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KlappentextLegendarily reticent, perverse and misleading, Prince is one of the few remaining 80s superstars who still, perhaps, remains unexplained. Now a firm fixture in the pop canon, where such classics as "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times" and "Parade" regularly feature in Best Ever Album polls, Prince is still, as he ever was, an enigma. His live performances are legendary (21 Nights at the O2 in 2007) and while recent releases have been modestly successful at best, his influence on urban music, and R'n'B in particular, has never been more evident. The Minneapolis Sound can now be heard everywhere. Matt Thorne's "Prince", through years of research and interviews with ex-Revolution members such as Wendy and Lisa, is an account of a pop maverick whose experiments with rock, funk, techno and jazz revolutionized pop. With reference to every song, released and unreleased, over 35 years of recording, Prince will stand for years to come as the go-to book on the Great Man.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571273263

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen

FormatE101

Verlag

Faber & Faber

Erscheinungsjahr2012

Erscheinungsdatum02.10.2012

AuflageMain

Seiten608 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse6329 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.1275350

Rubriken

Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

2
THE BUSINESS OF MUSIC

Past biographers have attempted to build up a picture of Prince´s childhood and family life from his songs ( Sister´, Da, Da, Da´, The Sacrifice of Victor´ and Papa´) that deal with childhood. And it is true that the content of some of these songs seems to chime with statements that Prince has made in interviews: his acknowledgement in a 2009 interview with Tavis Smiley that he had suffered from epilepsy as a child was treated as a major revelation by the media, but it was something he´d written about in The Sacrifice of Victor´ seventeen years earlier.

It´s important, of course, not to read all Prince´s lyrics as autobiographical, and there is just as much myth-making in his work as there is personal revelation, but for all his reputation as an enigma, Prince is extraordinarily revealing in song and onstage, and often seems more truthful speaking to his audience than to any representative of a media he regards as hostile. The other problem with reading the work in order to understand the life is that there´s a gothic quality to several of these songs that suggests a self-dramatising enjoyment of myth-making.

For anyone seeking a straight story rather than revelling in the obscurantism, it doesn´t help that Prince´s mythological approach to his past is shared by some of his family members. While attempting to launch a musical career in 1988, his one full sister, Tyka Nelson - Prince also has two half-sisters, Lorna and Sharon Nelson, and one half-brother, John, Jr, on his father´s side, and one half-brother, Alfred, on his mother´s - backed up Prince´s early story (denied by his mother, Mattie Baker) in an interview with a British tabloid while promoting Royal Blue, a pleasant but lightweight collection of pop-funk that features a song about an imaginary friend, Marc Anthony, that the two of them would read her collection of pornographic novels, an autobiographical detail given by Prince that past commentators have occasionally questioned.

Much of Prince´s early life has been turned into stories that seem to obscure as much as they reveal. Take, for example, his father´s musicianship. John L. Nelson has been described as a jazz musician, but it seems that his music was not straightforward jazz but something far stranger, perhaps closer to outsider music.1

Whatever Prince´s feelings towards his father (and they seem to have fluctuated over the years before his death), one thing that does emerge is his respect for his talent. He would make cassettes of his father´s songs for members of The Revolution, and although it has been suggested that he was giving his father writing credits on songs like Around the World in a Day´, The Ladder´ and Scandalous´ out of filial loyalty or kindness, it seems that he was genuinely inspired by memories of his father´s piano-playing. Asked about his musical career by MTV VJ Martha Quinn during the premiere party for his son´s second film, Nelson said: I was a piano-player for strippers down on Hampton Avenue in Minneapolis, having a lot of fun.´ The son would grow up to share his father´s interest in strip clubs as a source of creative inspiration, later sending a copy of the song he wrote for his protégée Carmen Electra to strip clubs across America.

Nancy Hynes, who was a contemporary of Prince at the John Hay Elementary School and lived in the same neighbourhood, gave me some background to the area and the school. Her parents, she told me, were white liberals who moved into the black inner city as a gesture of civil-rights activism and solidarity´. They moved in in 1967, just a month after the largest riot in West Minneapolis, which took out primarily the commercial area - between ´65 and 67 that avenue lost thirty-two of its businesses. The house that we bought was being vacated by two elderly Jewish sisters [and] no one could understand why a white family was buying a house in that neighbourhood. The houses either side, one was sold to a mixed-race couple, which was legal in Minnesota at the time but not in many of the southern states, and [the other to] a black family. Prince at various times stayed across the street from us, [which was] where his aunt lived.´

Of the school, Hynes remembers an enthusiastic young staff, many of whom were choosing to teach in the inner cities. The kids were economically mixed, but the majority were black, which in US terms of the times included mixed-race kids. Classes were relatively small. There was a lot of music in the classroom, [but] formal music lessons were another matter. I remember peripatetic music-teaching. My friend remembers a music teacher who came once a week. There weren´t any bands that I remember, but we listened to records and used to be asked, I think to settle us down, if we wanted to listen to the Osmonds or the Jackson Five, and the Jackson Five always won.´

What seems intriguing given the nature of Prince´s later career and the ease with which he could move from music to film to art to live performance, is that a holistic approach was part of the school´s ethos. Hynes remembers: You wouldn´t have considered it odd to be asked to write a short story after watching a film or to make a painting. I don´t remember painting being only something that happened in art class. In home room we´d talk about music, we´d talk about film.´ Prince´s sister Tyka told previous Prince biographer and sessionologist Per Nilsen about the privations she experienced at the school, noting that there weren´t any school lunches´2 and that students at the school had to go and find people prepared to feed them. Hynes, however, remembers things differently. I remember the school lunches vividly, and they were awful. Mash and gravy, and the mash would end up on the ceiling, where it deserved to be.´

Although she didn´t share classes with Prince, she did share teachers, including a particularly good´ teacher called Mrs Rader. Hynes´s friend, Elizabeth Fuller, who went both to John Hay and later to the same high school, and who had more access to Prince than Hynes, recalls: OK, now just as a fan ... what was Prince like in high school? Too cool for school? Absolutely. He spent most of his time in or around the music rooms on the fourth floor, often in a private practice room or sitting on one of the wide brick windowsills playing guitar to himself. The band directors never could convince him to actually join the band. I do seem to remember that his own band played at least one of our winter dances. The one song that sticks out in my mind consisted entirely of four-letter words.´

*

While not wanting to rehash old stories, there is one legend which shows up in most Prince biographies that it would be remiss not to include, and which Howard Bloom - who handled Prince´s publicity from the early 1980s onward - says the musician told him was his most important formative memory: being five years old and seeing his father onstage in front of a screaming audience, surrounded by attractive women. Two years later, at seven, Prince completed his first song. In an early indication of the future direction of his lifetime´s work, it was called FunkMachine´.3

When Prince was ten, his parents divorced. On several occasions, including a video interview in 1999,4 Prince remarked that after this separation, his father left behind his upright piano. He had two years alone at this piano before leaving his mother and moving in with his father. Though Prince´s early life is characterised by aloofness and isolation, he was also very interested in sports - a hobby that he retains to this day, as evidenced by his recently recording a song, Purple and Gold´, for his home-town Minnesota Vikings - although Nancy Hynes has no memory of organised sports at John Hay. It seems he discovered this interest, at least according to early biographer Jon Bream, at his next school, Bryant Junior High, where, Bream suggests, he became a jock´,5 playing baseball, football and basketball (a photo exists of Prince as part of the school´s basketball team).

This next period in Prince´s life is usually presented as a time of turmoil. Alan Leeds, his road manager throughout the 1980s, told me: Prince´s relationship with both his parents was somewhat strained. They had broken up in his formative years, and he ended up staying with his dad as opposed to his mum, which was unusual in those days.´ While with his father, Prince befriended his father´s stepson, Duane (who would eventually become part of Prince´s road crew), before going back to his aunt´s, opposite Nancy Hynes´s house.

It was at his aunt´s house that he encountered a man who would soon become an important presence in his life: Pepe Willie, who was dating Prince´s cousin, Shantel Manderville. I was twenty-three, he must have been thirteen,´ Willie told me, because he was just a little kid. I didn´t pay him no mind.´ But a few years later, when Prince was crashing at his friend André Anderson´s house (Prince´s warm feelings towards Anderson´s mum Bernadette are expressed in the autobiographical song The Sacrifice of Victor´) and had enrolled in an after-hours course on The Business of Music´, he started having phone conversations with the older man.

According to Willie, Prince considered him an important...

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