Prince
My dad, who has been to more great concerts than anyone else I know, ranks two Prince concerts in his top five of all time. Once, during a random catching-up conversation in college, my dad asked if I was planning to go see Prince. Apparently he had a couple shows planned at Madison Square Garden. I was always entertained when dad was more plugged into musical goings-on in New York than me. Actually, he still is sometimes.
I said no--while his name was familiar, it wasn’t tied in my brain to any particular music--and the conversation continued, per usual. A couple weeks later I got two tickets in the mail, to one of those shows at MSG. I will be forever grateful.
This was in February 2011. I brought Benjamin. His knowledge of Prince was similar to mine; we really did not know what to expect. We also apparently didn’t know that we really should have showed up on time: we arrived 30 minutes into Cee-Lo’s set as an opener. This seems like less of a bummer now, but he had just released ‘Fuck You’ and we were both Gnarls Barkley fans, me especially. So the fact that we accidentally got to see someone like that perform set the tone for an epic evening.
Since that night I’ve described this performance to many friends and acquaintances, doing my best to make the point clearly that if they ever had even a glimmer of an opportunity to see Prince and didn’t make it happen, they would be making a big mistake. Given how infrequently Prince performed in his last five years, it’s likely that none of them got to. It really is a shame, because it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Maybe Michael Jackson would have come close. Maybe.
The thing I knew about Prince going in was that he was a talented multi-instrumentalist, something my dad values a lot and made very clear. What’s hard to really appreciate is that it’s the multi-instrumentalism, the insane vocal range, the unstoppable dance repertoire, and a swagger that is in another dimension. Prince could go toe-to-toe with performers who work their whole careers on any one of those skills and he would have more than held his own. It actually is superhuman to a degree that doesn’t make sense.
And it was all on display at MSG. Every song, even to untrained ears, was an instant classic. He brought the stadium to its feet for a party anthem and then silenced it during a ballad with the raising of a finger. I have never seen someone wield such direct control over 35,000 people--all wholly fixated on this tiny, other-worldly man.
He shredded guitar solos and stood up from his piano a few bars into a song declaring that he had to stop because if he kept playing, women in the audience might find themselves pregnant. He wanted to give us an experience that we’d never forget, and he knew he could. He might have known that he couldn’t not.
Beyond perfecting his own performance, if not performance in general, he continued to push the boundaries, at one point bringing out one of the lead dancers at the NYC ballet for a two-song dance duet. Later--and I don’t think either Benjamin or I knew who she was at the time--Prince invited Kim Kardashian on stage to dance with him, before promptly kicking her off for being lame and just standing there. If you aren’t here to party, get the *&%$ off of my stage. In that moment, and in his public persona in general, Prince didn’t care about anything except being legendary. He was also deeply passionate about social justice. Beside that though, he didn’t care what you thought, what you wore, what you looked like, who your parents were--he just wanted you to dance.
The world needs people like Prince to show up, from time to time to remind us all that greatness is possible; that injustice is an unacceptable compromise; that we need not apologize for who we are; and that everything’s better with a little funk on it. For all the entertainment and inspiration he gave audiences and listeners and collaborators and friends (and lovers, wow, I can’t imagine), there could never have been enough Prince to go around. I expect never to see a performance like that again, but I keep showing up for stadium concerts hoping that someone else was learning from the master. May humanity someday do him justice.
Of the other remembrances I read around the time of Prince’s death, Frank Ocean’s struck a chord in particular:
“MY ASSESSMENT IS THAT HE LEARNED EARLY ON HOW LITTLE VALUE TO ASSIGN TO SOMEONE ELSE’S OPINION OF YOU.. AN INFECTIOUS SENTIMENT THAT SEEMED SOAKED INTO HIS CLOTHES, HIS HAIR, HIS WALK, HIS GUITAR AND HIS PRIMAL SCREAM. HE WROTE MY FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME, ‘WHEN YOU WERE MINE’. IT’S A SIMPLE SONG WITH A SIMPLE MELODY THAT MAKES YOU WISH YOU THOUGHT OF IT FIRST, EVEN THOUGH YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE - A FLIRTATIOUS BRAND OF GENIUS THAT FEELS APPROACHABLE.”
Read it here.
