I struggle with an artist like Prince. Struggling is not the same as disliking, of course. I like Prince and I like the music that he made in his lifetime—the small fraction that I've heard of it so far, anyway. 1999 completes the trifecta of "critically acclaimed albums" for me, after Purple Rain and Sign o' the Times. I like them, and there are moments throughout that I love (we will eventually focus on today's album, don't worry). But in general, I get the overwhelming sense that I am "missing" something when it comes to Prince. It's less a disagreement about whether he's good (he is), more of a disagreement about how good. I hear some fun and competent and interesting pop/funk music, whereas it feels like other people hear a god. And I don't get that sense.
Here's my theory on it. And this doesn't just apply to Prince, I don't think. You could probably apply the theory to a bunch of other artists from Prince's time period, or slightly earlier or later. Basically anyone who was big before I was born, and is still seen as relevant today. It comes down to whether the artist's image is marketable. That's it. Decades after the artist was last relevant in pop culture, and a decade after they pass from this mortal coil, if they are seen as a "legend" or "one of the greats," etc., then that has everything to do with the marketing of their image, and almost nothing to do with the art. (Exceptions abound, obviously, like Bruce Springsteen for example, but let's not get distracted from the point I'm trying to make.)
That, in turn, tricks me into thinking that my assessment of Prince's best three albums as "very good but not great" is somehow inadequate. It's because, through constant reiteration, we are told that this is an artist to remember, because they are easy to remember (being the character that they were), and that you should keep buying the things that their estate is giving you, keep listening to their five or ten hits over and over, keep funneling money into that image. And if you keep seeing this, keep seeing Instagram posts with Prince music or reddit posts of supposedly crazy shit Prince did and Facebook status updates that "nobody does it like Prince anymore" and so on, then you're gonna feel that ancient impulse to want to fit in. And so you end up here.
"Here" for most people looks like: "hey, Prince's hits are great." "Here" for me, unfortunately, looks differently. It looks like full-album dives. And if I'm getting through his best known and most beloved albums and nodding along like they are good but also half-shrugging too, then what, do we even have to consider the rest? He more or less released an average of one album a year from the release of 1999 to the year of his death, and the vast majority of those are critically reviled. But you're not supposed to remember that. You're supposed to cue "1999" on the monthly music streaming subscription AI-curated playlist and let it play again and again. Because that Prince, man, he was a real one!
For what it's worth, I don't think Prince himself would care about any of this. I don't think he lived on this planet, actually. There's no other explanation for all of it. I think he was just a weird fucking guy who made a lot of music, and some of it, almost by accident, was really fucking good. I think that 1999 is really fucking good. I have my qualms with it, but there was no pain in listening to the Minneapolis sound all week. He knew how to lay down a groove, and he knew how to write a hook. "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" are the hits for a reason. If that's all you know about Prince, then let none of what I wrote about shame you. I'm actually jealous of you.
There's not really even anything "wrong" with this album, or any Prince album that I've had the pleasure of knowing. I might be inclined to say that some of these songs are too long, but I have accepted it. It's a double album with only eleven songs. By design, those songs are all going to be a little too long. On the one hand, it might've been nice to condense every song and tighten the album as a whole, make it one disc, make it eleven unimpeachable pop hits collected on that one disc. On the other hand, maybe that would be detrimental to the artistry. Maybe the idea of extended each song by repeating the hook over and over in an outro is the way that Prince becomes unique and stands out.
I turned the album on at dinnertime at some point, and Pam (who, it should be noted, is probably more of a Prince skeptic than I am) did her usual "what are we listening to?" But she said it because she didn't know that the album version of "1999" has a weird spoken-word intro. She knows the song. The radio version is almost half the length of the album version. I prefer the album version because I prefer albums, but I can't diss the decision to trim the fat either. But you see? Every step of the way, we have found the invisible hand of commercialism pulling the strings. It's like Prince hit some unspoken goal of having twelve marketable songs and then was forgotten about, left to wander in the wilderness for twenty years making unlistenable music, all of that easily swept under the rug when the artist dies and the legacy is all the remains, a legacy to be propped up by those who are left to prosper from it.
I acknowledge all this, and say that there is a way around it. You can just not care. Well, okay, no, instead how about: Care just enough to be aware that you are being manipulated, and ignore those forces, and just slip into the artistry. If I had a gun to my head and was told to choose between listening to a Prince Greatest Hits compilation over and over for the rest of my life or listening to the eight-minute "D.M.S.R." over and over for the rest of my life, picking the latter would be easy. Prince lays out such a fine-ass groove on the Oberheim OB-8, and it's so pure. It's pure because no ad man sold me on it. It's just there, in the margins, and it makes me feel good. It's not the best thing I've ever heard, and it doesn't move the needle on my view of Prince at all. It's just good music. The forces that be are trying to make me feel like I'm missing something by thinking that way, but I don't think I am. I think this is good enough.
Listen to the whole thing here:
No comments:
Post a Comment