By Thabiti Lewis, Associate Professor of English, WSU Vancouver
I liked Prince as a teen but I grew to really appreciate him even more for his music, fashion, business sense, and artistic creativity, as I became an adult. He is without a doubt a heroic role model of our era. He never stopped trying new things and challenging “tradition.” Undaunted by norms, he was willing to be a daring, inventive, radical, free, and unreconstructed human being.
Tony Bolden, professor of African American Studies at Kansas University and guest editor of The Funk Issue in American Studies Journal (2013) sheds light on the meaning of funk and Prince. “Funky” says Dr. Bolden, “is honesty of expression at our deepest emotions. The genre Funk is hybrid forms. And Prince is the exemplification of that. He rejected categories, opting for Funk’s embrace of multiplicity of forms. Prince exhibited carefree blackness,” which Dr. Bolden says, “is funk. In many ways [Prince] reflected the meaning of the word and the genre.”
Throughout his career Prince waged battle against the record executives who controlled artists economically and creatively. Prince famously wrote the word “Slave” on his cheek during his battle in the 1990s with Warner Brothers over how often he could release his music and who owned it. Tied to a contract that required him to release a fixed number of albums, Prince produced them feverishly to speed up the execution of the contract. After leaving Warner Brothers, he formed his own music company, NPG Records and released a triple album in 1996—not coincidentally titled “Emancipation”.
Always looking forward, he also was one of the first artists to utilize the Internet’s potential. He released his double album “Crystal Ball” for $50, selling 500,000+ copies. He famously told Larry King to, “do the math” when explaining the profit that he made from this unconventional approach.
Who can forget how he changed his name to a love symbol—a combination of the symbol for male and female—during his epic battle with Warner Brothers as a statement against corporate greed and in support of artistic bodies. This move left Warner with no “Prince” to sell, by abandoning that name and wresting control of his body and art. More than a symbolic gesture, he redefined himself without words. To put an exclamation point on his effort to release himself from slavery, he later reacquired the rights to his music.
As one reflects on Prince’s career it is not difficult to see him as the epitome of what an artist can become because he challenged notions of race, gender, and sexuality. His masculinity was secure; he loved the ladies and they loved him, not withstanding his small stature.
Prince’s ethos and his aura, embody black American vernacular and culture to the point where he defined himself by an unspeakable symbol. He is a child of the Civil Rights Movement (also known as The Second Reconstruction). Emancipated and determined to be free, he avoided gimmickry—after his first few albums—and his impetus was usually about expanding the known, stretching the unknown, refusing to be defined, limited, or owned. A close look at Prince’s life and career is an education for artists, for all of us, in the possibilities of self-definition, artistic control, and forward thinking.