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

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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 magazine 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 diversity 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. Rather than defining it as transcendent, and unintentionally dismiss a critical aspect of the artist and his work due to 132 K. T. WHITENEIR a limited scope of analytic vision, we as scholars and consumers are responsible for dig- ging deeper into the artist’s intent and expanding our own critical lenses if we are to engage with the sophistication of his work.

“Can you picture this": the Shape of Black Masculinity in When Doves Cry" A set of double doors open up to an interior filled with the sound of flapping wings, the smell of purple and pink bouquets, and steam rising from a porcelain bathtub filled with the lithe body of a doe-eyed singer. He stands, presenting himself on full display, his chest swathed in nothing more than sweat, hair, and a modest cross hanging around his neck. For a moment time stands frozen as faces materialize in the steam around him. He sings to provide viewers with precious more time to crisscross his body with their gazes. In the 10 seconds provided to scan him from top to midriff, from loose curls of Black hair to the center of his torso, viewers are invited to analyze and consume him almost whole. By 1984 the world had already come to expect nothing less of Prince’s characteristic candor, having witnessed lyrical lewdness straight from his Dirty Mind (1980) four years prior and a healthy dose of Controversy in 1981. But in this sleek music video where Prince himself took the directorial helm, the viewing public are presented with a series of invitations and challenges. Prince emerges from the bathtub and crawls across the flower strewn floor, his nude body protected only by the censorship of a strategically directed lens. Light pours onto his body through purple and gold stained glass windows inscribed with the iconic Prince love symbol and the Christian cross. As he moves, the camera follows, mimick- ing the watchful eye of an onlooker intent on not missing a single stride. Written on this unambiguously Black body are the same invisible codes that have classified how other Black male bodies are read within American culture; codes that reflect what scholar Ronald Jackson describes as “an iconographic spectacle, an idealized Other aes- thetically codifying the hegemonic subconscious proclivity to see the Black body as exotic or strange” (Jackson, 2006, p. 76). The cultural ramifications of consuming Blackness within this narrow framework influence how Blackness was understood in the 20th century, as well as today. Jackson (2006) illustrates a bleak picture of the sanctioned and recognized modes of Black masculinity within the American cultural mindset: “Black males are economized … usually as heroes, thugs, studs, servants, agents of the law, and a surplus of other images. The one iteration that stands out most … is the stud, pimp, player, and mac daddy images,” (Jackson, 2006, p. 70). These hypermascu- line and hypersexual scripts that Jackson (2006) articulates rely upon models derived from outdated colonialist perspectives of the African and enslaved Black body: of Blacks as strange and exotic, as oversexed animals or objects that prey upon the virginal and fragile white woman, and as violent foils of the either nonviolent or heroic White male (Jackson, 2006, pp. 73–80). Further, interspersed throughout are cuts from Purple Rain—the film “When Doves Cry” also serves as a quasi-trailer for—depicting “The Kid” (played by Prince) and the film’s lead ingenue Apollonia engaged in a kiss, his body atop hers, alongside scenes of spousal abuse perpetrated by “The Kid’s” father. In tandem with notions of hypersexuality, aggression is prominently featured in this short HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 133 narrative as characteristic of the Black male body. Bryant Keith Alexander summarized these assumptions of Black masculinity, calling them: rhetoric by White men in promoting African (Black) bodies … [as] being a good stud, a good worker, or a good fighter—but not a human … the same images and rhetoric that were used as persuasive evidence to justify slavery and a specious sense of intellectual and humanistic superiority. (Alexander, 2006, p. 85) Although virility, diligence, and physical vigor and strength feature prominently in the Eurocentric, patriarchal conceptualization of white masculinity, this framework focuses solely on the overt physicality of the Black male body, consequently relegating Black masculinity to a kind of brutish primitivity governed by little more than primal or hormonal impulse (Donaldson, 1993; hooks, 2004; Westwood, 1990). Though the Black male is visible, he is often legible as almost entirely devoid of emotional and intellectual value or complexity, and, further, his primary worth as a physical being must fall within the above sanctioned cultural schema (hooks, 2004; Westwood, 1990). Thus, the hunger of a naked man on the prowl stands at the foreground as viewers look at Prince, seemingly reifying the politics that govern how Black bodies are also understood as animalistically hypersexual. However, though his nudity can be read as signifying the sexual aggressiveness assumed of the Black male body, it simultaneously asserts a kind of vulnerability typically reserved for femininity in the Western gender schema. White doves, symbols of peace and fidelity, and the song’s eponymous signifier for perhaps Prince himself, also fly across the otherwise empty room, providing glimmers of softness that work to contradict superficial readings of Black male eroticism as domineering or violent. However, to understand this performance of masculinity in “When Doves Cry” and Prince’s career more broadly, as well as his place within the American musical market of the late 20th century, it is critical to recognize that this is not transcendent of Black masculinity, but rather subversive in that it expands our cultural framework of what Black masculinity looks like.

“This is what it sounds like: the 1980s during the Purple Reign” The year 1984 was an illustrious one in Prince’s career as evidenced not only by the completion of his chart-topping album Purple Rain, but a motion picture of the same name. By this time, Prince’s career had already spanned 6 years and five albums, and his status as a mainstay in pop music and culture was undeniable. Five years prior, at 18 years old, his creative prowess in the recording studio was already influencing the creation of new sonic landscapes. As a one-man band, remarkable for playing all twenty-seven instruments on his first studio album, Prince had at his disposal nearly every tool he needed to single-handedly craft the soundscapes that would shape his legacy. In this regard, biographer Stan Hawkins credits him with the birth and development of “the Minneapolis Sound:” a fusion of new wave, synthpop, rock, funk, and pop—genres that had all preceded Prince, but found harmony via his alchemical artistry (Graustark, 1983; Hawkins, 2017). To say that Prince defied genres does little justice to one of the biggest aspects of his musicological legacy: his ability to dissolve the boundaries between genres and coalesce 134 K. T. WHITENEIR sound under one unified genre, music. It was impossible to contain his musical magnitude within a single taxonomy. He was not a rock star despite early comparisons to Mick Jagger’s on-stage androgyny (Palmer, 1981). He was not an R&B and Soul artist despite his early music finding its strongest audience on stations targeting listeners of James Brown, Little Richard, and other Black artists. He was not a pop star despite a musical rivalry with Michael Jackson contrived by critics and fueled by fans. He was a musician, an artist, and 1984 proved to be the perfect year for his art to impact the lives of listeners and viewers of a demographic growing not only in number, but diversity. After wrapping up the massive 1999 era, which spawned his first triple platinum, Billboard Top Ten album, and a highly-acclaimed tour opened by satellite acts Vanity 6 and Morris Day and the Time, Prince began development of the Purple Rain album (Feldman, 1984, p. 62). Released on June 25, 1984, the album shot to the top of the Billboard 200 charts—America’s unofficial chart recording album success in sales—4 weeks after its debut and spent 24 consecutive weeks at number one (Caulfield & Trust, 2016). Prior to its release, Purple Rain was heralded by the era’s first single “When Doves Cry” on May 16, 1984. It was a song critically recognized not only as one of Prince’s best songs, but one of the greatest songs of 1984 and of all time (Rolling Stone, 2011). The summer hit shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart 6 weeks after its debut and ultimately became the best-selling single of 1984, marking Prince’s first number one American single. “When Doves Cry” has been lauded for the possibilities it opened up for the pop rock instrumental, described by biographer Jim Feldman as “a highly original record [that] floats on exotic rhythms and heavily accented percussion” (Feldman, 1984, p. 74). Most specifically and frequently praised by musicologists is the lack of a bass line in “When Doves Cry,” an instrumental innovation that effectively captures part of the genius that would come to define the era as a whole. When Purple Rain, both the album and the film that embodied it on the silver screen, hit the public it projected Prince to an audience that had grown increasingly hungry to devour anything the pop paragon produced. In addition to the fans that had been with him since the beginning—predominantly Black fans who had given him success and fame by requesting his songs on Black radio stations since 1978—Prince caught the ears of white audiences historically known for rejecting him. Radio stations that curated music of interest to white pop and rock fans slowly but surely began spinning Prince’s singles as “When Doves Cry” proved itself to be a tour de force. With the single’s help, Purple Rain dominated the film box score as well as the music charts, putting Prince on nearly everyone’s radar throughout 1984. Feldman (1984) paints a picture of Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson’s tight grips on their respective musical thrones being shaken by this relative upstart who man- aged to fuze musical, visual, and sartorial aesthetics in a way that few others could successfully pull off. Though the Purple Rain era was not the first nor the last time Prince’s nuanced performance of gender, race, or eroticism would show up on the stage or in music, it would create an iconic set of musical and cultural motifs forever ingrained within the memory of both the artist himself and within Western pop culture, ones viewed as transcendent predominantly by white audiences. Throughout history, artists have used visual motifs as tools to disseminate social and political ideologies. Unsurprisingly artists of the late 20th century took advantage of the HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 135 identity boundaries that had been blurring within the West, and used their work to mold the changing shape of identity expression. Since the 1960s vestiges of androgyny, drag, gender nonconformity, and male sensuality have flourished across the landscape of international Rock and Roll due to musical pioneers like David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Bowie painted his face in all manner of makeup and toyed with gender both in his music and international live performances. Jagger and the Stones’ predominantly white male audience consumed with eager anticipation the palatable controversy of the lead singer’s moppy long hair and white fringe dresses. However, this same audience infamously drew the line at a radical articulation of Black masculinity in the 1980s by none other than the Purple One (Cochrane, 2015; Gamble & Huff, 2014). In 1981 while opening for The Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Prince, clad in a trench coat and black bikini briefs, was pelted with food by the audience and on the receiving end of homophobia in response to his gender-defiance (Heller, 2016). Though Rock and Roll fans had somehow found a way to appreciate Jagger in a dress and Bowie’s androgynous Ziggy Stardust persona nearly a decade ear- lier, Prince’s radicalization of masculinity failed to resonate with them. Whether it was his relative newcomer status, apathy toward his brand of performance and music, or that longstanding ideas about the Black male body had left them bothered and bewil- dered about Prince’s reinterpretation of masculine conventions, their responses reify that too great a deviation from the norm incites both punishment and ridicule, especially for Black bodies. Prince, however, took this as an opportunity to construct an entirely different reality whereby his art would be recognized for what it was worth. To do this, he continued pushing at the boundaries. It is important here to note that few of Prince’s Black con- temporaries performed their masculinities in the radically subversive ways that he did. Augmenting his height in high heeled shoes, clad in lacy lingerie, flipping feathered hair or bouncing curls, Prince’s image can be poised in contrast to those of other iconic Black male sex symbols of the late seventies through the eighties to showcase how he offered an alternative to familiar modes of Black masculine presentation.

I am something that you’ll never comprehend: Prince’s disruption of Black masculine convention Although Michael Jackson is often positioned as a foil to Prince, Jackson’s onstage persona and image does not lend itself to an equivalent comparison of how overt sexuality or displays of poignantly eroticized and subversive gender play within the musical landscape of the 1980s. Arguably more suitable were sex icons Teddy Pendergrass (1950–2010), whom John Hudson of the Atlantic identifies as a “sex symbol of his era” (Hudson, 2010), and Bobby Brown (1969–), whom Los Angeles Times writer Robert Hilburn described as “moving around the stage with confidence and sexuality” (Hilburn, 1992). Though Prince and Pendergrass, whose stacked physique emphasized his sex appeal, shared a kind of sensual languidness when performing for audiences populated by cheering women, Pendergrass expressed a masculinity that could best be described as evocative of traditional archetypes of manhood. 136 K. T. WHITENEIR

In his iconic 1979 concert at the Sahara casino, Pendergrass appears in various stages of dress, beginning in a shimmering pastor’s robe that signified his gospel inspirations, transitioning to a white dress shirt and white bell bottoms, and ultimately ending the performance dressed only in a white a-shirt and a sheen of sweat that made his pants cling to his thighs. His close-cropped hair, full beard, and unambiguously muscled body lean closer to a familiar silhouette of Western masculine body aesthetics than Prince’s pointedly subversive fare on the stage, (King, 2010; Gilchrist, 2006). At Prince’s debut show at the Roxy the same year Pendergrass played the Sahara, the then-19-year-old, strutted around the stage in a skin-tight shirt, a pair of zebra striped panties, thigh high socks, and his long hair styled in a popular hairstyle worn by some of the most iconic sex symbols of the eighties: the feathered blowout (Muller, 2014). Coupling this with choreography, Don Snowden described as “enough pelvic grinds and phallic guitar poses … to give most obnoxiously macho rock stars a run for their mon- ey,” Prince demonstrated a kind of erotic masculinity that was a far cry from that of Pendergrass’s more traditional approach to masculine eroticism, which plays a massive role in why audiences understand Prince as transcending Blackness and Black masculinity (Snowden, 1979). As Prince continued to perform throughout the eighties, more male musicians took the stage of the late 20th century musical market, adding to the list those who could be juxtaposed against Prince and his brand of Black masculinity. Bobby Brown—who began his career outside of the adult contemporary genre as a teen heartthrob member of the band New Edition—broke off from his origins to become one such artist by embodying his self-described “hardheaded,” good-boy-turned-bad silhouette (Phull, 2017). Nearly a decade after 19-year-old Prince debuted at the Roxy in a thong, 19- year-old Brown stripped away the veneer of the do-good post-pubescent boy, and swathed himself in the iconic white a-shirt that, as it did for Pendergrass, read as a shorthand for unambiguous machismo on the cover of his most famous single, My Prerogative. Prince continued to deliver on the growing expectation of his radically queer Black masculinity. That same year, the 29-year-old dressed in Victorian-inspired ruffled blouses and crop tops as mega fans tousled his long, curled hair. To be clear, this comparison of Prince with Pendergrass and Brown’s willingness to perform within these particular cultural narratives of Black masculinity does not operate as a critique of their integrity as artists or men. Instead, it functions here as critical to a discourse on the socioeconomic and cultural capital gained from enacting sanctioned racial and gender signifiers and, further, how Prince successfully navigated and sub- verted Black masculinity (Patterson & Elliott, 2002). Like financial capital, cultural capital is often leveraged through attendance to approved cultural codes. That is to say that the performance of culturally accepted social rituals carries weight that translates into both tangible and intangible social benefits, including societal prominence and esteem, approval by other participants performing within the cultural system, and the acquisi- tion of financial or monetized capital, especially in commercially driven creative fields (Patterson & Elliott, 2002). Apart from being a Black man within the American system that has historically char- acterized Black bodies as spectacle in one form or another, he was employed as an artist, a producer of cultural and financial capital, whose career thrived on being HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 137 considered lucrative and readily consumed. As a public figure whose career relied upon the consumption of his art as a good, Prince was squarely positioned in what Jackson (2006) calls the popular marketplace. Evoking race and class scholar Cornel West, Jackson states that “Black bodies [are] commodified in a number of ways throughout everyday American life,” and that not only is the Black body “treated as cultural capital” within our pop cultural machine, but further that it is a lucrative cultural and financial institution (Jackson, 2006). As an artist, Prince was especially immersed within this cultural model. He succeeded in navigating a highly policed landscape of presumed expectations by strategically playing into the intrigue surrounding his sexuality and gender with lyrics like those from his 1984 hit, “I Would Die 4 U” which dabbled with gender identity and employed no gimmick or overly ostentatious display to summarily encapsu- late and respond to the cross-generational voices commenting both then and now about his identity. Recognizing the importance of being not only a powerhouse musician, but also an engaging contemporary artist, Prince proved to be well-versed in the importance of stirring the audience without alienating them, all while maintaining the subversive shape of Black masculinity he desired for his artistic image. Prince succeeded in doing both by presenting himself with an air of mystique. In 1984, Prince was aware that his music would be consumed in record high numbers, but also that it was his most powerful vocal piece to the masses (Sheffield, 2016, p.6). His early interviews in the 1980s were short and shrouded in duplicity, his first televised interview to MTV did not come until 1985, and, as his career progressed, Prince moved toward pointed silence in interviews, until eventually he regularly refused them. Therefore, for an audience with a culturally ingrained greed for the Black body, Prince upheld an arm’s length distance that early in his career worked to his advantage. Listeners and viewers devoured the scant bits he offered to television hosts like Wolfman Jack during his televised debut on NBC’s The Midnight Special, in 1979. He gyrated and performed in a barely-there leopard print costume while simultaneously answering Jack’s questions with short, seemingly paradoxical demurity. Even in interviews with journalists and magazines questioning his artistic motivations and inspirations, he was regularly pleasant but uncompromisingly reticent; telling the Rolling Stone in no uncertain terms, “I play music. I make records. I make movies. I don’t do interviews” (Karlen, 1990; Loder, 1984, p. 22; Sheffield, 2016, p. 6). )Further, though E. Patrick Johnson stated silence functions as a tool whereby masculinity propa- gates the “sexual difference and the imperialism of patriarchy,” Prince subverts this trope again through music. (Johnson, 2003, pp. 31–32). Through songwriting, the only speaking he felt obligated to, his music served to simultaneously disseminate the ideals that defined his genius, garner cultural and financial capital, and displace the expectations of this popular marketplace by making their hunger his asset. “When Doves Cry” exemplified this by narrating the sex-fueled image he employed, coupled with the vulnerability that oft-defined his unique persona. In one scene, Prince stares into a vanity, his white shirt open at the chest, as he questions how he could have been abandoned by an absent lover. His loneliness—which, save for the viewers’ presence as hungry voyeurs, is punctuated by a photograph of his on-screen father— betrays a vulnerability that counters the assumption of the Black masculine psyche as devoid of emotion (Yep & Elia, 2007). Lyrically, he questioned whether the very 138 K. T. WHITENEIR boldness of his father—which coincides visually with the battering of his mother—was the source of tension between him and his lover. The domestic violence perpetuated by his father is met with interrogation and uncertainty, questions that issue a challenge to the cliched narrative of emotional aloofness, an aspect of masculinity key in what scholar R.W Connell termed hegemonic masculinity in the late century. Her theory asserts, that though sanctioned and familiar versions of gender can predominate within a geocultural region’s social moment, the performance of identity is still heterogenous. Be it gender, race, class, or the combination thereof, multiple narratives of identity span across region, culture, time, and individual (Connell, 2005, p. 76). Further, Connell wrote that hegemony is “the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life … and is likely to be established only if there is some correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power, collective if not individual” (Connell, 2005, p.77). For Black bodies though, hegemony plays a much more perva- sive and virulent role in the way they are empowered, consumed, and understood within the American cultural biome. Social activist and author bell hooks recounts from her youth the multifaceted shape of masculinity dominated by a more “esteemed version of manhood” (hooks, 1992,p. 15). This “patriarchal ideal” and other hegemonic modes of behavior are typically established through two symbiotic functions: the repeated demonstration and illustration of a set of behaviors until they are considered traditional, and the simultaneous repudiation of behaviors deemed inferior until they are made taboo. The popular marketplace is saturated with a number of cultural outputs that act as catalysts for and reinforce these cultural schemas, serving hegemonic standards through the process of stigmatizing and propagating sanctioned social phenomenon, including scripted and unscripted television and film, music, fine art, and print media, among others. For an audience indoctrinated within this limited consciousness to understand Prince’s flirtation with the nuances of performing Black masculinity, not only is a familiarity with 20th century Western con- cepts of gender necessary, but also their intersection with Blackness, race, and ethnicity. Though Purple Rain and “When Doves Cry,” predated the discourse, Kimberle Crenshaw’s critical work on intersectionality put into definitive terms how Blackness and masculinity work in tandem in Prince’s art. In her 1991 work, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, Crenshaw argued that “identity-based politics [had] been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development” for subjugated peoples, expressly African American and queer communities (p. 1242). An awareness of the aspects of one’s self and how they come to shape their perception of the world and their experiences within it would lead to not only the betterment of their communities, but also others with which they interact. Crenshaw articulated that the then-dominant narrative within discussions of identity politics and activism positioned difference as detriment. 20th century American social activists believed that the dissolution of differences would ease intercommunity tensions. However, Crenshaw who saw this perspective as fundamentally problematic for the ways it disregards the interaction between race, gender, and class dynamics built upon the work of other sociologists who argued the centrality of racism in presuppositions of gender and offered an alternative narrative: that an awareness of and respect HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 139 for how these differences interact could inspire sympathy and broaden our awareness of the experiences of others (Westwood, 1990). Intersectionality has within the last two decades become a mainstay of gender, race, and identity studies as well as social activism. The discourse often attends to the com- plexities of discrimination, wage inequality, and sexual and domestic violence against women, low-income, ethnic, queer, disabled, and other marginalized peoples; but also how class, race, ethnicity, and gender performance and performativity combine and ultimately compound upon each other in ways that impact every person differently (Crenshaw, 1991; Kimberle Crenshaw on Intersectionality, 2017). The stereotypes faced by American Black men, of virility, of hypersexuality and aggression, of violence, are distinctly different from the assumed fragility, docility, and sexual ambiguity of East Asian men (Westwood, 1990). Thus, it is critical that the understanding of gender take into account the intersections with other identity positions. Prince demonstrated the cruciality of recognizing intersectional difference through his ability to flout gender expectations in ways that were neither replicated nor challenged by peers, many of which happily articulated their masculinity through more familiar and traditional Western lenses. His career epitomizes that race and gender are insepar- able, and that they are crucial to our performance of identity and selfhood. Viewers cannot understand how Prince undermined expected notions of gender without understanding how he was undermining expected ideas of how Black men perform. This is especially true if their cognitive position assumes that he transcended and existed outside of Black masculinity instead of frequently and unapologetically challenging, questioning, and offering different articulations of the performance of Blackness. However, though Prince achieved an extraordinary level of success, in many ways he contended with the consequences of how he challenged expectations throughout his decades long career, and continues to postmortem. Although artists like Pendergrass and Brown never found themselves pelted with food or the target of homophobic slurs for their performances of masculinity, theirs and Prince’s versions of individual expression are proof that varied performances of gender can successfully coexist simultaneously and successfully despite the disadvantage against untraditional identity expressions. It is these moments of difference that contain the kind of multiplicity hooks articulates existed alongside hegemonic masculinity: Throughout black male history in the United States there have been black men who were not at all interested in the patriarchal ideal. In the black community of my childhood, there was no monolithic standard of black masculinity. Though the patriarchal ideal was the most esteemed version of manhood, it was not the only version (1992, p.88). This kind of multiplicity can illuminate and encourage different performances of masculinity beyond the expected narratives, but also work to redefine and broaden the legibility of different gender taxonomies. Sometimes running parallel to each other, and at other times intersecting, the performance of identities is both multiplicitous and in a constant state of flux. What is unanimously sanctioned within our generation may have been scorned in the last, and what may have been considered taboo within one community is concurrently valued in another. What scholars like hooks and artists like Prince present to us is that though one narrative may garner more sociocultural capital, another can coexist alongside it, and that we must recognize its presence and impact. It 140 K. T. WHITENEIR is this that he performed for a global audience. What Pendergrass and Brown gained from their display of sanctioned forms of Black masculinity was the ability to perform gender as they understood them and navigate spaces that read these performances as not only legible for Black men, but legible for a larger Western audience who considered them Black male sex symbols (Gamble & Huff, 2010; King, 2010; Bahr, 2018). What we gained from Prince was the privilege to see how Black masculinity could be so much more. Forever loved by women, and—albeit not usually imitated by them like Pendergrass and Brown’s conventional masculinity were—appreciated by men, Prince was able to define for us a subversive narrative where traditional masculinity was irrelevant. Yet, the result has been a kind of ambiguity about both his Blackness and gender that is often misinterpreted, and this is symptomatic of a cultural myopia resulting from a predominantly white American gaze and commentary on Black gender. A myopia that has historically attempted to confine Black culture and its people. Black masculinity is oft-allowed a limited threshold of articulation within a Eurocentric Western framework, lest it be misconstrued by an audience, willingly or otherwise, unfamiliar with its different presentations (Westwood, 1990). And herein lies the greatest difficulty many have in understanding Prince’spen- chant for queering the formula and representation of Black gender conventions. When the possibilities presented exceed the framework that is used to analyze them, clumsy and often reductive interpretations like transcendence or “biracialism” take the place of nuanced critical engagements with how he approached the eternally present concept of his race and gender (Palmer 1981). This is not to say that Prince was always perfect in his articulation of Blackness. Almost 40 years ago Prince not only danced around the topic of his race, he explicitly denied it, saying “Idon’t necessarily look on myself as amemberoftheblackrace—more a member of the human race” (Salewicz, 2013). However, 25 years ago, when Prince scrawled “slave” across his face he articulated for all to see that Blackness was central to his experience (“Beyond music”, 2016). To the day he died, he combated racial inequality and attempted to level the playing field through activism and philanthropy. So, by interpreting statements made in 1981 and statements like “I never grew up in one particular culture” (Hicks, 2014) as admission of some kind of “Black–White synthesis,” scholars and critics disregard Prince’s demonstration of how important Blackness is to his artistry. Doing so they ignore the intersections, the very chance to see not only how broad Black culture is, but also how broad American culture is. They miss how Blackness can be communicated in more expansive ways.

Conclusion “When Doves Cry” set the pace of the era by not only skyrocketing to number one. It also confirmed that not only could sex sell for Prince, but that this kind of vulnerability was equally as lucrative for him. Prince’s calculated ability to offer just enough to his audience, while keeping just enough away, reveals why he remains both a musical and visual icon, and one of the most mystifying and sophisticated public figures of this contemporary moment. His ability to showcase his body without relying on sheer provoca- tion nor cliched narratives of the Black male body turned the Rock and Roll genre onto its head. Though it is a groundbreaking piece of music, “When Doves Cry” is but a HOWARD JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS 141 part of a greater body of work that epitomized Prince’s ability to balance the complex- ities of sensuality. Alongside “Let’s Go Crazy,”“I Would Die 4 U,” and the eternally iconic “Purple Rain,” the album singles built the foundation for the Purple Rain era, which has become representative of the kind of emotional versatility and candor many expected of Prince. Emotional versatility that can expand a restricted understanding of Blackness rather than merely exist outside or beyond it. The art that he provided to generations of listeners can simultaneously be done justice and understated in the same breath. From the afterlife, he still causes controversy. He still queers genres and expectations. He still manages to elude our ability to capture the depth of his work. “When Doves Cry” with its absent bassline and sensitive visual aesthetic played a critical role in Prince’s career. As his first number one single in America, it marked a turning point in terms of commercial success for his career. As a sleek music video promoting his first major motion picture film, it is indicative of the weight his name could carry and the relevancy of his work and persona. But as a piece of art, its significance also comes down to how it still serves to shape our understanding of culture. Yet, even as a scholar, one continuously working to hone their ability to communicate complex ideas and nuance, it is incredibly difficult to find the perfect words which befit the magnitude of even this single moment in his career. Ideas of what constitutes Blackness and masculinity have changed since 1984. Yet even with an expanding horizon of musical and visual work depicting the softness, vulnerability, and sensuality inherent but oft-forgotten within masculinity, Prince continues to remind us that a man’s stomach can still tremble inside. And even further, that Blackness does not preclude this kind of emotional sophistication. As sexually experi- enced, as physically stacked, and as hardworking as a Black man can be, his body does not represent all there is to his person. And an embodiment of this nuance, does not translate to mere transcendence. Prince did not go beyond. He embodied. For as radical as he was, Prince was at his core a human being. He was a man unafraid to tap into the fullest spectrum of emotion, of masculinity, and of Blackness to relay to us, that we can define who we are. In many ways, Prince saw the world as free of certain boundaries, free of certain limitations, and we can hear that in the way soul flowed into rock, rock into pop. To relegate this to the fallacy of transcending who he was is to miss how he has taken these assumptions and challenged us to reconsider them. If we are to in fact dig the picture, we must try to understand as many of its elements as we possibly can to learn from it.

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