Prince and the Competition

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/magazine/prince-andthe-competition.html

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One of the more impressive artifacts making the Internet rounds in the last 24 hours is a video, recorded at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, of an all-star band playing the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The performance is a tribute to George Harrison, a posthumous honoree that evening, by a group that includes his son Dhani, along with old bandmates and collaborators like Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood. Then there’s another person on stage, too, standing a bit apart from the rest, bent over an electric guitar. He’s a small man, in a dark pinstriped suit, a scarlet red shirt and matching derby hat — a look that splits the difference between toreador and pimp. For a while, the guy hangs back in the shadows, strumming and looking a bit bored. But three and a half minutes in, he saunters into the spotlight to take a guitar solo.

The guitarist is Prince, and what ensues is something like a cyclone. A huge sound comes roaring out of his Telecaster, an onslaught of notes and riffs and block chords that continues rippling and lashing for nearly three minutes. It’s an attack that seems intended not just to extinguish all memory of Eric Clapton’s famous solo on the original recording, but to vanquish George Harrison and the Beatles for good measure. It’s a brazen hijacking of an In Memoriam tribute, a breach of etiquette — and a wondrous exhibition of pure showmanship and ego. When the song ends, Prince whips off his guitar, flings it in the air and peacocks off, stage left.

To mount a proscenium in the company of Prince, who died Thursday at age 57, was to bask in greatness and to risk humiliation. On occasions like this one, Prince’s performances had a way of shifting from show business as usual — a star’s prerogative to entertain and strut his stuff — into the realm of pure blood sport. He aimed not only to put on a great show but also to show others up, to singe lesser mortals with pyrotechnic displays of musicianship and charisma. His competitive instincts could overwhelm his gentler, courtlier ones. A month before the Rock Hall gig, he appeared on the Grammy Awards, charging through a medley of his hits alongside Beyoncé. You could see him straining to be courteous, to cede the spotlight a bit. But after a few minutes, he appeared to lose patience and cranked up the virtuosity — dancing, shredding on guitar, sliding from the depth-sounder bottom end of his vocal register into an otherworldly falsetto. The spectacle concluded with another guitar toss, and Beyoncé, one of the world’s more unflappable performers, was left looking rather windblown, teetering on her high heels.

Antagonism has always been one of music’s animating forces. It runs through history: the cutting contests of Storyville jazz musicians, Bronx street corner battle-rap showdowns, Mozart versus Salieri, Beatles versus Stones, Whitney versus Mariah. But Prince may have been the most tenacious musical competitor of them all. His ambition was outrageous: With every song, every note, he aimed to be the best, the baddest, the most wizardly, the most unimpeachable. He seemed to have swallowed an encyclopedia of music history and developed world-historical ambition to go with it. He was a one-man band extraordinaire, the world’s best rhythm section and the world’s best background vocal choir. He could sing like Al Green or, if the mood struck, John Lennon; he could work a bandstand as fearsomely as James Brown and play a guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix. His death came as a shock because he had strode into his sixth decade in apparently undiminished form, with the waistline and hairline of a man half his age and the stamina of a man even younger than that. His hitmaking days were behind him, and his pop-culture profile waxed and waned, but whenever he resurfaced, he served notice that he was indomitable: He could still sing, dance, play instruments, write songs and produce records better than everyone else.

Rivalry defined his career from the beginning. On his first major concert tour, in the winter and spring of 1979-80, Prince was the warm-up act for Rick James, another rising star who was scrambling racial and musical categories. Tension flared between the two singers; James complained to journalists about the sensationalism of Prince’s act, with its eye-popping clothes and obscene lyrics. James was right, of course. Prince played the weird card, and not just because it came naturally to him. Weird was good business; Prince knew he could trump the competition by standing out. An elfin black man in lingerie belting out a jittery New Wave song about a 32-year-old nymphomaniac who keeps her 16-year-old brother as a sex slave — the shtick was hard to ignore.

But the real strangeness of Prince was in his sound: jagged pop-funk that hit the 1980s with an electric jolt. Musicians in the early ’80s found themselves surrounded by any number of new high-tech toys, instruments they hadn’t quite learned how to use. Prince figured them out, devising a new brand of dance music based on a heretofore unheard-of idea: that synthesizer and drum machines could carry a sweaty funk groove as forcefully as guitars and drums and brass sections had. Prince’s music was a triumph of minimalism, of addition by subtraction. The power of his best singles lies in what is not there as much as what is. You hear it in the eerily clattering “When Doves Cry,” which jettisons bass altogether, and in the throb of “Sign o’ the Times,” which tilts in the opposite direction, pushing a pulsing bass way out front.

Those and other catchy, sonically visionary songs made Prince a superstar. Today, it’s striking how much more adventurous Prince’s records were than those of fellow ’80s titans — including his chief friendly nemesis, Michael Jackson. Some of his singles even took dead aim at those rivals. “Raspberry Beret” played like a funky, libidinous sendup of Bruce Springsteen’s Heartland road songs. (“I put her on the back of my bike/And we went riding/Down by Old Man Johnson’s farm.”) The astounding guitar work on the “Purple Rain” soundtrack seemed directed at Jackson, who had muscled up his music on hits like “Beat It.” The point was unmistakable: If Michael Jackson wanted a rip-roaring guitar solo, he had to corral Eddie Van Halen and pay him a generous day rate. Prince could peel off the solo himself, presumably in between orgies.

A pop psychologist might diagnose a Napoleon complex in Prince, who stood just 5 feet 2 — 5 feet 6 in purple platforms. As he aged, his digs at competitors sometimes turned shrill. As late as 2004, he was still taking swipes at Michael Jackson: “My voice is getting higher/And Eye ain’t never had my nose done . . . That’s the other guy,” he sang on “Life ‘o’ the Party.” That song was on “Musicology,” a comeback album that found Prince playing the fuddy-duddy, scorning hip-hop. (“Take your pick/Turntable or a band?” he sniffed.) It was a weirdly reactionary move for a guy who had always kept moving toward the new and the next.

But Prince was also a more charming, earthier, funnier guy than many realized. His sense of humor shines through in dozens of songs, including those that revel in surreal nonsense. (“Let’s go crazy/Let’s go nuts/Let’s look for the purple banana/’Til they put us in the truck.”) He was least convincing when he turned to weightier, spiritual matters, as he often did. Gospel testimonies such as “The Cross” and “The Ladder” are bogged down by moralism and clichés, and albums like the 2001 Jehovah’s Witness manifesto, “The Rainbow Children,” are close to unlistenable.

The true subject of Prince’s grandest songs is the grandeur of Prince’s songs. I’m still not sure what “purple rain” is; no one is. I do know that “Purple Rain” is a tour de force, Prince’s audacious attempt to write the ultimate rock power ballad, just as “Adore” is the ultimate falsetto soul ballad, and “Kiss” is the ultimate bare-bones funk jam, and “1999” is the ultimate apocalyptic party anthem, and so on. Prince’s records induce awe — not at God’s grace or the majesty of the universe, but at a more local wonder: the fact that one human person, one mind and body, could contain so much music. His religious views were esoteric and ever-shifting and, frankly, not so interesting. But his faith in music and his own paranormal gift for it never wavered. His most persuasive theological pronouncement came in “My Name Is Prince.” “In the beginning God made the sea,” he sings. “But on the seventh day he made me.” Amen.