| Like
many of you, I have always enjoyed Prince’s music. Throughout
my life, I have cranked up the radio or MTV whenever one of
his songs came on, however I have been a true Prince fan for
only about a year now. What prompted my discovery of the genius
of Prince's music was the realization of how open and honestly
sexual his music is. It has affected me in a way that no other
music has. It is sexual in a way that doesn’t seem sleazy
or manufactured, the way that much of pop music's sexuality
is portrayed, and unlike Madonna, Prince does not portray his
sexuality as being experimental or taboo--even when he's singing
about an incestuous relationship with his older sister. The
sexuality portrayed in Prince's music is raw, passionate, and
truthful. He doesn’t disguise it to look like something
else. He simply expresses it through his music, and never adheres
to a strict mold of what sexuality should be. Prince’s
proclivity to color outside of the sexual lines has been evident
since his early image. Here was this man, who while singing
about his sexual desire for women, was wearing either a black
thong and thigh-high’s, or decked out in lace and matching
high heel boots, and always in full makeup. Like his music,
Prince was expressing how multifaceted sexuality could be
by blurring the lines between traditional male and female
imagery. Something which is still not commonly done with performers
who identify themselves as straight.
Prince
shows us that sexuality is not flat or one sided but that
it can be expressed as the multi-dimensional phenomenon that
it is. He does not embrace just the masculine and feminine
sides of his sexuality, but he also expresses everything in
between, recognizing the many sexual sides that exist in all
of us. His expression is not just the bouncing back and forth
between what is male and female, but rather it encompasses
that which isn’t one or the other and therefore cannot
be fully described by either term. Prince, himself is not
afraid to switch gender roles in his songs. In “I Wanna
Be Your Lover,” Prince proclaims, "I wanna be your
brother/ I wanna be your mother and your sister too."
In "If I was Your Girlfriend" he openly sings of
his desire to be his girlfriend's closest female friend. Prince
uses gender switching to express romantic love in a way that
is not commonly done and in a way that opens up his music
to the listener. He's not just saying that he wants to be
your man; he's saying that he wants to be your man, your woman,
and about half of your relatives. He doesn't want the one
sided male-female sexual relationship that predominates most
love songs, but instead he wants a relationship that goes
beyond the traditional concept of what a romantic and sexual
relationship is.
In
his Lovesexy album, Prince gives us a view of the spiritual
side of sex when he alternately sings the praises of sexual
intercourse and God throughout the album. Although God and
sex are seen as being mutually exclusive in many Christian
religions, Prince uses Lovesexy to express his love of God,
and to show how sexual experiences can be spiritual as well.
Just as Prince expresses male and female sexuality as a jointed
experience, he also brings together sexual and religious experiences
as one in the same. Prince isn't limiting sexuality to a dark
forbidden corner of life but instead, brings it out into the
light, letting it touch every part of his being; even the
part that loves God.
Non-Prince
fans don't seem to understand what Prince is trying to say,
with his sexually explicit songs, androgynous image, and religious
devotion. They don't understand the freedom that Prince is
expressing and instead, find him weird. Or as my mother says,
“creepy and perverted.”
The
most common sentiment I find among males who are not fans,
is that Prince is either “gay,” a “faggot,”
or any number of hateful terms, while female non-fans think
that he looks and acts too much like a woman. What I don’t
think the non-fans understand is that they are reacting to
the surface image of Prince and are not really listening to
the music. They see the image, but not what it represents
and are therefore closed off to his message.
The
freedom that Prince represents is what the fans hold on to.
Prince fans find that the way Prince expresses his sexuality
through his music makes them more comfortable and able to
embrace and express their own sexuality. Through his music,
his behavior, and his public persona, Prince is all about
freedom of expression and being true to himself. This is a
freedom that many are unfamiliar with and will not allow themselves
to comprehend. Those who do become familiar and open up to
comprehend, become free within themselves.
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