Fangirling
It's a joy (and heartbreak) to be a fan. But the heartbreak is more about us than them.
Art is everything. Prove me wrong here, but it’s magic when someone tells a story that helps me understand the world or sings a song that makes my fallen heart rise. It’s god coming through the fingers of our mortal bodies. I can’t get enough of that feeling of restoration and transcendence that comes when the art speaks to me.
Which is why I love Prince.
It was 1984, and I was listening to Prince’s latest on vinyl, which my mom had picked up for me at Kmart. I’d seen him on MTV and secretly watched Purple Rain on HBO. I’d never heard anyone who sounded like him. And, like Boy George, I still marvel that none of us—not a one in my very small Iowa town—ever questioned that he was part man and part woman, and maybe that was why we all loved him. I still believe that these artists opened our minds, and when our kids did away with gender entirely, we were ready. Think about how he sang for us, “I’m not a woman/I’m not a man/I am something that you’ll never understand,” in “I Would Die 4 U.”
The whole Purple Rain album meant a lot to me, but one Saturday afternoon I was listening to “When Doves Cry,” and at some point, I wasn’t even in the room anymore. I was in the song. I was digging, if you will, a picture. When I opened my eyes, my mom was standing in front of me repeating my name, entirely confused as to why I hadn’t heard her yelling in the kitchen.
That was a first for me, with music. But reading has always done that. I would read anything I could find at the public library or in garage sale bins and could for an hour or three every day escape to Narnia, or a fifth-grade classroom in Pennsylvania with Blubber, or the supernatural murk of a stack of horror comics, or even into the pages of Seventeen, where I checked in regularly with Leif Garrett’s life.
Later, when I moved to Minneapolis to teach, I discovered live music, and learned the power of the local band to raise the roof on your work week. Jeff Tweedy ran into my right shoulder at First Ave. on his way to the stage for one of the final Uncle Tupelo shows. I paid my full grocery budget for a ticket to see Elastica play for 18 minutes at the 7th Street Entry and every goddamn second was worth it. My friend Deb and I nursed a crush on the Honeydogs, and those conversations were as good a salve as the new French drugstore find I’m really into right now.
One blessed day I shall never forget, I was sitting at a stoplight on Hennepin Avenue and a guy pulled up next to me on his motorcycle. He was wearing bright white tennis shoes and a helmet, but beneath the shield I recognized Prince Rogers Nelson himself. The artist formerly known as the one who took me out of Colfax, Iowa, for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. He gave me a nod and the tip of a finger to his helmet as my jaw hit the dashboard and I waved like the idiot fangirl I am and always will be.
I credit my Prince votive candle for keeping me alive during my last semester of graduate school in 2019. I will never leave my neighborhood knowing that Prince’s grandma possibly lived near my house and he possibly visited her during summers when he was a boy.
When my neighbor sent me the New York Times story about an elusive Prince documentary by Ezra Edelman—A NINE-HOUR DOCUMENTARY, YOU GUYS—I lost myself one more time in the story. And not only does the writer make the same “dig if you will” joke that I just did (I started this fangirl post over the summer, just finishing it now, I swear), she opens with an anecdote about the magic of “When Doves Cry.” What, Universe? Tell me the stars are aligning without telling me the stars are aligning!
It's got me thinking about how it works to be a real fan. I mean, it’s exciting. It gets us believing that a human being can transcend mere humanness, can even become divine. But we always find that in the end, it’s just not possible. Prince was mortal, everybody. He was good and he was bad. Are you surprised? I am not surprised. How could we be? I blame some of this on the adulation of vapid celebrity profiles—how can we still lead each other to believe that some of us are above humanity? That we are only perfect, only good? It’s also that we crave to believe—from the saints of old to the singers (and comedians and actors) of now—that the blessed walk among us. And perhaps we, too, could be one of them.
But I’m old now. And I think of it differently. It is the art and only the art that is holy—some people are just better vessels than others. We receive the work of our lives if we make room for it. The makers are only the vessels who dare to hold it. Who build their lives around the art—and that takes cajones, I’m telling you.
Prince’s music was transcendent (start at 3:28, baby), but the man was like all of us. It’s the journey of the fan to accept this. Just hold the art close. That’s what is ours. That’s what those better angels deliver to us.
The story, and unreleased documentary, suggest that “When Doves Cry” wasn’t just another sexy song. It was also about rejection of one’s essential self by the people who you thought loved you. “How could you just leave me standing/alone in a world so cold.” I didn’t know what level he was singing to me then—maybe we leave our pain where it stands until we are strong enough to face it—but he’d reached something deep, and he held my hand that day.
That’s all I have on the topic. I’ve felt a little sensitive after thinking about Prince all week, and watching the presidential debates, and thinking about how hard it is to carry our own torches of art or creativity, our deepest and most tender selves, in a world that can feel antithetical to same. But I hope you’re carrying yours. I hope you always will.
Happy almost-weekend.
That NYT article was incredible, and I hope to someday see that documentary that is being hung up by concerns that it could "cancel" Prince.
He changed my world in rural '80s Iowa. We would dance and sing to 'Purple Rain,' and 'Darling Nikki' was especially dirty and a family fave, and my poor overworked Catholic Mom would come home to use dancing and jumping on couches and writing around to it and she would be like "This song is terrible." But she never took it away. (Take that book-banning asshole parents. She still let us have our music.)
Seeing him twice in Las Vegas later in life in my 20s at late-night jam-session shows that went hours, standing practically underneath him wailing on guitar at his Rio residency, him yelling to crowd, "What hit do you want to hear next? I got all the hits. I got too many hits!" was heavenly and my friend turned to me and said "Yes, he is right. He does have an insane number of hits" is still a highlight of short-lived music critic career.
That said, these great artists -- Prince's contemporary Michael Jackson especially -- were incredibly talented and complex sensitive souls who grew up in incredibly abusive homes. It showed. Abuse breeds abuse. And these were times before anyone acknowledged it, went to therapy, etc. You just suffered and shut up. Not to say they had zero responsibility for their own behaviors later in life, it just shows how hard it is to climb out of that hole, especially for Black men and women (also see: Janet Jackson) who grew up in working-class homes where they were physically and emotionally abused.
I hope Prince's doc gets out.
This was a great piece. I quoted Prince in my 1984 senior quote: “Life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last.” My mom, an academic, was upset and called me frivolous, pointing to other kids who had used phrases like “Carpe diem” as their signature. I remember just looking at her and saying, “Mom, this quote is exactly about ‘carpe diem’ - and so much more - that’s why I chose it.”
A friend of mine - who, by the way, did not know who Prince was before she met me (!) - gave me a Prince voodoo doll that hangs next my front door; I’ve also got the votive in my kitchen along with a Mexican Day of the Dead Prince tile. Prince’s allure is, perhaps, in his imperfections and his willingness to challenge our notions of what perfect even means 💜