"Prince is lame," cried the world when I was growing up and I believed it. Perhaps he was everywhere in 1984, but by the early '90s when my memory began he was nowhere to be found. I didn't consciously listen to a Prince song again until freshman year in college.
Now I listen to a Prince song nearly every day.
"Prince is lame?" But we were perfect together. As an infant did I subconsciously absorb the then ubiquitous Purple Rain soundtrack over FM radio, only to have it repressed during my childhood?
Innocent unconscious > repression > rediscovery > guilty pleasure > unrepentant conscious celebration.
A few years later I discovered that Jonathem Lethem's Tourettic private eye, Lionel Essrog, was a kindred spirit. He hears "Kiss" on the radio for the first time:
... twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.
"Turn that shit down," Minna said.
"I like it," I said.
"That's that crap Danny listens to," said Minna. Danny was code for too black.
Too black but too powerful to be ignored and Lionel tracks the record down. His reaction to what he finds makes perfect sense to me:
Prince's music calmed me as much as masturbation or a cheeseburger. When I listened to him I was exempt from my symptoms. So I began collecting his records, especially those elaborated and frenetic remixes tucked away on the CD singles. The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.
Faced with the absurdity of rational life in the modern world? Let's go crazy indeed. Zizek must have had Prince in mind when he advised us to enjoy our symptoms. Simultaneously unrepentant and devout, there is no line between prayer and orgasm. Horror movie screams live side by side with trite romantic couplets; wanton dominatrices masturbate in public, luring unsuspecting innocents back to their castle for a night of mind blowing pleasure; the drives and desires are looped ad infinitum, endless variations on endless themes.
A throbbing, twitching world, exulting in exhaustive repetition. Nothing is complicated.
One week later, "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder was number one ...
4 comments:
On November 15, 1984, I was born and "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" by WHAM! was number one in the States. I'd like to say that at 23 ripe years of age I now embrace the saccharine homoeroticism of WHAM!'s big hit, but I would be lying. I certainly embrace saccharine homoeroticism, but not this song.
To me, unapologetic appreciation is a wave, it's contextual. The superego is impossible to evade for good, and if orgasm indeed occurs partly by virtue of the superego being breached or overwhelmed, feeling apologetic about liking something makes it all the more enjoyable. Do you lose an element of excitement once you resign yourself to celebration? I think that's why you can never lose that aversion, that intellectual inclination that says "this isn't good for my soul, I shouldn't be doing this...but it FEELS so good!" Release is the essence of transcendence, and if prayer gets you there, right on, but once you've released you've lost the energy of the act, so we fall back into that dumb circle of drives and desires in search of the ever higher release.
An old Hindu teaching goes something like this:
Emotions are waves on an ocean; be the ocean and let the waves pass.
Being an American, I add this caveat: only if it ain't worth catching.
May 30, 1984:
I was born.
A total solar eclipse that centered over the north-eastern part of the US.
"Let's Hear it for the Boy" was #1 in the US, "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" was #1 in the UK, and "Footloose" was #1 in Australia.
I could blame being born during a total eclipse for the misfortunes I've experienced in life, but it may be more appropriate to blame the civilized world's collective love of music only appropriate for awkward junior high dances.
Michael - to quote Calvin & Hobbes, "I like to have everything so good, I can take it all for granted."
Maureen - I don't know what junior high dances you were attending but I seem to remember a paucity of homoerotic dance grooves. Maybe I should have gone to more.
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