I can’t.
Honestly, I just can’t.
Even though Prince Rogers Nelson has been one of the reasons I aspired to do and still do this job, I can’t sit at my desk and wax philosophical on an artist whose music and uniquely weird presence on this planet has meant so much to my life and appreciation and love of music.
If you want to peruse his bio, you can find many rundowns of his incredible, influential, hit-filled career. But I can’t write about Purple Rain’s sales and the hot girls he dated because I’m simply too heartbroken.
For real.
I’ve been a huge, dedicated, bootleg-collecting, stand-in-line-for-hours-to-see-him-in-a-small-nightclub fan of Prince Rogers Nelson since 1978, when my 8-year-old self first heard his debut hit Soft & Wet on KSOL and wondered who those two funky, soulful women were, and why they called themselves Prince.
When I actually saw his picture in the back of Jet magazine and discovered he was just one little guy with an Afro who wrote, played and produced these slightly odd but taut and funky guitar-laced jams, I was suitably impressed and became a lifelong fan.
Prince would go from funky R&B weirdo to global star, but just as with another singular pop music icon we lost this year, he was always a bit outside. Even as Purple Rain, the album and the film, rocketed him from a “rude boy” in a Speedo, trenchcoat and heels (always heels) to the top of the mid-’80s pop culture zeitgeist, Prince was always just different from everyone else on the landscape, including perceived rival Michael Jackson.
Prince expanded my musical tastes as he filtered his influences through his own prism. I heard his love of Santana and rock in his guitar solos, his respect for composition in his fancy Joni Mitchell-inspired chord progressions and lilting melodies, the cosmically conceptual on-the-one weirdness of George Clinton and P-Funk, his recognizable vocal harmonic sense a la Chaka Khan and Marvin Gaye. There was Sly Stone’s pioneering Summer of Love funk-pop dreams, Earth, Wind and Fire and Tower of Power in his horn chart-infused synth lines, and of course James Brown’s funky Good Foot.
I listened and watched, enraptured, all through his rise as controversial and seemingly alien pop star, melding the profane, the carnal, the sacred, the funky and the messed-up (Sister is still a pretty weird tune); suggesting we listeners be “new breed leaders” who “stand up, organize” or that “sexuality is all we ever need;” and singing about “Uptown,” his utopia where “black, white, Puerto Rican” could party together because “everybody’s just-a-freakin.’ ”
During his relatively fallow mid-’90s period when hip-hop, grunge and arena-country had replaced him as pop culture heap-toppers, as he fought with his label, purposely feeding them substandard music and calling out the industry, he was still in his weird way always there for me, and I was always willing to stand in a three-hour ticket line with a bunch of other fans to talk about how much he moved us.
If you’ve read my column through this seemingly vindictive year, the deaths of music icons has been a sadly common theme. Bowie, Maurice White, Merle Haggard, Phife Dawg, Glenn Frey, they have all stung my and perhaps your music-loving heart to varying degrees.
And once again, I’ve still got no words of wisdom, no existential explorations or treatise on the shining stars who touch us with us their greatness only to leave us too soon, to wallow and revel in what they left behind. I have no pithy, snarky summation of his Royal Purple Badness, and no way to succinctly convey 30-plus years of appreciation and fandom for a cat who objectively had very little in common with me beyond a love for music.
But this just hurts my heart deep: from that wide-eyed 8-year-old in the car who suddenly wanted to play guitar and drums, to the 45-year-old who’s shedding a few tears on his keyboard and can’t wait to start drinking and listening to Prince, The Time, Vanity 6, Sheila E., Wendy & Lisa, Jesse Johnson, Madhouse, Mavis Staples. Hell, I’m gonna throw Sheena Easton’s Prince-penned and -produced Sugar Walls in the playlist, too.
R.I.P. Prince Rogers Nelson.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758. Read his blog, Sound Check Online, at www.ohio.com/blogs/sound-check, like him on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1lNgxml and/or follow him on Twitter @malcolmabramABJ.