrary. Can you? Which is why only an idiot would volunteer to write about Prince, or sing a Prince song, or play a Prince riff. Maybe that's the point though. To get through this thing called life we have to do our best when we're not the best. We have to trudge while other soar. We have to accept that flowers wither; stars burn out; that perfection isn't proof against death. My gut feeling is Prince knew this better than anyone. And that it kept him from ever giving too much of a fuck. Nobody is ever going to sound as good, be as good as Prince. No one can recreate his magic. What we can do is let it show us how to live, take courage from it, let his music and spirit infuse us. Let's be idiots for the things we love. Prince would approve.

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