black-popular-culture

[black-popular-culture]

[black-popular-culture]

Hypocritical, feeding the needy while worshipping the greedy? Sure sounds like a Conservative to me.

[black-popular-culture]

Prince: Emerging Black Identities in the 1980s

Every few decades, a musical artist registers on our cultural radar that redefines a sound of a generation. See Taylor Swift. In the 1980s, that artist was Prince Rogers Nelson. Born in Minneapolis, MN, Prince released his second album, Controversy, in 1981. Only twenty-three at the time, he captured the imaginations of critics and funk fans alike. But the nation-at-large was not ready for an “album posters show[ing] Prince in a shower stall, half-naked and dripping wet, posed next to a small crucifix.” Expressions of black sexuality, as proliferated by whites. Those who have held ignorant, fucked up, and racist views, prove how the fetishization of blackness since first Africans touched terra firma.

Malcolm X said, and Denzel Washington made famously, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock landed on us.” X’s racial metaphor was a reinterpretation of DuBois’ metaphor of the veil. Both men, having had access to information that negated white-perceived notions of biological differences between the races, could have also applied the same philosophy to gender. Labeling race and gender do nothing more than cloak individuals by controlling and setting societal norms, while also moderating and moralizing personal behavior. Labels like male and female or black and white are not intuitively defined but are learned patterns of behavior set by their Anglo-American parents. Those teachings firmly reinforced the fear, racism, sexism, misogyny, anti-intellectualism, selfishness, and entitlement that whites have enjoyed since the rape and genocide of Indigenous peoples.

Anglo-Americans were waking from their 1970s slumber as a certain slack-jawed president, awed by the “disgusting” cultural events of the 1970s (gays, disco), promised “Morning in America” at the decade’s open. Luckily, President Frederick D. Roosevelt had already signed into law a policy that forbade racial discrimination in government services including contractors and all other government-contracted agencies. The impact of the law raised the incomes of many black families. As Black Americans continued to gain strides in the middle-class, Anglo-Americans’ assholes pinched even tighter.

In the wake of the civil rights struggle, fissures grew in the black community as more blacks, mirroring the trajectory of their white counterparts, fled the ghetto for the relative safety of the suburbs. Fearing the encroaching darkness, whites (and some blacks) found political comfort in the only place they knew to look, in the arms of their white daddy, Ronald Reagan. Burning disco records were not just backlash against the music itself. Anglo-Americans who sat at the top of the nation’s music industry revealed received ideas about the black and feminized culture it produced.

Steve Dahl is famous for one thing alone, blowing up disco records. In 1979, the Chicago disc jockey promoted an event that was designed to fill seats at a double-header at Comiskey Park, but it “turned into a mass anti-disco movement from which disco never recovered.” After factoring in the musical artist, music genre and popular culture, and trending “street” styles, America has, throughout history, been gender-coded by its space and time as either feminine or masculine. Disco, heavy with black, female, and gay participation as both musician and spectator, was received and gendered feminine. Therefore, anything or anyone who claimed association with disco was accused of being a part of a secretive, gay, black cabal whose sole goal was to tear asunder the fabric of our great, white, paternalistic nation.

Out of Dahl’s ashes, rose a beautiful, black, sexually ambiguous Prince. Nelson George wrote that “no black performer since Little Richard had toyed with the heterosexual sensibilities of Black America so brazenly” It is true that Prince’s performances of gender and race were rooted in a deep history of black artistic expression, but like his slow-to-appear successor, his popularity was predicated on his ability to influence the social agenda. Unlike Little Richard, however, Prince had MTV (Music Television). Although resistant to incorporating black acts into its line-up, MTV would prove to be the greatest tool for disseminating popular culture’s blueprint.

The 1980s stand as a decade of massive change in the United States. Black scholarship on race and gender were being seriously studied. Reaping the rights that Anglo-Americans had stolen from them, Black Americans entered more institutes of higher learning aided by Affirmative Action and desegregation. Middle-class blacks seized greater control over our own images unmitigated by stares from Anglo-Americans. Just as DuBois had predicted, the talented tenth proved responsible for changing Anglo-America’s perception of what, exactly, it meant to be black in their own country. 

Prince led the musical pack with his gender-bending offerings echoing the early years of David Bowie’s career. Prince blurred the lines between masculine and feminine clearly upsetting the binaries held by most Americans. And he was black? Prince confirmed what Anglo-Americans already feared. After lifetimes of fear-mongering and pearl-clutching, their worst dreams came true. Their Anglo-American daughters were all about Prince. They loved him. They even wanted to (gasp) fuck him! And that’s what happened. White girls drove all into Black American females’ lane. That’s why we’re a nation of multicultural/biracial individuals. Coffee colored,

indeed.

What is most interesting about Prince is that he defied preconceived notions of what blackness

and, black sexuality was. Unlike Michael Jackson who refused to acknowledge his sexuality (Elvis’ daughter? Really?), Prince refused to be veiled by his audience or critics. In the lyrics to his song “Controversy,” Prince asks, “Am I black or white/Am I straight or gay?”  By asking others to clarify and define who he is, he exerts full control by refusing to be limited by what those questions infer. As a nation built upon divisive racial and gender practices, we have been conditioned to view others based upon exterior representations of self. 

Similar to DuBois’ urgent call for the black community to control or own their images, Prince had already established a tight grip on his self-image by the time he became the youngest producer in the history of Warner Bros. Records. This “first” was largely ignored due to the mainstream press’ obsession with categorizing the artist not based on his musical abilities, but on their perceptions of gender and race. Shipler writes, “The notion that blacks are not as smart, not as competent, not as energetic as whites is woven so tightly into American culture it cannot be untangled from everyday thought,” These ideas are exactly what DuBois’ argued veiled his people. 

Prince’s image becomes an obsession with white critics leaving both blacks and whites to question his authenticity. “When he's off, his bombast and swagger seem flimsy and forced, a cheap charade,” wrote one critic in a review for the Chicago Sun-Times that referred to Prince’s music as a “mongrel mix of creamy ballads and brittle funk” before calling the artist a “silly poseur.” Because whites have traditionally been in charge of the media they controlled both how whites saw blacks and, worse, how many blacks saw themselves. But, again, Prince challenged the veil by presenting himself precisely as he wanted.

It has been over 100 years since DuBois declared the problems of the 20th Century would be racially motivated. He was prescient, indeed. With blacks entering the middle-class in record numbers, however, racial veils parted once gaining control of black representation.

On the micro-level, Prince refused to allow the color of his skin to keep him from expanding personal boundaries. Anglo-Americans, except for some white females and white, gay-identified individuals, despised Prince for the same reasons they roundly ignored Ernie Isley. They played better than they could. Anglo-Americans have never produced any music that did not exist in black communities. We invented soloing, for instance, something that is credited today with white music. Prince’s accomplishments paved the way for the many blacks who wanted to live their truth. 

While Prince reveals the emerging identities of blackness that appeared in the 1980s-today, there are several other examples from R&B to punk. He is a symbol of Black American freedom. Prince, of course, went on to become one of the nation’s most controversial artists of the 20th Century. Constantly toying with his image, he mitigated opportunities of veiling by successfully counter-veiling (revealing) his critics as homophobic and/or racist. Like DuBois before him, Prince knew that “life is just a game/we’re all the same” freeing himself from racial and gender stereotypes. Whether consciously or not, Prince understood the power of history, not just remembering it but creating it too.