long live giles li

06-07-08

Happy 50th Prince!

Happy 50th Birthday Prince. I wrote you a little prose poem.

I have never seen Prince up close. Not like my homie Bao who saw him and his entourage at a record shop in Minneapolis. Not like my friend Connie who was running through the Detroit airport to catch her connecting flight and stopped mid-stride upon seeing Prince and his entourage. Not like Visionaries leader Key Kool who recorded his first demo at Paisley Park and walked into a room only to see Prince sans entourage.

I’ve seen him in concert once: back in 2004, when he was on tour, doing his old hits for the “last” time. (We all knew he would keep doing his hits. When you write and record songs that are nothing less than masterpieces, why would you ever stop performing them?) I would say it was a life-changing experience, if it didn’t sound so stupid. I choked up twice. To my left was my “date” – Vudoo Soul (we’ll talk about this another time) – to my right was a white family of five, with a youngest child about 7 years old. Behind me was a row of 6 or 7 35-40 year old Black women wearing purple. In front of me was, well, a lot of air because I was in the second balcony.

I was at the concert because of the gracious donation from my lifelong best friend Dave, who surprised me with a ticket one night several months prior. Serendipitous doesn’t begin to describe. Literally no more than 2 weeks before that ticket-as-gift night, I had made a list of things I wanted to do in my life. Item #1: See Prince in concert for free.

A lot of people see Prince and they see the chunky platforms. They see the svelte figure and effeminate body language. They see the pompadour, the racial ambiguity, the sexual expression beyond what we’re supposed to find appropriate, the sometimes scratchy/sometimes mellifluous falsetto. They see what appears to be an inability to grow a full beard/mustache. They see the multi-millionaire painting the word SLAVE on his cheek with eyeliner. The man who changed his name from Rogers to Prince to the symbol, giving music stores fits about where to display his CDs in their alphabetically-perfect world. Then the Artist. Then back to Prince.

In short, they see a freak. Everything he’s done seems to be exactly what nobody else would do.

And he’s built a career, no, a legend, by doing things nobody else would do. “When Doves Cry” was a dance song that features absolutely no bass. Unheard of at the time, and still never replicated to that level of success. When contemporaries embellished their life stories through song, Prince only told the absolute truth, and held the specifics and names in his own head, never giving too much of himself away. All the pain and sadness came out, but you had to listen to the music, not just the lyrics. Rumor states he once recorded a song about his father that was so emotional he destroyed all tapes before anyone else could hear it. When he makes music, all he knows how to do is tell the truth, sometimes against his own better judgment.

He would ask his band to play 3 hour shows, jump into their cars and zip across town to play another 3 hours to a different crowd. Anything to play for people. Anything to avoid talking to them. He only knows how to talk to you through performing for you. He’s notoriously soft-spoken in person. And what really would you expect? Because Prince is all those things that make people call him freak, and that means young Rogers Nelson, growing up in Minneapolis, was all those things too. And if interacting with the people around him was difficult because of their judgments about him, then why wouldn’t he channel all of it into his music?

Sure, he’s a rock star. He built a mansion, keeps the gate locked, has his famous friends over. But he’s different about it. His mansion is in Minnesota, his home state, not California or the Hamptons. He unlocks his gate often, holds a weeklong music festival on his property, lets everyone in. When other rock stars come over, he opens his garage to the public, let’s them walk right up next to him and watch a jam session.

Prince doesn’t know how to talk to strangers. He probably doesn’t know how to talk to friends. His stage show runs 3 or 4 hours because he’s telling us everything he wants to say every night.

When I saw him live, I felt like he was right in front of me. In contrast to the elaborate stage shows, the “40 muthafuckas on stage,” different backup dance crews, the fog, the strobe of today’s big stars, the everything to make you forget the central character on stage is just that: a character, there sat Prince, strumming an acoustic guitar on a rotating chair, so nobody in the crowd could feel deprived of seeing his face. Inviting people from the audience to come on stage and dance to his music – and sing lines from his songs. Calling his band “too funky,” pouting off to a couch on the side of the stage and flipping through a magazine until the crowd begged for him to come back. Letting us sing along to that “wooh hooh hooh hooh” part at the end of “Purple Rain” for like 10 minutes as he closed the encore.

He helps remind me that sometimes you really do leave it all on stage. Not once did he look like he wanted to rush through the rest of the show and get to his dressing room and watch SportsCenter. I wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he had to be carried to his hotel the moment he disappeard under that stage. I also wouldn’t have been shocked to hear he went to the Paradise Rock Club and played another 3 hours.

He helps remind me that yes, it is OK to open your soul on a mic; and yes, it is OK to close it when you step away from it.

A lot of people see Prince and see a freak.

I look at him and see the exact same thing. That’s why he’s beautiful.