What silence looks like — Prince RIP

Let’s begin where we should: “Joy in Repetition,” a loping sinister track on Graffiti Bridge, the soundtrack album to a movie that no one rented at Blockbuster but which served as my adolescent introduction to Prince Rogers Nelson. The rush of syllables, a chinoiserie-indebted synth program, and, of course, a guitar solo as tart as aspic. For many years Prince could generate a frisson by harnessing one of those squalls to a spare rhythm track. I’m pissed that many people like “Joy in Repetition.” At the time I thought “Joy in Repetition” was mine alone. This was often the case with Prince, wasn’t it? I’ve gotten in arguments with people who love Around the World in a Day‘s “The Ladder” and Lovesexy‘s “When 2 R in Love.” I’ve gotten scowls for loving Parade‘s “I Wonder U,” a wee thing: close-miked Wendy & Lisa harmony over horn and flute lines that flash and fade like early morning lightning. The history of psychedelic folk in two minutes, folks.

So vast is Prince’s catalog that what starts as tinsel starts to show pink around the cheeks at unexpected times. What an unintimidating catalog. Prince unlike Miles Davis was fun. Cream sh-boogie-bop. Morning noon and night you give me head. The rumble of the Linn drum. The flock of swooping multi-tracked harmonies that he learned from Joni Mitchell. The bass in The Time’s “777-9311.” His drumming on “Tambourine.” The use of space in “Let’s Have a Baby,” a track from 1996’s Emancipation that also doesn’t get much love. He found no joy in repetition but he repeated joy, unceasingly. As musicians age and their craft improves their inspiration wanes. Prince’s last few albums going back to 2007’s Planet Earth are the exceptions. The untainted purity of his falsetto and the rigor with which he directed his bands signified his commitment to wringing the fresh and the occasionally strange from the rote. And “Chelsea Rodgers” is a banger — and it’s mine, got it?

If Prince has an underplayed period, it’s the new wave disco years: the nymph with the epicene voice with insistent demands. When was the last time you heard 1979’s Prince? He pours his anguish on the lesbian-loving “Bambi” all over his guitar, then finds another sweetie on “When We’re Dancing Close and Slow.” Like on the later “Let’s Have a Baby,” Prince forever tried to imagine what silence looked like. It’s what attracted him to that Linn drum sound: it thwacked and went quiet. He was up to old tricks by picking up scores of new tricks on the b-side “Gotta Stop (Messin’ About).” Concise and in the pocket, Prince is better than a half dozen Rick James albums combined.

An hour ago I finished an impromptu interview with student deejays, one of whom was born the year “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” became his last American top five hit. But she knows Prince well: the soundtrack to road trips, to explanations from her dad about “the jazz influence” on this or that track, to feeling alive. Asked for a favorite song — today, I emphasized — I picked “Sometimes It Snows in April,” that masterpiece of vagueness with which Parade ends: a cushion of piano and acoustic strumming except imagine the cushion getting yanked and rearranged and fluffed while you’re trying to rest your head. Prince was fun but he didn’t comfort me; he forced me to reckon with loss and the lineaments of joy. In this life things are much harder than the after world. Which is what compelled him to strum the refrain of 1987’s “The Cross” over and over, willing himself to believe. Which is what drew him, again, to Joni Mitchell. I’m not sure she knows that he performed the best cover of one of her songs: a devastated and devastating version of “A Case of You,” on which he shows he was as fluent a colorist on piano as on guitar.

Poor butterfly who don’t understand
Why can’t I fly away in a special sky?
I’ll die in your arms under the cherry moon