The Year Was 1982

At about 12 years old, I became very interested in music. Mostly because I idolized my uncle (my father’s brother, 10 years my senior) and he was a big music fan, with a huge collection of vinyl. I would spend hours in his basement, flipping through his wooden record crates with the Peaches logo on the side, discovering great music. In headphones, I was transported. I was transformed. An imprint was burned into my brain that remains to this day. Parliament/Funkadelic, Slave, Stevie, EWF, Chaka, George Duke, Mtume. All of the greats.

For the first 10 years of my life, my White mother raised me. My Black father was estranged from the family. My grandparents and my uncle were my link to my Blackness. A Blackness that I didn’t yet understand or know how to exercise. My uncle was the only Black man in my life and he was the coolest individual that I had ever encountered, and still is. I really wanted to be like him. But I was different. I had no athletic ability or experience like he did. I didn’t have a large group of friends that I had grown up with. But I could relate to, and connect to, and emulate his voracious appetite for music. Mostly Funk, R&B and Soul.

I remember distinctly, staring at the cover art, reading all of the liner notes, and trying to interpret the cartoons on all of the Parliament records. It was a fully immersive experience. The sounds poured over me like a hot shower and I could simultaneously “see” and “touch” these artists through the physical medium called an LP. (God, I miss that three-dimensional music experience.)

I was flipping through my uncle’s record collection and came across an album with a guy standing in front of some bed springs wearing a trench coat and some bikini briefs. It was shocking. I’d never seen anything like it and it was off-putting. I was frankly surprised that my uncle, a masculine 70s brother, would have such a thing in his collection. Why does this dude dress like a girl? I didn’t get it. I quickly flipped past the record and moved on to things that could easily fit into the Black box that I had unknowingly developed in my head. But later that night, after exhausting several other trails on my musical exploration path, I came back to it. To try to understand it.

The song titles were salacious and titillating. At first, it tasted like a Disco-y, Pop-y, metallic… but guitar… and why is his voice so high? Ohhhh… Wait? What did he just say? I had never heard anything like it. It actually felt “Dirty.” And I could hear the Funk a la Clinton somewhere in there, but this was different. Very different. Harder. Starker. Slicker. Nastier. Younger. Freer. Cooler. More important.

So, I had a new trail to explore. I had to flip through all of the records again and pull out everything that was by this guy, Prince. I found 4 in total, “For You”, “Prince”, “Dirty Mind” and “1999”. The year was 1982. It was all quite astonishing to me. This stuff was really good and sounded like nothing else in my uncle’s collection. When I asked him, his response was, “Prince? Oh, yeah. That boy is bad!” So, I now had verbal confirmation, from the only expert that I gave a shit about, that this guy Prince, despite the way he looked and sounded, was officially sanctioned as something cool and acceptable. In my head, because my uncle said it, Prince was also Black. Sort of in the way that I was Black. Light skin, curly-ish hair, different, but still Black.

This brand new thing called MTV played a Black artist for the first time in its short history. And that artist was Prince. On the late night video shows and Saturday morning music and dance shows, this collection of related performers seemed to appear out of nowhere. I connected to the sound and the aesthetic of it. All of it. All of them. They were a pantheon of super-heroes to me. The hyper-sexualized Vanity and her girls, “sooo fine” I would say. Morris and his Time crew of cool-suited dudes. It seemed that they all lived in some different universe where everything was cool, and everyone was beautiful and having sex and creating a sonic landscape that was custom made for me. And all of this was orbiting around this guy Prince that I found in my uncle’s record crate.

It was like this very special thing that I found. None of the kids at my school were into any of it, at the time. It was my thing. And I kind of liked it that way. The other kids just didn’t get it. And I didn’t really want them to. It was mine. They were my cool friends, not theirs. This was an alternative choice and it was different. And, at that time, that difference was pretty important to me.

In 1984, everyone had figured out what I already knew. This guy was amazing and no one else was doing anything like this. And what he was doing was taking everything that was happening, and had already happened in music, smashing it together and shoving it through this lace-covered Play Dough fun factory and the result was far more than just a new sound. It was more than just music, videos, concerts, movies and television appearances. It was a new aesthetic. It was a new multi-culti world-view. It was a fearless, completely executed artistic vision. Complete with this mythical main character that was clearly gifted in his ability to orchestrate all of this. My 14^th birthday cake was decorated with a picture from the “When Doves Cry” single cover art.

And evangelizing this guy wasn’t always an easy thing. After his mass popularity waned, and pop-culture moved on from the aesthetic of the 80s, I again found myself in a smaller minority of people that loved Prince. And that was just fine with me. The fickle nature of our culture requires both ascension and a decline. But that never mattered to me because I was still that 12-year-old kid in my uncle’s basement looking through records. There were these flashes of output that would receive popular acclaim, but all of it brilliant to me. All of it. It was mine. Still is.

Prince has been a significant part of my life since I was 12 years old. A high school project on my favorite artist. My college searches for bootlegs at the local independent record store. My first love. My soaring achievements and my painful mistakes. Marriage. Divorce. The birth of my children. Sharing this music with my kids and helping them to see the brilliance of this gift. Through all of the changes in my life there have been very few things that have remained constant. This man and his music have been there through it all. Making it all a little bit brighter. Making it all a little bit better.

I’ve stood next to my wife at a Prince show in a small venue trying not to cry at witnessing the sheer overwhelming brilliance of his gift, for fear of appearing weak. I’ve taken 2 city buses in the rain to go to the downtown record store to buy a new Prince release. I have watched every video, listened to every song, read every article, purchased every release official and otherwise, joined every club, gone to every show possible. I have no idea what I invested. But I know that it was worth every penny and every minute. I’ve evangelized this guy and made mix tapes and then CDs for those that needed to be made aware of this very special thing. This very special guy. And this became a central part of what I did. Of who I am.

To say that Prince has had an impact on popular culture would be an underestimation. But I’m not interested in popular culture. I’m only interested in those things that are special and meaningful to me. I could spout off a long list of other artists that couldn’t exist unless he existed first. I could spout off a long list of cultural attributes that couldn’t exist unless he existed first. But, what would be the point?

To say that Prince was a very gifted “human being” would be inaccurate. He wasn’t one of us. He was something different. From somewhere else. There has never been another individual that possessed his combination of gifts. Writer, producer, arranger, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist virtuoso, business mogul, philanthropist, culture pusher, boundary bender.

To say that I am crushed as a result of Prince’s death would be an understatement. My musical hero is gone and I still can’t believe it. The world is just a little less bright. A little less special. I need to figure out what life is like without the anticipation of the next show. Next release. Next appearance. And I will. But this one hurts. Bad. This guy made the soundtrack to my life.

Weak or not, I am a 45 year old man and Prince’s death has moved me to tears. I mourn the loss of a person that I never met but who felt like a friend. It feels very personal. I mourn the loss to the world of this kind of greatness. This kind of excellence. Watching him do what he was placed here to do was one of my favorite things. And I mourn that that opportunity has passed.

So, we are all left with his music and the memory of his gift. And, wow, what a gift. No one has, or ever will, come close. We will never see this kind of pure genius again. Ever.

“Sometimes I wish that life was never ending. But all good things they say, never last. And love it isn’t love, until its past.” – Prince

Wonderful , thankyou.

Nice read, thanks.