As Prince moved from "1999" into "Little Red Corvette," I fired questions at my 16-year-old brother: Who is that? He's so weird! Is he wearing make-up? Why is his hair like that? Do you like this song? My brother was more than happy to answer my questions if it meant steering me away from the empty calories of Air Supply and Hall & Oates that were the staple of my musical diet at that point. Yes, Prince is very fucking cool, his tone told me. Yes, this guy is the real deal. Yes. He came from another dimension to blow your tiny preteen mind.
A few weeks later, I visited a record store and bought Dirty Mind. I put it into my Walkman immediately, and didn't take it out for the next six months. That opening beat, like a heartbeat, followed by Prince's extra-high soprano, sounded to my very white, very Catholic ears like the sexiest whisper of temptation I'd ever heard.
There's something about you, baby
It happens all the time
Whenever I'm around you, baby
I get a dirty mind
It doesn't matter where we are
It doesn't matter who's around
It doesn't matter, I just want to lay you down
It was like listening to my nascent libido. Prince was a dangerously sexy alien who lived inside my head and knew exactly how sick my thoughts were. He understood the enormous inconvenience of getting a dirty mind whenever you're around someone — which is the pretty much the dominant ambience of a 12-year-old's existence. Suddenly I knew that all of the things that everyone called "bad" might actually be very, very good indeed.
And there was something so gentle and loving and right about Prince. He had a massive sex drive (Obviously! All the guy did was fuck!) but he didn't have the scary vibe of a macho dude who would manhandle you with his giant, clumsy bear paws and then leave you mauled and weeping afterwards. Prince was filthy but sensitive. He knew what he was doing. He had skills. When he bragged about his skills and then shimmied around onstage and then played those finessed, nuanced guitar licks with those delicate hands of his … Well. You learned things about your own desires just watching him. It was not difficult to access your sexual imagination, once you knew that Prince existed.
And nothing Prince claimed seemed far-fetched. It seemed plausible that virgins on their way to be wed would stop and proclaim to him, "I must confess, I want to get undressed and go to bed." I didn't even know what this "head" thing was, but I knew Prince could probably do it better than any man alive. And he wouldn't make you feel cheap about it, either. He'd make you feel like the center of the known universe. Prince seemed to love women for all of the right reasons. Prince was part woman, maybe. Or maybe he was part gay. I didn't have the slightest grasp of what any of this stuff meant — I barely understood binary gender constructions — but I knew that Prince found all of the traditional distinctions made by mortal man useless and arbitrary and hopelessly narrow-minded.
Prince made pop music seem more exciting and smarter than it ever had before. Prince made sex seem full of possibility instead of sinful and scary. Prince made regular everyday men seem clumsy and unimaginative.
So I bought 1999 and listened to that constantly. And then Purple Rain came out.
"The Beautiful Ones" was by far my favorite song on that album. I listened to it over and over again until I couldn't stand the sound of any other song. No other song could touch the seductive melancholy of "The Beautiful Ones." Here was a song that felt just like falling madly in love and lust and then watching it slip out of your grasp. Plenty of songs are about that, but Prince takes it past the gentle, flat ocean of "I want you back" and heads out for the open sea of desire and despair and rage and raw physical longing. When Prince starts singing "Do you want me?" it's so unexpected and so wretched that it's impossible not to feel every cell of your body spring to life. When he screeches "Baby baby baby I want you!" it sounds like a baby crying, which is exactly how it feels to want someone who is indifferent about you.
I loved that song desperately, precisely because it embodied the feeling you have, when you're so obsessed that you can barely breathe, that if you express yourself clearly enough and passionately enough, the object of your obsession will somehow be moved enough by your passion to come around. This essential misunderstanding — that by explaining your desires clearly and forcefully, you'll finally be embraced and loved deeply — ruled the next 15 years of my life. "The Beautiful Ones" was a terrible, irresistible omen of things to come.
by Heather Havrilesky, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Ron Wolfson
