How the LOVESEXY Album Changed My Life!!!

Here is a segment of a letter I wrote to a friend about five years ago after the One Night Alone tour in Dallas. It concerns the epiphany I experienced when I went to purchase the "Lovesexy" album, almost twenty years ago.



I remember hearing the song “Alphabet Street” well over ten years ago in my senior year of high school and wanting to own a copy of the new Prince album it was from--Lovesexy. I gathered up my money, and zipped down to the token music store at the mall in my hometown in search of the album (actually, a cassette back then). I quickly found it, but wasn’t prepared for what would come next. The cover art to the album shocked me, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

The cover art depicts Prince naked on the cover, a nude pixie astride a large colorful flower. One leg is modestly raised, a necessary gesture of self-censorship. His skin seems to glow, his hair messily brushed back--and one arm crossed gently across his chest, as if attempting to cover his heart. The image suggests a sensitive and fragile creature in a delicate environment. It is an image of stark vulnerability from Prince, a rare glimpse into the soul of a talented, yet often misunderstood artist. I remember the picture making my face turn red as my pulse quickened slightly. Looking around to see if anyone had seen me take it from the shelf, I placed it back. Pacing around the store, I thought heavily about what I should do next. “If anyone ever sees me with this album,” I hastily assumed, “They’ll think I’m gay.”

You see, gay boys aren’t necessarily welcome in the small Southern town where I’m from. In certain circles, I would be heavily chastised for even owning a musical selection from a black artist. The fact that Prince’s choices in costumes (or lack thereof) are bold and flamboyant--flaunting his raging sexual ambiguousness, certainly didn’t help matters much. It would be several years before I would make the decision to come to terms with my own homosexuality, and at this point I was just seeking acceptance by my peers. Gridlocked, I left that store feeling frustrated and kicked down, disappointed in myself for needing to fit in so desperately.

At this point in his career, Prince was starting to get kicked down a bit too. Many people had begun to form an anti-Prince mentality. The mind think at that time had regarded Purple Rain as a masterpiece, and left little room to consider other works that didn’t instantly deliver the same commercial impact. “Prince isn’t cool anymore,” I’d hear often. Or “Oh, it’s a good song, but not as good as “Let’s Go Crazy”. Or “Prince hasn’t come out with anything good since Purple Rain.”

Indeed, many who purchased Around the World in A Day, the highly anticipated follow-up to Purple Rain felt they were misled, betrayed by the infectious hit single “Raspberry Beret. The rest of the album was definitely a far cry from Purple Rain. It was chaotic and dark, mixed with odd and strange musical moments that sometimes startled us. I’ve since accepted that music from this artist is often not what we’d expect for him to do next at all. His music is a wild and beautiful thing--like an alien flower from another planet, which has somehow made it to Earth. It is colorful and mysterious, strangely hypnotizing in complexity, and at times it is perhaps a bit ominous.

Back in that mall I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. “I just want to be like everyone else,” I told myself leaving upset. “I just want to fit in.”

Something in my head snapped as I realized the forces I was setting into motion. “Am I to become this?” I wondered. “Am I to become a slave to the expectations of what others want me to be? Or am I to stand tall, and choose for myself, regardless of what I think others might want me to be? ” I took a deep breath, swallowed and turned back around. Making a bee-line for the cassette, I made my purchase and took it home to devour it.

As Prince blazed through the song “Anna Stesia” toward the close of the Dallas show on April 16th, I found myself looking back on that decision and feeling like I had come full-circle. The song had been one of many favorites from Lovesexy, a spiritually fulfilling album with so many wonderful compositions and themes. “Have you ever felt so lonely that you thought you were the only one in this world?” the song inquires of us. “Have you ever wanted to play with someone so much you’d take any one boy or girl?”

The song continues, reaching into that well of darkness inside each of us. “Between white and black, night and day, black night seemed like the only way, so I danced.” In the angst-ridden torment of my youth, Prince had become the artist with which I could most identify. The song contained everything I viewed as monumental at this time in my young life… alienation, desire, redemption. Prince had become my hero. In him, I seemed to recognize the misfit within myself--a sexually conflicted outsider with universe-bending goals, and the courage to stand up for what he believes in.