Let’s celebrate "this thing called life”
Prince
By Dr Andrea Baker
“I don’t wanna die. I’d rather dance my life away”, US music icon Prince sang on his fifth album, 1999.
Today we are celebrating the legacy, the passion and genius of Prince (Rogers Nelson) who passed away suddenly at his home in Paisley Park, Minneapolis (Minnesota). He was 57.
"I'm gutted, he wrote the sound track of the better part of my teenage years. He is the American Bowie", said Gretchen Wood, a music researcher from the University of Mississippi.
Bowie’s death on 11 January this year was gut wrenching, but Prince’s passing on 21 April seems surreal.
When the news broke yesterday at 1.15pm US time that Prince had died, MTV in the US immediately stopped its regular programming and began a marathon of his music videos.
NASA projected images of Purple Rain, the title track of his 1984 album on its website. The album sold more than 13 million copies in the US and stayed No 1 on the Billboard charts for 24 consecutive weeks. In 1984, Prince won an academy award for Best Original Music Score, for the film Purple Rain which was derived from the album.
He also won a Golden Globe in 2007 for another composition Song of the Heart for the Australian film director's George Miller’s Hollywood feature animation Happy Feet.
One of the most advanced, multitalented artists this century has seen, Prince was a singer song writer, a multi instrumentalist, dancer, performer, producer and the occasional actor, like his cameo appearance in Wes Anderson's 2014 comedy film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the pure sense of the word, Prince was an impresario.
Growing up in a musical African American family in the mid west US, his father John Lewis Nelson, was a pianist and song writer and his mother Mattie Della (Shaw) was a jazz singer. Following the release of his first single, at age 19 For You (1978) the kid from Minneapolis scored a three album recording contract from Warner Brothers, and was given complete creative control, and publishing rights, which was unheard of at the time. Prince's swift rise to musical fame helped to create a lasting legacy, the Minneapolis sound, which since the 1970s, has been described as of smart mix mash of rhythms and blues, synthpop, rock, jazz, soul, funk with a dash of hip hop.
Prince became a music superstar with other smash hits such as Little Red Corvette (1983) and continued to party “like it was 1999". He disturbed the rock formulae and musical thread with his long mixed genre compositions, but still appealed to the mainstream and the underground.
Winner of seven Grammys, while presenting the Album of the Year in 2015, the radically outspoken Prince said that, “Books still matter, Albums still matter, being Black still matters”.
Influenced by Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix, the unpredictable Prince was majestic on stage, with or without, his extraordinary weeping guitar playing.
His impromptu jam sessions were legendary. Like his last three hour marathon in 2013 at South by South West in Austin (Texas) which some of us were lucky to attend. Held at the last minute at an intimate venue of La Zona Rosa, Prince entertained a few hundred fans until 2am when the police kicked everyone out.
With only two weeks’ notice, Prince’s HitnRun tour in February 2016 played to sell out concerts in Sydney, Melbourne (Australia) and Auckland (New Zealand).
Serge Thomann, music photographer (and Deputy Mayor, City of Port Phillip) was at the Melbourne concert.
“Even a piano and a microphone seemed superfluous at times in the purple shadow. For me, it was the concert of a lifetime.”
Between 1978 and 2015 Prince composed more than 50 albums and sold over 100 million albums worldwide, making him one of the best selling artists of all time.
Prolific and hyper protective of his work, Prince’s musical legacy lives on in many unreleased compositions which remain locked in a vault at his Minneapolis home.
Dr Andrea Baker is a senior lecturer in journalism within the School of Journalism and Australian Studies, Faculty of Arts.