prince from minneapolis

In April 2018 we organized a large symposium on campus called “Prince from Minneapolis”. I had started planning this well before 2010 but could only make the time after becoming Arts, Design, and Humanities Chair of our university's Imagine Fund. Sadly, a couple weeks after I received the funds, Prince died. There will be a hybrid scholarly/general-audience book with the University of Minnesota Press collecting some of the symposium papers. The following is taken from a successful proposal for a Grant-In-Aid. It gives a sense of some of the activities and thinking that led to the event. Many thanks to the many collaborators who were involved.

Prince from Minneapolis: the geography of genius 

It barely needs repeating that for almost 40 years, Prince has been able to innovate popular music and orchestrate the culture industry as very few others have. His accomplished musicianship, production techniques, and aesthetic are influential across the world and across the popular music spectrum. The question driving this project is straightforward, but launches some fundamental questions in the humanities and social sciences: why did Prince emerge in Minneapolis? What demographic, cultural, and technological conditions had to be (literally) in place for his genius to take hold? Why is it that a genius like this -- someone gifted with unique creative powers as well as the conditions and drive to realize them -- only emerges once a generation?

More particularly, the project will benefit from my recent theoretical and historical research into race (Deleuze and Race and Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets) and gender (Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism). How did an African American multi-instrumentalist and sexual provocateur assert himself from within a small African African minority in an overall liberal yet traditionalist Midwestern city? What geographical circumstances are required for a musical genius to appear and flourish, and how do these tend to be racialized and gendered? Exactly how did Prince achieve the coveted but also controversial cross-over impact on white and European audiences?

Prince himself has often labored to transcend the black/white and sex/religion binaries so traumatic to US society. Yet he too is shaped by the histories of slavery, migration, segregation, and Christianity. His ambivalent identities correspond to his reinvention of genres and fashions, from disco, funk, and new wave, to rock, jazz, hiphop, and house. Notoriety turn into enigma when he eliminated he changed his name into an unpronounceable symbol, ostensibly to protest his contract with Warner Bros.

Prince’s newfound spirituality (he became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001) has led him to abandon the hypersexuality of the early 1980s. Nevertheless he has continued pushing the boundaries of heterosexual eroticism, and does so as the only ageing active pop and R&B megastar of the moment. Since the Musicology album, the celebrated 2007 Super Bowl rendition of “Purple Rain” for the (purple-colored) Minnesota Vikings, and continued surprise concerts and media appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, Prince has been making a major global comeback. All of these developments -- race, sexuality, religion, age, the connection between one’s name and one’s identity, comeback, endorsement of Black Lives Matter, etc. etc. -- can only be understood within the ideological tensions of contemporary popular culture.

Now, as Prince has told audiences across the world for decades, he is from Minneapolis. This project seeks to find out how this is so, and why he acknowledges this background. Why and how does he maintain a deep emotional and professional connection with Minneapolis, while all other megastars (especially fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan) become part of a seemingly placeless music industry? More philosophically, how does the universality of “great music” square with the fact it derives from a particular history and geography? It is not only necessary to situate Prince in a line of black male artists which includes Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, and Michael Jackson (a question of criticism and aesthetics), but also to see what of Minneapolis and Minnesota contributed to his genius (a question of geography).

To answer the question how genius arises within the geographies of race, this project builds on a growing resonance between diverse fields researching music. Music geography is a small but established subfield of cultural geography, in which one major research focus is the question of how musical and sonic processes enable social differences like class, gender, race, and nationality to be organized across space (Leyshon, Matless and Revill 1998). Whether at the level of bedrooms, cities, or globally, taste and access to particular soundscapes will express identity and place in society (positionality). The methods required to ascertain this connection between place, identity, and music are generally those of the humanistic social sciences: discourse analysis, ethnography, semiotics, archival work, etc. Where possible, the proposed research will also gather quantitative data (class and racial segregation, record sales, concert attendance, etc.) to make publicly available geovisualizations of the Twin Cities music scenes and their history since the 1970s.

Meanwhile, in cultural and critical theory, the question of African American identity or blackness -- and its intersections with gender, sexuality, class, and place -- has lost none of its importance. Race continues to structure public debates, from Obama’s election to Black Lives Matter and anti-immigrant rhetoric. While there are highly regarded theorizations of how colonialism and/or capitalism structure classical music (Said 2009), the music industry (Attali 1985), and the cultural politics of popular music (Gilroy 1993), how music culture works in concrete spaces of production, distribution, and consumption is not their focus. Methodologically, therefore, I propose to put the sophisticated concepts of race and the music industry from critical theory (going back to Adorno) to use for understanding the racializations of musical processes on the ground.

The research will be closely entwined with forging new connections across departments on campus and with the Twin Cities artistic and media communities. Perhaps Prince would at some point visit the campus to receive an award; definitely, there will be opportunities for students to engage his music in various formats. The symposium will include a scholarly conference and other activities, including live music and possibly a retrospective exhibition at Weisman Art Museum. [NOTE: An exhibition of photography and sculpture happened under the title "Prince from Minneapolis", curated by Diane Mullin.] It will put the university in international limelight and attract a significant number of tourists and fans. It may also increase connections between campus and the public and the diversity of our student body.

The work funded by this Grant-in-Aid would lead to a major symposium in 2018 called “Prince from Minneapolis” to coincide with the megastar’s 60th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his first album, For You. Research undertaken together with students will principally consist in the following:

1) recasting the known biographical facts of Prince’s career within their local, national, and global contexts

2) gathering further archival, audiovisual, and interview data (principally through Minnesota Historical Society, oral history, focus groups, and informant interviews with e.g. radio deejays and music journalists) on the popular music scenes of the Twin Cities in the 1970s and 1980s; perform network analysis of musicians and other artists af?iliated with Prince; participant observation at concerts in his private Paisley Park studio (Chanhassen, MN) and in the Twin Cities

3) constructing a public GIS based on crowd-sourcing stories, audio, and images about Prince, the Minneapolis Sound, and black music more generally from local fans

4) theoretical research into music and cultural studies to determine the place of Prince within US popular culture; musicological research with colleagues in the School of Music, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and American Studies

5) determining strategies for using Prince’s appeal to diverse audiences as springboard to address issues like the racial gap in music education and to increase campus diversity.

References

Attali, Jacques (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press

Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press

Leyshon, Andrew, David Matless and George Revill, eds. (1998) The Place of Music. New York, Guilford 

Said, Edward W. (2009) Music at the Limits. New York, Columbia University Press

Schwichtenberg, Cathy, eds. (1993) The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory. Boulder, CO, Westview