This will be long.
We’ve done a few podcasts on Prince and race on my podcast Muse 2 the Pharaoh. In one we looked into how he navigated the industry as a Black man.
In the other, it was on how racism shows up in the fandom using personal examples of how it shows up in our lives and similarly how we see it in the othering of Prince.
While both episodes were generally well received, we also got some direct feedback that our experiences were invalid, that Prince was an “all lives matter” type, or that we as younger fans were trying to co-opt Prince for the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
I didn’t give up on framing Prince as a Black man and never will. Most of my “Darling Nisi” persona is looking at Prince in the context of American Blackness from pulling out old newspaper articles that incorrectly described him as “mulatto”, featuring his named influences or those he borrowed heavily from (ie Muddy Waters’ Electric Man) and sharing stories about how he specifically looked for Black writers and organizations to promote and support throughout his life…things you don’t hear about as much because of the bias that shows up in media where certain stories aren’t told or certain subjects aren’t studied.
I don’t know why I was worried about his upcoming biography, especially as he was about to step out as a Black Lives Matter advocate in a HUGE way. I wondered if he’d go there and talk about his experience as a Black man in America, born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, as a child who was bussed to the nearby white school for “integration”, as an artist who was part of a segregated musical system that he made calculated moves to break out of, as a man who had to navigate life as ANY Black person does regardless of class.
I was hoping that he’d talk about that so people could see and understand what all of this and more is like. That even your favorite “magical” (a word I also hate) Black male artist had to go through this too…and that maybe it would help people to not “not see race”, but to appreciate different cultures and heritages instead rather than using othering or other dehumanizing object based tactics just because of the color of our skin.
This article about his upcoming biography made me feel better about the work we’ve done on Muse and about what I try to do with Darling Nisi because Prince in his own words speaks to these very same topics here. Ones that before I had a fear that I was projecting my own stuff on Prince, but seeing what he’s said here, seems like though I might have been, it wasn’t off the mark at all.
I’m even more excited for this book by The Professor! 💜💜💜
The Book of Prince by Dan Piepenbring
