(I wrote this in 2016, I share it today here, please forgive the translation errors)
.
- hello?
- Fabrizio, it's me
- oh, hi mom
- do you want me to start with the bad news?
- uh, what bad news?
- Prince is dead- ...
- Fabrizio?
- and what's the good news?
- there's no good news
So, at forty-six, I found out that Prince had died from my mother. I hung up, smiled sadly and the phone rang immediately. It was my aunt. She wanted to know about Prince.
On Facebook I started getting notifications from people telling me that Prince had died, I scrolled down the page and like rain there were these links that said Prince had died. I thought about whether I should write something, change my profile picture, my image, put a link, I saw that every new link that told me that Prince was dead, I was not well. I went into preferences and closed my Facebook profile. I reassured Facebook that it was not forever.
I connected to Prince.org, the Prince fan site and the site was not responding, I would find out a few hours later that the server had collapsed due to too many connections. I closed the computer. I went into the kitchen and said that Prince was dead. I smiled, I think, I still had half my face anesthetized.
Someone understood.
Almost without thinking I took One Nite Alone, a demo album of his voice and piano, I put it in the player, I listened to it all while I put away the groceries, I thought, I denied. Many years ago an American critic wrote a very beautiful sentence about Prince, a review at the Crystal Ball: he wrote that it was an illogical, wrong album, but that he had bought it and would buy the next one, because stopping listening to Prince would have meant leaving adolescence and - damn it - he wasn't ready yet.
I thought he would bury me, Prince would bury me. Every year he seemed to get younger by six months, he aged by a year and got younger by six months.
When I read on Facebook people who are grieving the death of a figure from the world of art, music or literature, I think, well, let's thank him for everything he did. Let's rejoice in the fact that he gave so much.
I can't do it with Prince, not because he didn't give so much, he gave a lot, but because he was - as always - in the midst of his infinite projects. He was about to give so much more, as always, more than he had already done. Phase III of his quarterly CD project, the live piano and voice, the second album of his all-female band, his memoirs and who knows what else.
I didn't love Prince: I didn't love what he thought, what he was. I loved his music and his production despite who he was, socially, politically and religiously.
And I loved his conception of music as one with living, with being there. Someone on Facebook called him "a music blogger": if there's one thing, an imprinting that has passed on to me, it's this thinking that you can't stop making music, if you know how to do it, and do it in an always new and unexpected way. Stubbornly, daily. The imprinting has obviously come to me translated for what I know how to do, in general, writing, always writing about everything, about pleasant things, about unexpected things, about painful things, about things - like this one - even personal and embarrassing.
I've received emails from others like me who are dealing with this icon that has accompanied them for thirty years. People in their forties like me who write to me that they didn't think they would cry over the death of an American millionaire. Everyone finds themselves having to come out of their adolescence like this, suddenly, in an unpleasant and wrong way, with their pants still open and their eyes unaccustomed.
He died, I didn't think it would happen so soon, and I'm sorry. I'm part of a group of people who are feeling sorry, even sorrow is a social phenomenon, shareable, commentable. When I walk, I fantasize, I create alternative worlds where things happen, I think it's normal. In one of these worlds
I fell into a coma, several times and many years go by and I don't wake up from the coma and those who follow me buy a Prince album every time a new Prince album comes out, put headphones on me and let me listen to it, to see if I wake up. I don't wake up but I stay updated on Prince's discography, even when I'm in a coma. This is to give you an idea, but I don't know what.
Now there is this international forum called Prince.org, it is an unofficial site dedicated to Prince, who for decades escaped the crossfire of our lawyers who - in various measures - have instead crippled the others. There is my user profile that says I have been registered for 14 years 2 months and eight days, which in digital terms seems like an immensity to me. After Prince's death there is a strange atmosphere, a disclaimer says that only posts that respect everyone's feelings are accepted, the others will be kicked out. "Make a life” they say.
The thread sticks have topics like “update on the autopsy results,” “update on the future of The Vault,” “the future of Paisley Park.”
The Vault is his safe, full of unreleased music.
Every now and then someone blurts out, says it’s not possible, that they don’t believe it. Others say they keep crying. Others, more intolerant like me, talk about the music that has yet to come out.
It’s a tacit agreement of everyone, and this is alienating, it’s that Prince is dead, it’s true, but we know that there are still years and years of music to listen to.
On the one hand the loss, we will no longer have anything new, on the other the recognition that a community has been created, thousands of people waiting for the promised music, the redemption.
In the meantime, his songs are emerging on YouTube, the lawyers can’t keep up with everything, live stuff, unreleased, bootlegs. I link them on Facebook, I try to explain why those are great, I talk about his crazy things, about how his crazy things entered my life. But they are not reviews, I can't write a review of a Prince album, writing, I mean, if it's good or bad. I can't do it for reasons related to my history: the first album I bought in my life was the Candy Candy theme song, the second the Ghostbusters soundtrack, the third Parade by Prince, 1986.
I was unlucky: Parade is the best Prince album ever. Butterflies in the stomach. At the time it shook up everything I knew about pop, namely Candy Candy and Ghostbusters. But also other things I listened to. It was the album that I locked myself in my room, I put it on the turntable, I put the needle on and after a while of listening to the first track my father's head popped out and said to me,
I'm sorry Fabrizio, it's flawed, tomorrow we'll go and change it, and I told him it's not flawed it's Prince, that's exactly how it is.
From then on Prince made more or less an album a year and I always followed him with an affection that after a while became pathological, but in any case my life is marked by Prince's album contextual to events.
I discovered Lovecraft with Parade. I left my parents' house with O)+>. I fell in love at the time of Come. I fell off a wall with Gold Experience. I staunched a skin tumor with Emancipation. I changed houses with Crystal Ball. I rented my second house with Kamasutra. I did the renovations with Rave.
I had a child with The Rainbow Children. I had a second child with Musicology. I suffered, badly, with
20ten. I hoped to get out of the abyss with Art Official Age.
My whole life, from the age of sixteen onwards, has had as its soundtrack the album that Prince would release that year. Thirty years of soundtrack, renewed every year. It's not just Prince who died, it's something shapeless and timeless that was part of me, surrounded me, waiting for me. I don't mourn what happened, I mourn not having kept that implicit promise to continue composing my soundtrack until my death. Waking up from a coma. Appearing to me in a dream in these non-existent concerts in small suburban rooms full of wooden chairs. I trusted him from the first moment
I saw him, with cold plain pasta in my mouth.
Prince died in 2016. Thirty years ago, in 1986, I was coming home from school, at the time I was going to high school. I arrived by train, I went home, I entered the kitchen and my mother was there: my mother, in my memory, always prepared plain pasta for me and left it in a bain-marie so it wouldn't be cold. Already seasoned, with parmesan cheese too, which in the bain-marie would stick to everything, like a patina.
I lived in a small town, an hour away from the city. I turned on the TV and there was DeeJay Television. At the time DJT was the only way I knew to watch music videos. I liked watching music videos, even though they were all in black and white. I only had black and white TV. Thanks to DeeJay Television I saw and heard some great shit: Georgio, Samanta Fox, Sandy Marton, Tracy Spencer, Gino Latino and going up T-Pau, Boy George, A cause de Garcon, Vanessa Paradis, Caroline Loeb, Guesch Patti, Living in a Box, Gino Vannelli, Little Steven and other people that if they all came into my living room today I would be embarrassed for them and for me. At the time I listened to them all, every day, chewing reheated plain pasta and saying “good”, “nothing” to my mother who asked me how it went, how I was.
In this context Prince was love at first sight. He wasn't a female, he wasn't an alpha male. The typical alpha male TV DJ was in the center of the video with a big guitar slung over his shoulder that - at most - he used as a counterweight to his head. At his side there were always a few hot girls who could have worked at La Rinascente, like mannequins. The hot girls looked you in the eye, swayed their hips, touched the alpha male who - in English - was saying something deep about love, like I'll never leave you, don't let yourself get down, everything will be okay.
Prince, the first video I saw of Prince, was 'Kiss'. In 'Kiss' there is no alpha male singing deep with hot girls around, he is the hot girl. The video opens with Wendy (not the one from Peter Pan, the other one) sitting down and playing the guitar. And a girl sitting down and playing the guitar is already a novelty. And while the girl is playing, Prince arrives, he is shirtless and sings as if the Bee Gees had their zippers stuck in the wrong place. And he is the one dancing, he is a beta male, or lambda I don't know, but he jumps, moves, screams, screams a lot.
This, while I slowly chew the plain pasta and think "so".
The things I liked about Prince's music were many and distributed over time: I gave a lot of my time to Prince and he gave me back, in his own way, this trust. He never stopped, he always tried, he went against the grain, as much as possible within a capitalst system like ours. He tried, without ever doing it perfectly well and without ever succeeding completely, without ever becoming something reassuring. He bluffed, or he really believed in it. What I liked about Prince was his being there and not being there, his hiding, changing, overdoing it. I knew him singing funky falsetto and, over the years, he became a rapper, a jazz musician, a rocker, a guitar virtuoso, a piano virtuoso, a committed singer-songwriter, a hip hop idiot, a composer of instrumental works, a slouching bassist. He never stopped, he proposed himself again trying to amaze, to disorientate. He never reassured us about his intentions.
Now that he's dead and that I'm putting links to his songs on Facebook, the ones that no one could listen to before because his lawyers blocked everything, I realize that I'm embarrassed. That his songs are different when put there on YouTube. That little bar at the bottom that shows the time passing, the images put by fans, the lyrics that appear, the whole Prince song here on YouTube is pilloried, it's separated. There's no way to really communicate what that song is, that song, the moment it's uploaded to the great maelstrom of YouTube, is taken by the blades and macerated, chopped up: Prince, who had always exhibited his nudity as an added value, here remains more naked than naked. What's going on is a vivisection, irresistible, gratuitous and unsatisfying.
Even in the car after his death I can't listen to anything else. My children mock me a little, a little not:
- Dad
- tell me, second-born
- why does this song make strange sounds every now and then?
- so, this song is by Prince...
- oh god, again?
- sure, again
- but isn't he dead?
- yeah, but I can still listen to him
- I thought that when someone dies, all the things they've done are erased
- it doesn't work like that
- it would be better
- ...
- anyway, why did he make these sounds?
- so, Prince swore a lot in his songs
- mh
- but then he regretted it and took up his old songs again and where there was a swear word he altered his voice
- ok, got it
- think what an idiot
- ...
- how much I miss him.
- but you didn't even know him!
- actually I met him twice
- sure, met, sure
- really!
- but like, “oh hi Prince”, “oh hi Fabrizio what are we doing tonight, shall we go to the movies?”, “oh great idea Prince let’s go with your scooter”, “well yes maybe we’ll get a pizza first”: these are things like I say with my friends, you didn’t say them, right?
- actually no
- then you didn’t know him. I mean, you knew Prince, but Prince didn’t know you, he didn’t know you existed
- no
- so...
- he didn’t know me personally, but if he had a concert the stadium would fill up with people he might not have known, but who knew existed. We were like a swarm of wasps, he knew us all together, as a group
- why wasps and not bees or ants?
- because bees and ants are noble animals
- and wasps?
- wasps are bad animals
After Prince’s death this thing happened among the Italian fans I hung out with, that we started helping each other. Everyone wrote what they felt, commented on the pain they felt, encouraged those who were in greater difficulty. Initially I was skeptical, I thought that - well - I'm an adult, I have three children, a mortgage. Then I saw that the others were adults too, they had children, they had a mortgage and they were feeling bad about this thing that Prince was dead. Everyone remembered the most beautiful events related to Prince, what had happened when they found out, when they saw him.
I remembered my grandmother. At a certain point, Rai announced that it would broadcast Prince's concert exclusively. Live, in prime time, 1988. In 1988, Rai broadcast Prince's concert in prime time, things that when you think about it today. Anyway, I decide not to watch this concert of the Lovesexy tour alone, but to see it with someone.
With my grandmother.
I go to my grandmother, not for anything else, but because my grandmother has a color television, she has a stereo and she has a VCR, things that will allow me to record the concert simultaneously on a 120-minute VHS and a 120-minute chrome cassette. So that I can watch it and listen to it thousands of times, until the tape wears out, as actually happened.
So I sit on my grandmother's couch, with my grandmother, I start all the tapes, and the concert begins. This concert was special because it had a central stage, the whole audience around it: the concert begins and you hear a drum kit and everyone screams there are a lot of people and then a Cadillac arrives, a car, it's not real, this car arrives on stage and the door opens and Prince gets out and smiles and 'Erotic City' begins. I look at my grandmother, she laughs. During the concert, Prince plays basketball, dresses up as a gangster, talks about God, gets tied to a chair, jumps on a bed, pretends to have sex, many things. My grandmother watches the whole concert, and at the end she says to me, in dialect, something that I translate as “this Prince is nice.” My grandmother.
I will re-watch that concert ad nauseam, over the years. I will also see it for real, live, with suffocated disappointment. The idea of the center stage means that you can listen to the whole of ‘Purple Rain’ while watching Prince sing it while giving you his ass, as my grandmother would say.
My grandfather, on the other hand, stayed in the kitchen throughout the concert, reading the puzzle magazine, turning the pages with the only arm he had, the second plastic one dangling.
After Prince died I bought three more songs by Prince. The last thing by Prince is not HITNRUN2 or even the singles of the never-released HITNRUN3. The last things are three pieces released by TIDAL shortly before his death, three live fragments, fifteen minutes taken from the voice and piano tour he was doing. Three pieces that, like the entire tour, are made for those who loved him, I won't even put the link. They are three total, final pieces. Especially 'Little Red Corvette', sung with voice and piano, a low voice that is sometimes broken and suddenly turns into 'Dirty Mind', and the tense falsetto of the early eighties re-emerges, to then return to his other voice, both set, rich in minimal nuances.
The result is a sort of mini-opera dedicated to Vanity, his musical and sexual alter ego in the pre-Purple Rain days, to whom these songs were linked and who had died a few months before him, in February. For problems related in some way to drugs.
In hindsight it's easy to make a narrative out of it, but what comes to mind is time, all the time that has swelled, enlarged, engulfed, stiffened. For me first of all, for all those things that emerge inside me too, desires per second, impulses, ways of interpreting a reality that does not exist.
Once in my life, in the 80s, I was walking with my dog along a country road and I thought that everything I saw was not real. It was a clear and precise vision, although completely fantastic. The high reinforced concrete wall, the woods, the light, everything was part of a much deeper and richer reality, outside the margin that my senses could capture. I lived crossed by things out of scale, ancient forms of intelligence or structure that pass through and separate from all the layers experienced from the earth to the sky and - who knows - also from everything we have been. A permanence of our gestures that remains there, stored by counters that we will never see.
Sometimes it happens that man cuts off limbs from his own body, fingers, legs, arms and then continues to live without them. The human brain regenerates human life so that the rest of the remaining body takes on that real, carnal lack, so much so that after a certain period of time a sort of reassignment of tasks takes place and the lost limb is almost no longer felt. And yet, every now and then, we wake up at night feeling pain in the leg we no longer have, feeling an itch in an arm that has been amputated for decades.
So we still hear its voice saying new things, still launching one of its cries that are not of alarm, but of a call to life in this humid and tired valley scarified by an implacable time.
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