The Purple Icon and Black Genius
What Prince Taught Us About Black Art and White Supremacy
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June 7, 2022 would have been Prince Rogers Nelson’s 64th birthday. There are two things about that sentence that feel wrong to me. The first is assigning an age to someone who seemed to exist in a space beyond all human constructs. The second is speaking about Prince in the past tense — as a phenomenon that happened and that is no more. Still, this occasion provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the valuable gifts the Purple One left us beyond his extraordinary music catalogue. Prince taught generations of Black artists and creatives (yours truly included) the importance of owning our work and demanding that the white industry structures in which we operate value our humanity as much as they value our art.
What is there to say about Prince’s prodigious talent that has not already been said a million times over? The man was an incomparable songwriter and composer, able to imbue his songs with the full range of human emotion — adoration, lust, veneration, rage, irony, pain, betrayal and anything else he wanted his audience to experience. He was also a prodigious instrumentalist, once responding to Dick Clark’s inquiry about how many instruments he played with a simple, “Thousands.” He was only slightly exaggerating. His first studio album, “For You,” was released when he was just 19 and featured songs written, composed, and arranged by the young virtuoso. He provided all of the vocals and played all of the instruments on the album as well. Legend has it that he even took the picture of himself that became the cover art. Multi-talented is an insulting understatement when it comes to Mr. Prince Rogers Nelson.
Equally as admirable to me is how protective Prince was of not only his own genius but of Black genius generally. Prince spent his entire career showing Black people how to relentlessly affirm our personhood and protect our genius in a country that pathologically tries to strip us of one while commercially capitalizing on the other. If you know anything about Prince’s background, this is not at all surprising. He grew up painfully aware of the way…
