1 Yr L8tr: My Prince Post
This is a slightly revised re-post from my Facebook page a year ago, but I'm gearing up to return to blogging, so I wanted to put this here for posterity, in honor of the first anniversary of his death.
MY PRINCE POSTMy first good Prince story involves a friend’s mother reporting how scandalized she was by the things Prince said about Sheila E. (as she stood there beside him) at Madison Square Garden the night before, and how jealous I was that I hadn’t been one of the kids she was chaperoning. Specifically I believe he pointed at her crotch and said, "Will you LOOK at this p***y!?"My second good Prince story has been, apparently, my whole life.
Or at least the part of my life that began when I was told I was weird by one and then many (thanks, Krista, for starting that clusterfuck off!) and has continued through when I realized (a few years later than recommended) that being weird wasn’t necessarily all that bad. It continued through the following decade, too, as I slowly came to understand that everybody I meet is at least a little bit weird. And it’s gone on as I’ve gotten older, gone on inhabiting the edge between being myself and being accepted. Because Prince was one of my people — Bowie was, too, but he was given to me by my older sister while Prince’s first number one hits happened when I was in seventh grade, just starting to find my own way in music — the ones who act differently not because they want to rebel (although that happens, too) but because they have no choice. And some of us are really, really good at it: good at not just pushing at the walls, the floor, the occasional tilted ceiling; but at poking holes, ripping seams, opening windows. And an even smaller few are good at blazing hot right there on the edge, where the sightlines are best and sound travels faster, and remaining on that borderland for all to see. There are the smaller-scale ones that belong mostly to the other weirdoes — Magnuson, Waits, Grace Jones, Eno — and then there are the biggies. Prince. Bowie. Who else? I don’t think there are any. Huge, famous, hit-making freaks, the ones who made the world love them by basically telling it to fuck off all the time. But maybe we don’t need them anymore? Maybe the weird has finally sunk in, started expressing itself more widely? Pink hair on bank tellers and transgender bathrooms in the news and neck tattoos on TV stars and a socialist giving the presidential race a run for its money. Maybe weirdoes are normal now? Not likely. Kids still get bullied. I just hope they have something to dance to when they’re alone.