Hairy Moody

• RIP Prince

  Hairy Moody

  April 2016

  Big_Stacks said:

  "Crazy You" , 

  You know, I never really paid that song much attention until a number of years ago, when I was hanging out with erstwhile soulstrutters Terry_Clubbup and DCastillo. We were each holding down our respective pieces of overstuffed pleather furniture in Terry's rumpus room, playing winding, expansive records for each other--Ozo's "Kites", that acid-drenched anti-drug gospel record where the Soul Expedition is the backing band, some infinite and cyrillic Gabor Szabo twelve-inch with a pink cover, etc.--not leaned or anything (yet), just kinda sinking in it. And as the evening stood right there at the precipice of becoming stormy and obscure, Clubbup put on "Crazy You" and shit was emerald city in minutes. Transformed. What a gorgeous, gorgeous record. Far too short, though--which I guess is about right, considering.
  
  But yeah, it's hard for me to know what to say, mostly because he is my single favorite musical artist ever, bar none, and I'm unable to really get any distance on him. Talking about Prince is like talking about my arm, you know?
  
  - I had my first kiss the week before the season that started with "When Doves Cry" and ended with "Let's Go Crazy."
  
  - I was in Michigan this past weekend, and the whole back page of the Detroit Free Press was an ad from GM, all black, with a sliver of red split-window visible at the bottom, along with the words "Baby, that was much too fast. 1958-2016." I knew it was cheesy, but I still got a little choked up.
  
  - When I was younger, I found out one sunny afternoon that one of my best friends and I had the same birthday. I'm not as ashamed as I should be to admit that I cherish the memory of this markedly less than the memory of later finding out that Prince and I had the same favorite Joni Mitchell record.
  
  - As much music as I've listened to, and as corny as I am, and as much time as teenaged me spent talking with girls, I've only used lines lifted from songs on two occasions, and one of them was me just letting it ring and saying to her, "Whoever's calling...can't be as cute as you."
  
  - I read a profile of Prince back around the time of Graffiti Bridge, and the reporter talked about how happy Prince was at the critical reception it was getting. The reporter was somewhat confused, because everyone kinda fucking hated that record. But Prince didn't care--he was excited because he the nature of the criticisms let him know that the critics were, at last, finally starting to hear him. That taught me a lot about how being successful can pale next to being understood.
  .
  - (Hissing of Summer Lawns, of course. Fuck you thought?)
  
  - My dear friend Pruitt is a couple-few years older than me, and--with the exceptions of Afrika Bambaataa and my dad--taught me more than anyone about how to find the interesting parts of things that I was sure had nothing interesting about them at all. One afternoon long ago, back when I was at my teenest and my punkest and my most harder-than-thou-est, Pruitt pointed out to me that the solo at the end of "Let's Go Crazy" was played all on one string and was about as hard as it gets, kid. I don't know if that's true about the one string, but the idea behind what he was saying has stayed with me: that even in the top ten there could be these rich, spiky bits, hidden in plain sight.
  
  - Growing up with Prince's music on the radio kinda ruined me, though, as it simultaneously rendered both pop and the underground somewhat suspect. When dude's going Top 10 with a song that constructs this whole horse/jockey/stable metaphor and twists it like a fortune cookie around a line about used rubbers, it makes it a little tougher to get too sprung on pop-apologist shit that insists so aggressively upon the existence of limitations, be they limitations of the pop form or limitations of What The Market Will Bear.
  
  Similarly, I tend to take a jaundiced view of underground shit that is ostensibly, you know, challenging gender or racial norms or whatever, but is content to do so on dedicated platforms in front of true believers, as I grew up on a black dude who not only made a single about him sewing a soft pink coat for his beloved, but went Top 40 with it, muscling that shit into your granny's parlor and your racist cousin's pickup truck and wherever the fuck else. 
  
  Now, I'm not saying that my personally witnessing the ascent of Prince has invalidated everything else for me, but it has made me very hard to please. On the one hand I feel bad about that, but on the other hand I feel like those old socialists from the 20s and 30s: I glimpsed utopia, you know? You kinda can't expect me to forget shit like that.
  
  - True, he lost a little luster in my eyes when it became clear (around the time of "My Name Is Prince," probably) that he wasn't ever really going to have an answer for rap, but I also feel like his fight against it, his denial of that reality and his disgust in the face of it, is what gave a lot of his later work its burn.      
  
  - Look: I was born in 1974, and so grew up as part of a very fearful generation, one that hid behind and atrophied beneath an ironic cool that made us stingy with others and suspicious of ourselves. Some are fighting their way out of it now, but a lot of us spent a lot of time pseudo-cynicized into an almost complete inability to reveal our true red hearts. This is probably why the chorus of a song I musically cannot fucking stand comprises the lyric I've thought about more than any other in the last ten years:
  
  Is someone getting the best of you?
  
  To me, there is in those words some probably unresolvable thing about not only my people's feeling that someone's always trying to scam us, but also our chickenshit tendency to never give anyone a hundred percent of our realest selves, to always hold something back.
  
  To hear and feel those words and that idea recognized, seized, and exploded by someone who has meant so much to me, to have him fire it like a mortar shell out of the dead center of a spectacle a vast and as meaningless to me as the fucking Super Bowl, into my living room and a billion others', it felt like a gift and it felt like a catharsis and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it.
  
  I think everyone has a Prince story like that--some song or record or episode or thing that everyone knows about, but that has some little facet of it that's elusive enough that you can allow yourself to believe no one understands it all exactly as you do--and that's mine.  
  
  Anyway, this is real hard for me and I'm all over the place and I have to go now.
  
  Rest in power, sir, and sorry about all the cursing.
  
  love,
  
  
  James