The making of Prince: How a skinny kid from Minneapolis conquered the world
Prince was never someone you could put in a box. And Slate music critic Carl Wilson says that—more than anything else—is what defined him.
"Prince was this prodigiously gifted self-made kid from Minneapolis, from this heavily white city where the clubs and the radio were highly segregated," he tells host Brent Bambury. "The way he invented himself and found his pop dreams was by breaking through those barriers".
He points out that pop music charts were still segregated in the early eighties as Prince ascended and argues that Prince's music was a vehicle that crossed boundaries.
"He would play a black dance club one night and then a white punk club the next night," says Wilson.
Prince was already seeing a world with fewer constraints and playing music that had none. But Prince had more in mind than desegregating the charts.
While his music refused designation, his image oozed with a hypersexual energy. Small and lithe, flamboyantly dressed with heavy mascara, Prince pushed an aggressively feminized masculinity. His lyrics subverted gender roles more completely than anyone else in pop.
Along with those boundaries, Prince erased the near taboo barrier between sexual ecstasy and religion, arguing in songs like Let's Pretend We're Married for a kind of carnal approach to worship.
"He believed that there was sexuality in divinity," says Wilson.
Prince had a complicated relationship with the music industry too. He fought with Warner, his label, largely because he produced music faster than anyone else. The label didn't want to release it without a concurrent marketing strategy. Likewise, Price grew disillusioned with radio as stations corporatized and developed software to program music. And he guarded against unauthorized use of his music online.
As a result, some of his later releases are less known than his earlier records. And the volume of unreleased recorded work is said to be enormous—enough to keep new Prince music trickling out from Paisley Park for decades.
Even without new releases, Prince the musician will continue to influence music for years to come.
And Carl Wilson says Prince's imprint on his fans goes well beyond the music.
"He created a sense for a lot of people that they could be something bigger and wider and stranger than they were."