“Dig If You Will the Picture: Prince's Subversion of Hegemonic Black

HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 2019, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 129–143 https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2018.1536566 “Dig if you will the Picture: Prince’s Subversion of Hegemonic Black Masculinity, and the Fallacy of Racial Transcendence” Kevin Talmer Whiteneir Jr. School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Representations of Blackness are often limited to a narrow selection Blackness; masculinity; race; of archetypes despite the everyday experience of Blackness being gender; Prince immeasurably varied. Its intersectionality with class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and more is complex and cannot simply be transcended as if it does not shape our choices, our ideologies, and our cognitive frameworks. And Prince, as a Black man, and as an artist, was no stranger to this. Flirting with the demarcated boundaries of everything, including gender and race, Prince presented us with a seemingly endless catalogue of musical and performative works that showcase, not “transcend,” the complexity of Blackness, masculinity, and their cultural intersections. This essay will analyze how Prince challenged racial stereotyping, the false equivalence of this with racial transcendence by looking at Prince’s Purple Rain era. In doing so, I push to undermine this interpretation of racial transcendence, articulate how race is in fact inextricable from his artistry, and illustrate how an awareness of this serves to benefit the legibility of Blackness and Black gender dynamics within not only Prince’s art, but within Western society. Prince Rogers Nelson (1958–2016) was an artist whose name alone evoked images of purple rain, white lace, red corvettes, and raspberry berets. Entire spectrums of color seemed available to a man who shared his life through a palette comprised of costume, film, and music. His chameleonic and impish nature helped create fantastical landscapes that defied Western cultural expectations and stereotypes. His complexity, which undeniably contributed to his legend and significance in the American and international pop world, was one that few had in the 20th century. Even with time, it is still one that is misunderstood. Prince was championed in life and in death as a queer poststructuralist, whose artistry deconstructed gender roles, sexual roles, race and ethnicity, and expectations of performance and performativity. In 1994, Robert Walser called him precisely this as he and others defined in high concept what Prince himself described as simply “being who [he] was,” (Kamp, 2016). Part of who he was, was a Black man. A Black man who seemed to assume nothing, take nothing for granted or expected. But it is this color, the most CONTACT Kevin Talmer Whiteneir [email protected] School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA ß 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 130 K. T. WHITENEIR permanent, the one that before, during, and after performances would remain, that has been the most challenged despite its significance not only in his career, but his life. Like many Black American icons—OJ Simpson, Whitney Houston, Muhammad Ali, Beyonce, and Michael Jackson—the significance of his Blackness is often sidestepped by a subset of fans and critics who, possibly expecting familiar and often cliched markers of Blackness and Black masculinity, fail or refuse to recognize that his embodiment of behaviors outside of these expectations is not analogous to a highly simplistic reading of “transcending” race. Following the deaths of Prince, Whitney Houston, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin who has just recently joined them in the afterlife, popular media bloggers and new outlets hastily and formulaically circulate headlines that suggest that the accomplishments of these Black artists in mainstream America was attained by the transcendence of their race. On April 22, 2016, Mark Caudill, a reporter for Mansfield News Journal wrote “Prince transcended race and even made it in the movies with "Purple Rain,” (Caudill, 2016). On April 24, 2016, CNN writer Mallory Simon wrote an article that quoted music journalist Martin Keller saying, “Prince transcended race and taught fans their lives could be more than what they thought,” and reaffirms an unfor- tunate and problematic narrative dichotomy that cites Prince as an inspiration to Black youth listening in abusive homes and white youth with aspirations toward stardom (Simon, 2016). And on May 23, 2016, Mark Anthony Neal, a writer for Ebony, a maga- zine that targets Black audiences in America, stated, “When an icon such as Prince Rogers Nelson transitions, he becomes a torch for both nostalgia and the power of music to unite, proving an artist could transcend race,” while paradoxically still affirm- ing that Prince’s Blackness stood at the foreground of his philanthropic and artistic work (Neal, 2016). This stretches as far back as 1981 when Robert Palmer reported on Prince for the Los Angeles Times: “One suspects that as time goes on, more and more American pop will reflect a similarly biracial orientation. If that’s so, Prince’s black–- white synthesis isn’t just a picture of what could be, it’s a prophecy,” (Palmer, 1981). What Palmer’s “biracism” prophesied instead was that with enough attention from mainstream outlets, American audiences could label any Black artist they enjoyed enough “racially transcendent.” In 2016, Saturday Night Live played a skit titled “The Day Beyonce Turned Black,” depicting the frenzy white audiences experience upon coming to terms with Beyonce’s overt lyrics and visuals that depicted scenes of Blackness in America. Bill Bottrell, co-producer of Jackson’s 1991 hit “Black or White” stated, “I think that Michael really, in his career, just transcended race. His work and his life was sort of about undefining race” (see “Jackson’s complex story,” 2010). However, what these writers fail to articulate is who has played a role in defining race, especially Blackness, in these restrictive ways, and what it means to be transcendent. Representations of Blackness are often limited to a narrow selection of archetypes despite the everyday experience of Blackness being immeasurably varied. Its intersectionality—a term coined in 1989 but having a resurgence today in contemporary academic theory and social activism—with class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and more is complex and cannot simply be transcended as if it does not shape our choices, our ideologies, and our cognitive frameworks ("Kimberle Crenshaw on Intersectionality," 2017). Not only this, but these identity markers shape others’ experiences of us as people. HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 131 From head to toe, style of hair to shoe, the livelihoods, thoughts, and experiences of Black people and Blackness are the subject of intense scrutiny, discourse, and representation by Black and non-Black people alike. And Prince, as a Black man, and as an artist, was no stranger to this. Flirting with the demarcated boundaries of everything including gender and race, Prince presented us with a seemingly endless catalogue of musical and performative works that showcase, not “transcend,” the complexity of Black masculinity. Though certainly not the first Black figure to challenge presuppositions of Black masculinity, the radicality and sophistication of Prince’s presentation and performance throughout his career encouraged broader understandings of the intersections between race and gender. Expressly, the positioning of his body as recipient of erotic desire rather than progenitor subvert the American cultural narrative of masculinity, especially Black men, as merely sexually aggressive (Jackson, 2006; Johnson, 2003). This essay will illustrate its analysis of the false equivalence of how Prince challenged stereotypes of Black masculinity and the notion of racial transcendence through a focus on Prince’s Purple Rain era. Given that it is arguably the most awarded, and cited of his oeuvre, this era serves as the perfect anchor for a discussion on the role of Blackness and its intersections with gender, masculinity, and performativity in Prince’s art. Though other eras and aspects of Prince’s career will be discussed, the Purple Rain era, especially the album’s first single, “When Doves Cry,” will demonstrate how all of these aspects play in what is also one of the most iconic tracks and videos of his career and that of American pop culture (Heller, et al., 2016; Spanos, 2016). “When Doves Cry” serves as the perfect visual nexus of his ability to synthesize cultural expectation and radicality, taking the Black male body and reconfiguring what centuries of representation and reproduction have constructed around its image. As a scholar of gender performativity, a fan of Prince’s iconic visuals and performances, and a Black man with concerns about the legibility of the Black male body in American and global culture, it is critical to analyze the specificity with which Prince attended to the legibility of his Blackness in his own work. To dissect this intersection of visual performance, race, and gender, I will use a mixed methodological analysis including Connell’s(2005) hegemonic gender theory, Crenshaw’s(1991) scholarship on intersectionality, Jackson’s(2006) discourse on the scripts that shape our understanding of the Black masculine body, and bell hooks’ (2004) childhood recollection of the diver- sity of Black masculinity. I aim to provide readers with the necessary theoretical tools to unpack some of the complexity of Prince’s work. In doing so, I push to undermine this interpretation of racial transcendence, articulate how race is in fact inextricable from his artistry, and illustrate how an awareness of this serves to benefit the legibility of Blackness and Black gender dynamics within not only Prince’s art, but within Western society. Writers such as Caudill (2016), Neal (2016), Palmer (1981), and Simon (2016) among others are accurate that Prince did not define himself within dictated schemas of Black masculinity. However, what he showcased throughout his career was that Blackness could be infinite, equally as unbound by convention as music could be, if we expand the ways we think about, understand, and discuss it.

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