美国国家公共电台 NPR Prince Contained Multitudes, New Book Confirms

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now to music. Many people were shocked and upset by the death of singer-songwriter Prince last April.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN DOVES CRY")

PRINCE: (Singing) Dig if you will the picture of you and I engaged in a kiss.

MARTIN: New Yorker contributing writer Ben Greenman decided 1 to turn his grief into an exploration of Prince's work. Greenman's new book is called "Dig If You Will The Picture." Leah Donnella of NPR's Code Switch team tells us more about it.

LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE 2: Ben Greenman has been a Prince fan since 1982 when he was in middle school. But even a dedicated 3 Prince follower 4 like Greenman has trouble categorizing Prince's music.

BEN GREENMAN: From very early on, he just shattered ideologies 6.

DONNELLA: Greenman is a culture writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books about musicians, both fiction and nonfiction. He says Prince loved to play around with constructions of race. When he first signed a contract with Warner Brothers in the late '70s, Prince didn't want to be categorized as a black musician. Remember, this was before MTV and before so-called black music was heavily marketed to white audiences.

So Prince stirred up rumors 7 about his racial identity claiming to be multi-racial, even though both of his parents were black. In his 1984 movie "Purple Rain," Prince's dad is played by a black man, and his mother is played by a white, Greek woman.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PURPLE RAIN")

OLGA KARLATOS: (As Mother) You don't care about me.

CLARENCE WILLIAMS III: (As Father) Don't I keep the heat on?

KARLATOS: (As Mother) I don't like it here. You never talk to me.

PRINCE: (As The Kid) Dad, please.

DONNELLA: In Greenman's new book, he also talks about the ways Prince toyed with gender 8 and sexuality. Take the 1981 song "Controversy 9."

GREENMAN: There's a line early on when he says am I black or white? Am I straight or gay? A famous lyric 10.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CONTROVERSY")

PRINCE: (Singing) Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?

GREENMAN: And some of it was to create mystique. But as he went on, some of it became a legitimate 11 inquiry 12.

DONNELLA: Prince had a sort of alter ego 5 he called his Camille persona, which he used in songs like "If I Was Your Girlfriend" where he was trying to convey things from a more female perspective.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND")

PRINCE: (Singing) If I was your girlfriend, would you let me wash your hair? Could I make you breakfast sometime?

DONNELLA: And according to Greenman, there was a strategy behind Prince's race and gender bending.

GREENMAN: That process was to isolate 13 two theoretically opposed aspects of a self of a person - male, female, black, white, straight, gay, good, evil - and he played out that opposition 14 in his work. Sometimes he resolved it to his satisfaction, usually he didn't. And the tension between those two things powered the work. That was the engine at the center.

DONNELLA: Behind the scenes, Prince was notoriously shy, and he didn't do a lot of interviews. But when he did, he committed hard to the idea that he and his music were not to be put into a box. In a 1999 TV appearance, Larry King expressed confusion at what to call Prince who at the time was not going by Prince, but an unpronounceable symbol.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LARRY KING LIVE")

LARRY KING: How would you describe your music? What idiom would you put in it?

PRINCE: The only thing I could think of - because I really don't like categories - but the only thing I could think of is inspirational, and I think music that is from the heart falls right into that category.

DONNELLA: The way Prince forced fans to reckon with their own notions of identity was a form of activism, Greenman says, an activism that evolved over the course of Prince's musical career.

GREENMAN: A lot of the way he addressed social issues was revolutionary early on and sort of slogan-based. He would urge people to educate themselves or overthrow 15 the existing order. Don't listen to everyone. And they were - it's not that they were bromides necessarily.

On an album like "Controversy," he talked about Reagan and he talked about nuclear proliferation and he talked about the Atlanta child murders. He was very into the news in the news cycle, and I think always was. There's a song very late in his career called "Baltimore" about the Freddie Gray case and the unrest in Baltimore.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BALTIMORE")

PRINCE: (Singing) Does anybody hear us pray for Michael Brown or Freddie Gray? Peace is more than the absence of war.

GREENMAN: Those kinds of songs get processed differently than the songs that are part of the core Prince identity of the '80s. I think those in some ways are easier to go back to. They have a different kind of energy. It's like staring into the sun.

DONNELLA: For Ben Greenman, writing "Dig If You Will The Picture" was a way to start processing that overwhelming brightness that defined Prince's career. Leah Donnella, NPR News.