http://www.salon.com/2016...he_elites/

Hello, Camille,

I’m hoping you will write your thoughts about the life of Prince, his work, style, “coolness”, and of course his music. I am also interested in where artists choose to live and create. Prince’s Paisley Park worked for him but was out of the normal NYC/ LA neighborhoods. How do you think being out of N.Y./L.A. benefited Prince or any artist or intellectual?

Anthony from California

I would certainly classify Prince as a major artist of the late twentieth century, but I must admit some disappointment with how his brilliant career developed or failed to develop over time. His great period was his early one, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when he created a brand-new sonic landscape and used the emergent genre of music videos as a flamboyant medium of performance art. Musically, he downscaled Rick James’ massive macho funk chords into a bewitching web work of intricate rhythms, intimate and sensual. As a sexual persona, he borrowed transgender motifs from Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix and refashioned himself first as a half-naked S&M rent boy and then as an aristocratic dandy, dripping silk and lace.

There is both a Mardi Gras and voodoo element in Prince: all four of his grandparents were born in Louisiana (and photos of his parents suggest they were at least partly Creole). He was one of the most photogenic people on the planet: his personal magnetism and artistic intensity verged on the eerie and mystical. But it’s clear that, like Michael Jackson, Prince became a prisoner of his own fame. I was horrified by the aerial views of Paisley Park published after his death: I had no idea Prince was living like that–in a lavish windowless bunker as characterless as an office park. Paisley Park is of course mainly a recording studio, but as a residence, it looks like a set for Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.”

No music fan who lived through Prince’s sensational Purple Rain period in 1984 will ever forget it. We were all drenched in the florid extravagance of his swashbuckling self-presentation and the searing confession of his half-crippling melancholy. The long, climactic title song of that movie still has a tremendous, near-religious charge. But then what? By the late 1980s, Prince remained highly productive, but there was a lapse in originality, and very few of his songs ever reached the top of the charts again. Changing his name to a love symbol seemed like a silly stunt to me, and I wasn’t impressed by a multi-millionaire writing “slave” on his face as a gesture against his record company.

The news about Prince’s death two weeks ago was announced while my Art of Song Lyric course was meeting. We were in fact doing the period from James Brown through soul, disco, and funk. I was incredulous when I got back to my office and saw the shocking headline on the Drudge Report. At our next class, I immediately showed Prince’s “Kiss” video (1986) to demonstrate what pure talent looks like. What a low-budget masterpiece that beautifully edited video is—nothing but dance, gesture, seductive rhythm, and witty warmth.

And then I showed a new discovery, a Patti LaBelle song from 1989 that I hadn’t heard in decades and had completely forgotten—“Yo Mister.” I had no idea that Prince had written, produced, and played on that powerful song about a young girl dying of a drug overdose until I read it in the Daily Mail after his death. In the video, Patti is shown (like a deus ex machina on a Philadelphia balcony) condemning the girl’s hard-hearted father as he stonily walks away from her grave in the Louisiana countryside, where a New Orleans funeral march is performed. This song, with its complex church bell reverberation, suggests the serious, avant-garde direction that Prince’s later career could have taken but unfortunately did not.

As for Prince remaining in Minnesota instead of moving to New York or Los Angeles, I think that was a terrific decision on his part. His creative imagination was rich enough—and he had the resources to explore every aspect of the arts on his own. Because of stratospherically rising property costs, New York was no longer the mecca for daring and impoverished young artists that it had been up to the early 1970s. And as for Los Angeles, it has always been about show and status, a cosmos of perpetual anxiety. It was hardly the place for a sensitive soul like the reticent Prince, who preferred enigmatic silence to conversation with strangers. If Prince’s idea stream began to run thin toward the end, it was not due to Minnesota, with its exhilaratingly clear Canadian air, but to a waning in his own confidence and ambition.

Camille actaullt stated yearss ago that after hearing If i was your girlfirend, Prince would be the only man she'd ever date

She gets at least as much wrong as she does right. She misses the post-PR era. Without that you cannot have a fully informed discussion of Prince's legacy.

And she's teaching an "Art of Song Lyric" class?

I think think Camille gets him pretty well. She is maybe too dismissive of his later period, but I also think Prince got lost in the 90s, and never quite recovered. Then again, the Piano and a microphone show I saw in Oakland was my favorite Prince show.

I'll say that Camille is also dismissive of Madonna's later period.

I think she'sright about there being a voodoo element in Prince.

paulludvig said:

I think she'sright about there being a voodoo element in Prince.

Yeah, he often put a spooky vibe into a song or two or three. Sometimes it was justin the instrumentation. He didn't do it much in these later years.

ufoclub said:

paulludvig said:

I think she'sright about there being a voodoo element in Prince.

Yeah, he often put a spooky vibe into a song or two or three. Sometimes it was justin the instrumentation. He didn't do it much in these later years.

Have you heard SuperCaliFragi from the Palace Reseda aftershow in '88? That's intense. A definite voodoo vibe there.

She seems to be dismaissing Sign of the Times though.

I look skeptically in her general direction.

i stopped reading on late 70's 2 mid 80's career part...

I've never understood why people give people like her some special credibility. I can't wait until Universities let go of this idea that there are people who's opinions are somehow refined and thus more worthy to listen to than anybody else's. If her mentor Harold Bloom is any better it's only because he limited himself to literature. I mean really, what has she stated with her writings that a million other people can't see for themselves with their own two eyes? What has she stated in her writings that couldn't be completely contradicted by a million other people who have equally valid counter arguments? It's kinda pointless self-verification op-ed type fanboying bullshit. Oh look Camille Paglia agrees with me.. Oh fuck Camille Paglia, look what she says about x y or z. Same old bullshit different day from someone who's know for having an opinion. The Kim Kardashian of ivy league over-opinionatedness.

lezama said:

I've never understood why people give people like her some special credibility. I can't wait until Universities let go of this idea that there are people who's opinions are somehow refined and thus more worthy to listen to than anybody else's. If her mentor Harold Bloom is any better it's only because he limited himself to literature. I mean really, what has she stated with her writings that a million other people can't see for themselves with their own two eyes? What has she stated in her writings that couldn't be completely contradicted by a million other people who have equally valid counter arguments? It's kinda pointless self-verification op-ed type fanboying bullshit. Oh look Camille Paglia agrees with me.. Oh fuck Camille Paglia, look what she says about x y or z. Same old bullshit different day from someone who's know for having an opinion. The Kim Kardashian of ivy league over-opinionatedness.

>

I guess its the showmanship.

But she has said some smart things. Have you ever read "Sexual Personea"? Someone once said, "Read it, and you'll know everything." Hyperbolic yes, but it's apparent that's what she was going for. Another critic said she'd be best to stay away from pop culture, alluding to the fact that it's beneathe her.

Her most legit arguement to me is her respect for the image, which I suppose is an obvious arguement, but one many pop artists don't learn. The one's who have? Madonna of course and Lana Del Rey?

I thought she'd be more of a student of Prince considering how much ink she's wasted on Madonna. Prince played with sex and gender norms in a way no man during his time had even attempted.

jcurley said:

but a prostitute ( male or female) is still a prostitute.

When you say things like that, aren't you ashamed of yourself?

CynicKill said:

GirlBrother said:

She's a big Bowie fan. So maybe she considers Bowie to have been the trailblazer in that regard. I think she's misguided in discounting Prince, if solely on that basis though. I'm certain that Bowie didn't sit at home, dressed as Ziggy Stardust, while reading the newspapers over Sunday brunch. However, with Prince, there doesn't appear to be any divide between his public & private persona. He dressed, acted, and was Prince 24/7. I don't know why I was surprised to discover that Prince had actually been living at Paisley Park full-time in recent years. Of course he would. There's something psychologically inevitable when an artist becomes their art. It happens to many. Even Bowie recognised that his Thin White Duke persona had taken over him, and fled to Berlin in panic. I don't think that Prince became his art. I think he was his art, and always was. There was no gradual blurring of borders between reality and fantasy; the stage light and daylight. I find that absolutely fascinating.