Saturday January 5, 2008
My Prince obsession, which began in 1980 in seventh grade with Dirty Mind, didn’t have as much to do with the lyrics or the music as with the mere taboo of the scandalous cover featuring the man himself in a black g-string.
It intensified with Controversy, for the resonance of the lyrics (“I just can’t believe all the things people say. Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?”) and with Purple Rain for the otherworldly rhythms, the shrieks of “When Doves Cry” and raw sexuality of “Nicky,” all balm for my adolescent hurts. (I saw the movie at least half a dozen times when it came out, and was moved to tears repeatedly, though when I tried to watch it recently the melodrama and comically terrible acting made it clear how much of a teen movie it is.)
At my high school in the mid-80’s the prevailing fashion was preppy, the music du jour new wave/Euro. Michael Jackson, with his narrowed nose and ever-whitening skin, was as black and sexy as was remotely permissible (“Thriller” was popular with the cheerleaders). In that milieu, to love Prince was to label oneself a misfit. Relegated to the outsider camp, I embraced his persona.
Through the latter part of high school I wore purple prodigiously, kept my asymmetrical hair short, curly and draped over one eye and waited in the pre-dawn cold of downtown Chicago to buy concert tickets.
For one of my high school’s annual walkathons along Lake Michigan’s Gold Coast, I brought my boom box and a cassette recording of “Delirious,” which I played over and over after attaching myself to a group of speed walkers led by the school’s most venerable Latin teacher, who was known for finishing first.
They were the uber geeks and they treated me warily at first. But they soon surrendered to the song’s bounce and zip (and, dare I say, lyrics like “I’m gonna explode and girl I got a lot”), crossing the finish line in record time.
During that time I broadened my collection with For You and Prince and bought the work of his protégés, the Time, Sheila E., the Bangles, and Cyndi Lauper, whose cover of “When You Were Mine” was good, though not, of course, as good as the original.
The day Parade was released, during my freshman year of college, my friend Colm (probably the biggest Prince fan I knew, other than myself) and I skipped class for a trip to the local record store. It was a delicious moment, hooky as rite of passage, and who better to inspire it but the master rule breaker himself?
With Sign O’ The Times my Prince obsession began to wane. Socially, college was a much better fit for me than high school and I no longer needed the validation he’d provided. By the time LoveSexy came out, the nakedness of his album cover self didn’t resonate as it had back in my junior high days. I’d become enraptured with Billie Holiday and her exquisite renderings of ache and longing, which soothed my own serial collegiate heartbreaks.
During those years I was a voracious consumer of music with a massive album collection that I moved in its ever-expanding entirety multiple times, first when I left Chicago for college in Annapolis, then for a year in Santa Fe, then back to Annapolis and then, after college, to various shared flats in San Francisco.
My knowledge of my collection wasn’t particularly deep. I’d buy stuff that looked interesting and pick up the discards of friends and family (when one sister started dating a heavy metal-head I inherited her entire Beatles collection, and when another sister broke up with her boyfriend I got all the Blondie and Bowie records he’d given her).
These things would go into the crates with everything else, waiting for the moment when I’d pull something out that I hadn’t heard in a while – or something I’d never heard -- to see what it sounded like.
That’s how I discovered Blue. I can’t say for sure how Joni Mitchell wound up in my collection. It may have been the Columbia Record of the Month Club, which I patronized for years and through which I was introduced, most memorably, to the Pretenders and Earth, Wind and Fire.
For all of my self-perceived musical openness, when I put Blue on that first time, which was the first time in my life
I had heard Joni Mitchell sing, it sounded to my ears whiny and pretty much unlistenable. Back it went into its sleeve, forgotten for years.
After college, at my first job in San Francisco (as an order-taker for a bike messenger company) the book keeper and I struck up a friendship. Like many people who choose to live in a desirable place for reasons other than work, he was incredibly overqualified for his job, which made him, to me, inherently interesting. He was a couple decades older than I and we spent our lunch breaks through the winter of 1990 looking for the intersections in our world views and cultural influences (the Billie Holiday connection helped).
When he told me he was a huge fan of Joni Mitchell I chalked it up to sentimentality. But that night, in the early evening darkness, I pulled out the dusky record and set it on the turntable.
Sitting in the armchair of my third-floor walkup I watched the fog settle in over the traffic sliding down Golden Gate Avenue. I listened to the first side. Then I flipped the record over and listened to side two. Then I listened to the whole thing three more times. It wasn’t love at first listen but by the end of the night Joni Mitchell’s mournful observations had insinuated themselves into my 22-year-old self.
By then my days of obsessing over an artist had passed. The complications of finding and keeping a job and an apartment, of making a life in an unknown city beyond the cocoon of school and family, had obliterated such self-indulgence.
I was still on the lookout for songs. The kind that transport you, that take you out of where and who you are while at the same time clarifying those very things. The kind you can listen to thirty times and still want to listen to thirty more. Songs that are perfect, or as close to perfect as anything can be.
“A Case of You” was one of those songs. I was glad that song had found its way into my life, that I could add it to the list of things that made me appreciate the beauty of music and the creative gifts some rare few people possess.
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Fast-forward 17 years, to a couple of days past Christmas, 2007. I’m sitting in the kitchen at the home of my husband’s cousin and her family. There’s a fire going in the fireplace. Their kids and ours are romping, dinner is cooking.
We’re sipping wine and listening to a new CD somebody got for Christmas. I hear Bjork and Cassandra Wilson, both of whom I greatly admire, but they barely register, the background accompaniment to a lovely evening.
Then comes a song that snaps me to attention. It’s “A Case of You” but in place of the sitar-esque guitar and Mitchell’s canuckian virtuosity (“I drew a map of Canada, Oh Canada”) are Prince’s gospel-esque piano chords and a tak-tak metronomic beat, his pitch-perfect falsetto infused with a mesmerizing churchy reverence (“You’re in my blood like holy wine, you taste so bitter and so sweet”).
I repair to the CD player, turn up the volume and play it again and again, with each listen drawn deeper into the intense beauty of this version, as different as can be from the original, and, like the second child you can’t believe you could ever love as much as the first, as perfect.
On the drive home the following day, and over the next few days in that luxurious lull between Christmas and New Year’s, I ponder the multiple revelations of this song.
How it has returned my Prince to me, a different Prince from the singer of my youth, as tender as always, but infused with an adult introspection.
How this is the first time in my life I’ve ever liked a new version of a song as much as a song I deemed perfect in its original form, and what degree of genius is required to achieve such a feat.
How this song, first recorded in 1971, sounds, on the cusp of 2008, some 37 years later, contemporary and meaningful.
How it is as rare for black artists to cover songs written and recorded by whites as it is common for white artists to cover songs written and recorded by blacks.
And, most significantly for me, a white person who grew up in a black part of Chicago, listening to Caruso at home and Cameo with my elementary school friends and who now, at nearly 40 years old anticipates that for the rest of her life will continue to parse the connections and meanings of that intersection, how Prince has drawn the line from himself to Joni Mitchell, a line that through his immense artistry appears, like a difficult balletic feat, clear, direct and inevitable.
A line I never saw, never knew existed except in some inexplicable place inside of me.
A Case of You
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