#1plus1plus1is3

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2022-05-23
Journal	Journal of Popular Music Studies
Authors	De Angela L. Duff, Zachary Hoskins, Kamilah Cummings, Robert Loss
Institutions	DePaul University, Columbus College of Art and Design

Abstract

In 2021, three landmark albums in the catalog of Prince Rogers Nelson celebrated milestone anniversaries: Controversy (1981) for 40 years, Diamonds & Pearls (1991) for 30 years, and The Rainbow Children (2001) for 20 years. In observance of this triple occasion, De Angela L. Duff of New York University convened a three-day symposium about these albums as polished solid. Held virtually in March 2021, the #1plus1plus1is3 virtual symposium included 20 presentations, four roundtable discussions, and three keynotes featuring people who worked with Prince.This gathering was the ninth Prince symposium or event organized by Duff in the past five years. At NYU, Spelman College, and virtually, she has gathered scholars, writers, and industry professionals to celebrate album anniversaries and posthumous releases. She also co-produced a virtual event with the PRN Alumni Foundation, #PRNAlumni5 (2021), celebrating the foundation’s five-year anniversary and the 2021 Record Store Day release of Prince’s The Truth.Reprinted here are three presentations (lightly edited for clarity) from #1plus1plus1is3, one corresponding to each album. For more information about the symposium including speaker bios, abstracts, and other video archives, visit the website: 1plus1plus1is3.polishedsolid.com. The Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson is not affiliated, associated, or connected with this symposium, nor has it endorsed or sponsored the event. Further, the Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson has not licensed any of its intellectual property to the producers, advertisers, or directors of the Prince #1plus1plus1is3 Virtual Symposium.YouTube Links:#1plus1plus1is3 Controversy Presentation: “I Wish We All Were Nude:Prince’s Controversy ‘Shower Poster’ as Aesthetic Linchpin and Artifact” by Zachary Hoskinshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFSZasOYv8M (25:19).#1plus1plus1is3 Diamonds and Pearls Presentation: “A Tale Of Two Princes: Diamonds & Pearls and the Myth of Colorblindness in the Work of Prince” by Kamilah Cummingshttps://youtu.be/Oib3jx-VuK8 (30:31).#1plus1plus1is3 The Rainbow Children Presentation: “Deconstruction: Work & Racial Capitalism in The Rainbow Children” by Robert Losshttps://youtu.be/QPPHLC6QZuo (27:00).The U.S. LP release of Prince’s 1981 album Controversy came with a fold-out color poster of a remarkable image, reportedly taken by bandmate Lisa Coleman.1 In the photo, Prince poses seductively in the shower, wearing only his black bikini briefs, a gold hip chain, and an insouciant stare. A vulgar stream of water trickles from the bulge in his crotch; mounted conspicuously beside the shower head is a crucifix.Four decades after its original release, the “shower poster” remains, for lack of a better word, controversial: the scourge of thousands of early-’80s parents, and (if my own home life is any indication) more than a few domestic partners.2 Search reactions to the poster on fan forum prince.org, and you’ll see everything from, “[P]rince looks like a…lil’ wet rat in it,” to the elegantly succinct, “gross.”3 That this 40-year-old image can still engender such division within the fan community is, in itself, worthy of a closer look.To understand why the poster was so divisive, it helps to put it in context with some of Prince’s earlier images and his evolution as a sex symbol. By 1981, Prince had released at least one pinup-style poster for each of his albums—though, it’s worth noting, the shower poster was the first to be sold with the album in question.First, the promo poster for Prince’s 1978 debut album, For You, depicts the 20-year-old artist well within the representative bounds of a young male R&B artist in the late 1970s: bare-chested and Afroed, with a leather jacket, a mustache and a choker in the shape of an Ankh.4 It’s sexy, but hardly provocative: Prince in this photo could almost be one of the more obscure Jackson brothers.By 1979, and the promo poster for his self-titled second album, things have changed.5 Prince now appears sans jacket, with some very revealing red shorts and white suspenders; his Afro has been replaced with a Farrah Fawcett blowout. Whereas his For You-era presentation was both comfortably heteronormative and very clearly Black, here Prince presents as both sexually and racially ambiguous. But it’s also a transitional image. By late 1979, Prince had famously decreed his intention to “portray pure sex”6; but one gets the sense that he hadn’t quite nailed down exactly the kind of “sex” he wanted to portray. The result is certainly daring and unique, but there isn’t much edge.On the other hand, a third poster for 1980’s Dirty Mind is all edge.7 Prince has cut his late-’70s disco hair into a choppy, punk-inspired style; he poses with a studded trench coat slung over his shoulder, sporting black bikinis—the same as, or similar to, the ones he’d wear in the shower a year later—and thigh-high legwarmers. The image is less camp than the one from 1979, but in a strange way, it’s also less shocking. Prince’s bikinis and thigh-highs would have been a familiar reference point for adventurous rock audiences in the early ’80s: both had been worn by Iggy Pop, for example, nearly a decade before. This is not to say that Prince’s Dirty Mind-era look was innocuous family entertainment—only that punk and New Wave provided a framework which made it less inherently provocative than what was to come.Which brings us, at last, to the Controversy poster. Prince still looks essentially like he did in the Dirty Mind era, but here he’s more exposed: The thigh-highs, coat and bandana are gone; his pose is less aggressive, more stereotypically “feminine” than in the Dirty Mind shot. Because of the hip chain, the parted legs, and the stream of water, our eyes are none-too-subtly drawn to his crotch. And, of course, there is the added provocation of the crucifix. To put it in anecdotal terms, the average Middle American parent in the late ’70s or early ’80s would likely have been okay with the 1978 poster hanging on their teenage son’s or daughter’s wall; they may have been less thrilled about the 1979 poster; and the 1980 poster may have given them genuine pause. The shower poster, however, would have been coming right down.The photo of Prince in the shower remains unsettling because it is so charged. A Freudian might call it overdetermined: In a single image, it dramatizes the constellation of racial, sexual and religious ambiguities that were at the core of Prince’s Controversy-era persona. And it does so through two particular aesthetic currents, which I’d like to spend the rest of this presentation unpacking.First, the poster is an example of porno chic. The release of Controversy in 1981 came toward the end of what is now referred to as the “Golden Age of Porn,” which began roughly with the 1969 release of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie—a descendent of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (both 1963), and the first sexually explicit film to receive wide theatrical release in the United States—and ended in the mid-1980s.8 This was a period, famously dramatized by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), when pornographic films such as Deep Throat (1972) were inching closer to the mainstream, being taken seriously by critics, and influencing legitimate cinema—including two films known to have been beloved by Prince, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1976) and Tinto Brass’s Caligula (1979).Specifically, 1981 saw the rise of home video pornography, which created a new boom in accessibility for sexually explicit motion pictures; audiences no longer had to go to a seedy movie theater to see pornography, but could instead watch it on their television in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Looking at issues of Video X, a magazine specifically designed to cater to the home video porn audience, one can see traces of Prince’s Controversy-era aesthetic: a mostly topless White woman in a strategically unbuttoned men’s dress shirt and skinny tie; a Black woman, wearing a proto-Vanity 6 lace teddy, reclining provocatively against a television set; and, of course, a fair amount of shower scenes.9 My personal favorite is a personal ad that I like to imagine was placed by Prince himself: “Minneapolis, Minn. single male (with girlfriend), swap VHS, mail or party. Send tape descriptions.”Prince, of course, was hardly the only artist of the 1980s to embrace a “porno chic” aesthetic; but I don’t think it’s controversial to argue that he was one of the earliest, most enthusiastic, and most explicit adopters. Even seemingly innocuous images from the Dirty Mind and Controversy period—like a 1980 publicity photo by Allen Beaulieu, with Prince posed on a strategically tousled bed—have the aesthetic of low-budget video porn.10 Key to this aesthetic is that most of these images were captured in Prince’s own home, on Kiowa Trail in Chanhassen: creating a kind of voyeuristic intimacy that, in the days before reality TV or YouTube, could only really be found in porn.The second aesthetic current in the shower poster is the iconography of punk and New Wave, which had something of a fixation on bathrooms, specifically toilets. We can actually trace this bathroom fixation back to the Dada movement: i.e., Marcel Duchamp’s infamous 1917 readymade “Fountain,” a public urinal contextualized as a sculpture. Dada would inspire similar bathroom imagery in the late-’60s rock era, such as Robert Davidson’s 1967 photo of Frank Zappa on the toilet (“Zappa Krappa”) and Barry Feinstein’s original cover photo for the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, which was considered too crude for record stores in 1968. Part of the appeal of bathroom imagery in the punk era was its intrinsic baseness: This was deliberate “low culture” imagery, rubbing the dirty detritus of late capitalism in society’s face. But it also came from lived experience: Punk venues—most famously CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village, but also 7th Street Entry in Prince’s hometown of Minneapolis—had some famously disgusting bathrooms.Prince, of course, was never uncouth enough to be photographed next to a dirty toilet, but he certainly flirted with punk bathroom imagery. For instance, in an early 1982 photo by Allen Beaulieu, he posed next to an industrial sink fixture. It’s telling that, when Prince appeared on the cover of New Wave magazine New York Rocker in June 1981, he was posed in the same shower as the one from the poster, albeit much more modestly dressed, in a tailored suit with de rigeur skinny tie. In marketing himself to a punk/New Wave audience, he put his own spin on the bathroom imagery that was rife throughout the subculture.We’ll end with one of the more interesting uses of the shower poster, a black-and-white advertisement for Controversy that ran in Interview magazine in August 1981. Interview arguably sits at the intersection of the two aesthetic currents we’ve been discussing: It was co-founded by Andy Warhol, whose Blue Movie, as mentioned earlier, opened the doors for pornographic films in mainstream theaters; he was also an early patron of New York City’s punk scene, through his connections with the Velvet Underground and Max’s Kansas City. The ad copy, similarly, ties together the various threads we’ve been discussing, selling Prince as both a punk-style iconoclast and a porn archetype. He’s “a photogenic child genius with one name and more music than modesty”; “old enough to drink in some states”—i.e., barely legal—and “famed for…assorted kinky outrage.”The Interview ad, like the shower poster it reproduces, encapsulates all of Prince’s aforementioned racial, sexual and religious ambiguities. I don’t want to belabor the point, since so much great work is being done by Black scholars to counteract the popular narrative of Prince “transcending race,” but in this blown-out, overexposed image, there seems to be a deliberate muddying of the waters of Prince’s ethnicity: He certainly doesn’t look white, but, especially to non-Black audiences of the time, he also doesn’t necessarily look Black. The racial ambiguity only adds to the exoticism.Perhaps less controversially, the image also presents Prince as sexually ambiguous. It’s easy to take for granted the endemic queerness of Prince’s aesthetic, but I think there’s more research to be done in how, especially in the first half of the 1980s, he was borrowing deliberately from gay male visual culture of the period. Even the ad’s appearance in Interview magazine offers a reasonably concrete example of Prince courting a queer audience: As Jeff Yarbrough wrote in The Advocate in 2018, Interview “was not specifically a gay magazine, but its sensibilities and staff certainly were.” If we look again at the ad copy—the “barely legal” framing, the “kinky outrage,” the specific reference to Prince’s “bikini”—we can see that he’s being constructed here as a gay male sex symbol.Finally, we have arguably the most provocative thing about the poster: the crucifix on the bathroom wall. Similar to his use of the Lord’s Prayer in the title track of Controversy, this appropriation of Christian iconography seems at once subversive and straightforward. Prince was of course genuinely devout, and his Christianity at this period in time was unorthodox in that it made little distinction between the spiritual and sexual; for him, there may not have been any contradiction between this highly sexualized pinup and an earnest expression of his faith. But I also think he was canny enough to realize that it is contradictory to more orthodox Christians, and thus in keeping with the subversive “Controversy” theme.What all of these threads have in common is that for Prince—always, but especially in 1981—identity is not fixed, but is indeterminate, constructed, and malleable. One of my favorite lines from the song “Controversy” is, “Was it good for you, was I what you wanted me to be?” This is a question that resonates throughout Prince’s work—even in the more seemingly rigid, well-ordered persona of later projects, such as 2001’s The Rainbow Children. And I think it’s central to why the poster continues to both resonate and infuriate: Prince made himself an icon by rendering himself inexplicable.Post-2016, it seems we’ve been viewing Hidden Figures Part Two: Prince’s Black Audience. However, Prince’s relationship with this audience should not be hidden. It should be honored for what it is, what it was, and what it continues to be in terms of how it has sustained Prince. That’s one part of it. But it’s twofold. The other issue is the near erasure of Black contributors from Prince’s musical legacy, as demonstrated in the recent Sign O’ the Times Super Deluxe release. There was much pushback when people were justifiably troubled by the lack of Black faces in that extravagant release, which followed the problematic 1999 Super Deluxe release. Again, Blackness faded to the background, being excluded in a lot of ways.When conversations about Prince, race, and excluding Black people or not really honoring their contributions to his narrative arise, there’s a common response from many fans: “Prince was colorblind; he didn’t see color; why are you talking about color?” I counter that with this presentation. I argue that Prince was very much aware of color. He was aware of race. More he was aware of and he had to a music industry with a to be That is the of this to look at Prince as a and who race, and because he it. Diamonds and Pearls a to and its in Prince’s that is why I to as part of this first people to reference when they Prince’s of and say he was is not the song and he that there be a that it you to this of spiritual that he is talking about in the they go back to to his first on the part of the he you was in a Black and and and I to all of music when I was and when I was I that one I all of and not be for the color of my but the of my and, I the part that people I see it on and and in However, when I look at this I don’t see a who he’s is a of a of the If we it with we an of its context and to the at the came with a of and it so an didn’t One of his actually the The was in response to a question how he about from people who he was to the white rock and Black The part that people which I think is very the He his to his and like this be we be If we be we might as well be I take Prince’s about the and I the in its within this my is that in Prince the reality of that is a result of in and, the music industry in which he He also the and that could the to be the to really the life that he wanted to He that there was a for Black to over to White audiences to that kind of it seems like it is in when he that his are to it’s a on the reality that like so many other Black Prince had to over to White audiences to the kind of that would the he not only to his but also to go on and the work that he did later to himself from the music part of this that is never he it by are a lot of people there that understand this because they me and my and I This appears to be a to the Black audience, who the of Black who have had to over to White mainstream audiences to a kind of and could the on with a Black audience, but in terms of the of that Prince was to and the of that he he he was to more and that he had to appeal to White audiences to it. It’s of who about how, for all his disco he didn’t see he White Because of have in being in the White Black have had to over to that community to a of like “I a the Prince is example of people what they want and it to suit an that is more on as an than on of As has us, to its racial is not about the to see color or the lack of of race. The point of is how we see when people want to this of being the of race, that is not least not the of it. However, the or and the have clearly As has that racial than is the to be Colorblindness does not with but as the against which is in the era of the early when many people we on color the of was the people who were the of who Prince on and with be Jackson music by our to the color and Jackson about being my it don’t Black or Even with as problematic as it is, it’s Black people it as a to We don’t have and about people not their color. the is on Black people to a we didn’t as we to and we and that are and As the that we have racial and it to the of argue to a of against who Blackness in Prince’s for If we album, The Rainbow a lot of the response was at what were actually and However, who Prince as at such an of in his has created this actually the of and it to It people to the of and look for everything as a an of as a framework for with the we can into Diamonds and have demonstrated that part of As has especially in his a all these still The music for example, was a of and Prince had to how to this the we see the racial We have a and a Black In his The Prince music industry had Black music from the Black for the and they captured that they would to had to and this and it to this the now like and is the reality of and White were to Black they It’s a Black people the of The is two mostly of White and as the and Black as the As the of the White This is because as many of the earlier Diamonds and Pearls was Prince’s the album a on Prince a one with and the title track the five on the White Again, it’s the of as the by which all is The have been since the However, what is interesting is the only time there a Black was when was in its and Black music was essentially the only music for a time of about one and a half to two years, there was no Black That to of and But was much this This was to be a so Prince did a lot of One that I found problematic was with in It’s of the kind of that White male wrote about Prince. Prince’s most recent projects, he it’s that Diamonds and Pearls is a LP for In The Prince his that the White was to music has been the of White and as there was a in the White and Black these White that Prince was in of a new Rolling was in an It’s almost as he his for of the since the album and movie that made Prince a his have been for the work that would take to the next But instead of a album that would the it the of Dirty Mind and we were is an interesting because Prince had released five very albums and four to the of but to he didn’t a It is also a of to that Dirty Mind and for Prince’s on the Black and with Black audiences is not White or He we were but it is to that Black White Prince’s by the White However, when the of came in a Rolling with Prince not about I how to by my second It is that he this in Rolling because his first one was not or which people because both the White He his first one earlier on the Black with “I from his album. This was Prince’s the music magazine of the White Black audiences and Black to we look at the two to Diamonds and he’d his a and was in such a on the Black As much as is as a we the film from the we see the single in the the Black The of the video featuring was given to and was in on the and and both The Prince song by The was and by also from was and by was All the corresponding on to the Prince was not in of a He there was an audience we to the about people what he was I it’s his of the Black audience to the to what he like to call Diamonds and Pearls Prince’s some on my album. It’s not new to to me you that I how to and Prince a music and who to to on and over to a mainstream audience the Again, this was a highly We because of their to by Black Prince didn’t it to with the and two after the However, he how to the by this of the that Prince is an appeal to In White “I use the terms white and to the She who is a of of it is a a from which white people look at and and to a of

Tech Support

Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2022.34.2.5

References

2020 - A Black Theology of Liberation
1998 - Black Music, White Business: Illuminating the History and Political Economy of Jazz
2002 - Avalanche
2019 - The Beautiful Ones