Categories
Podcast

Podcast: All the Critics Love U – A Conversation with Jack Riedy, Author of Electric Word Life

As promised/threatened, we’re back to a monthly schedule on the D / M / S / R podcast! For this month’s episode, it was my pleasure to speak to music writer Jack Riedy (Pitchfork, GQ, VIBE) about his new book Electric Word Life: Writing on Prince 2016-2021. It was a really fun conversation, running through each of the pieces collected in his book and covering everything from Prince’s influence on Chicago house to the degree to which the Batman album goes (spoiler: it’s hard). Check it out, and if you’re so inclined, get yourself a copy of Jack’s book! It’s a great read and highly recommended.

By the way, I caught this too late to mention it “on air,” but thanks so much to cittalente for their review on Apple Podcasts! If you’re interested in reviewing D / M / S / R on your podcast service of choice, please do, and I will read it on the next episode–which, if all goes to plan, should be dropping next month.

Categories
Ephemera, 1983

Modernaire

The third annual Minnesota Music Awards were held on May 16, 1983, at the Carlton Celebrity Dinner Theater in Bloomington. Prince took home six awards himself–Musician of the Year, Band of the Year, Best Male Vocalist, Best Record Producer (for 1999), 45 or EP of the Year (for “Little Red Corvette”), and Album of the Year (for 1999)–plus, by proxy, Best “R&B, Soul, Ethnic” Band for the Time. According to Jon Bream of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, he spent most of the evening backstage, watching the Motown 25 special on TV.

Finally, wrote Bream, “the local hero” made his grand entrance: “parad[ing] down the center aisle in a banana-colored satin suit” with bodyguard “Big Chick” Huntsberry in tow. He handed his awards to Chick, “thanked Minnesota for its support,” and brought out his band–along with Vanity 6 and the Time’s Morris Day and Jesse Johnson–for a 10-minute version of “D.M.S.R.” played “on borrowed equipment” (Bream 1984). Dez Dickerson, despite having put in his notice earlier that spring, was in his usual spot on lead guitar; it was the last time he and Prince would share a stage.

Categories
Uncategorized

DM40GB30: Pandemonium Roundtable Panel

Last Friday, July 10, was the 30th anniversary of the Time’s fourth and (technically) final album, Pandemonium; so, to mark the occasion, the fantastic De Angela Duff has shared the Pandemonium roundtable from last month’s DM40GB30 symposium with myself, Darling Nisi, and Ivan Orr and Ricky Wyatt of the Grown Folks Music podcast.

I think it’s obvious from the conversation that we all had a great time (and if you’re looking for an extra great time, try taking a drink every time De Angela–whose favorite Time album is famously Pandemonium–pops into the live stream to interject). It was extremely flattering to be asked to share the “stage” with folks as knowledgeable about the Time and their place in the R&B scene as Ivan and Ricky, and KaNisa did a stellar job as always moderating. Can’t wait to do this again next year!

Categories
Uncategorized

Loving Prince Means Believing Black Lives Matter

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about the uprisings against police brutality currently going on in the United States and elsewhere; to be honest, it feels a little self-aggrandizing to insert myself into the conversation. But for better or worse, dance / music / sex / romance is the biggest platform I have, and I would be remiss if I didn’t use it to add my voice to those calling for justice and long-overdue, radical change.

Believing that Black lives matter is the only reasonable or appropriate position for a blog about Prince to take. Prince was a Black man who centered his Blackness in every aspect of his life and work. He was famously a major financial contributor to the Black Lives Matter organization before his death in 2016; he used his platform as a presenter at the 2015 Grammy Awards to shout out the movement; and after the murder of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police officers that same year, he wrote the song “Baltimore” and organized a benefit concert to help heal the city after days of unrest. According to co-writer Dan Piepenbring, he wanted his unfinished memoir to “solve racism.”

All of this indicates a shift, late in his life, to overt political activism; but even at the height of his crossover success, he was already trying to imagine a better world for Black people. “Uptown” is a vision of racial unity, set in a city whose history often does not live up to its inclusive reputation. “America” is a Hendrix-esque reappropriation of “America the Beautiful” with sardonic new lyrics about inner-city desperation. Even “The Cross” draws from the long African American spiritual tradition of using scripture to advocate for liberation. And this isn’t even to mention the litany of songs released later in his career that are even more forthright in addressing racism: from “The Sacrifice of Victor” to “We March,” from “Dreamer” to “Black Muse.”

As a rule, I try to avoid speculating on what Prince would have thought or done had his time on Earth not come to an end four years ago. But I am confident that, had he lived to witness the police killings of Philando Castile in July 2016 and George Floyd last month–not to mention the countless other acts of police brutality, fatal or otherwise, against Black people in the Twin Cities and elsewhere–he would have been fully in support of these protests. And, while I am also usually not one to say that we should do or believe everything that Prince did, in this instance, I can’t think of a more productive way to honor his memory.

But enough from me. I’d like to take this opportunity to share some critical perspectives on Prince from Black writers and podcasters. Please feel free to share more in the comments:

Also, please consider donating to these or other resources supporting the struggle for Black lives in Minneapolis. If nothing else, this is something we know that Prince would have done:

In lieu of suspending Patreon payments this month, I will be donating all patron fees to the above organizations. Thanks for reading, take care of yourselves, and I’ll be back at a time when it feels appropriate.

Categories
Reviews

Review: Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods

Every Prince fan, Scott Woods writes in one of the essays in Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods, “thinks they are the biggest Prince fan in the world. It is why encounters with fans are sometimes challenging: You can’t tell us anything about Prince, let alone anything that would make us change how we feel about him.” This is both a bitingly funny observation–one of many to be found here–and an accurate assessment of how his book will be received in certain corners of the Princeverse. It’s something of which Woods himself is well aware; as he writes in the book’s introduction, some readers will think his book sucks, “and mostly for the same reasons as most Prince books suck: it won’t tell you anything about Prince that you didn’t know.”

Woods is right; if fresh knowledge is what you’re looking for in a Prince book, then you should probably look elsewhere. But I have to question the philosophy–out of professional self-preservation, if nothing else–that the only reason to read a book about Prince is to learn something “new.” So much of the fandom in the wake of Prince’s passing last April has been about making connections, through shared experiences and shared grief: swapping stories, knowledge, and opinions, not because it’s something we’ve never heard before, but because the act itself brings us closer to one another. A theme that runs through several of Woods’ essays, borrowed from a speech by Wendy Melvoin at Prince’s memorial service, is that making art is a form of communion: “Being creative is how you can talk to [Prince]. If you’re being creative, he will talk to you.” This book, then, is both the long conversation with Prince Woods was never able to have, and one of the most engaging conversations about Prince you’ll ever have with another fan.

And Woods really is a huge fan (perhaps even the biggest in the world). His knowledge of Prince’s oeuvre is deep, and his opinions are as much fun to disagree with as they are the opposite (Seriously, ART OFFICIAL AGE was a “loss?” Controversy was better than Dirty Mind?!). His book, a collection of his online writing about Prince, is clearly meant for other hardcore fans, and it’s at its best when its appeal is narrowest: devoting a whole essay, for example, to the heavily processed Linn LM-1 “sidestick” that is an ineffable signature of Prince’s greatest music (you know it when you hear it). Of course, this means it’s also wildly self-indulgent; probably the longest single essay is a gratuitous (but witty!) beatdown of Kanye West in the wake of L.A. Reid’s ill-fated 2015 comparison of the two artists, which feels even more anachronistic now that Reid’s career is effectively over. But hey–people actually paid money on Kickstarter for Woods to write that one, so clearly there’s something here for everyone.

Whether Little Weird Black Boy Gods is worth its own modest asking price, then, depends on what one expects out of a Prince book. There is no real thesis here–though there are certainly recurring themes–and, again, no new information on the artist (though Woods’ detailed report on his tour of Paisley Park is a different kind of “insider info”). Personally, I’m okay with this, in large part because Woods is honest about his intentions. He’s not trying to make an overarching summation of Prince’s career, as authors like Brian Morton and Ben Greenman have tried (and, arguably, failed) to do; he’s just reflecting on his own experiences as a fan, both before and after Prince’s death. At its best–as in the title essay, one of the most moving tributes to Prince in the wake of his passing that I’ve read–it’s exactly the kind of creative, communal experience Melvoin was talking about in her memorial speech. We’re never going to know everything there is to know about Prince; but books like Woods’ let us know a little more about each other, and by extension about ourselves. In some ways, that’s an even more appealing proposition.

You can support dance / music / sex / romance by purchasing Little Weird Black Boy Gods (or anything else!) using my Amazon affiliate link. See you again soon.