prince

As bird stated earlier, the song was recorded well before he became a JW. Likely around 1994. He converted around 2001. Also it stole its premise from Brave New World and likely didn't reflect any strong opinion of his own. Were anti-vax or anti-trans positions even on his radar at that time? Probably not.

or he's always been much more conservative than we thought

i don't know, a guy like prince, all you can is "it's complicated"

he wasn't always a JW, but he always loved god, he was always a Christian, and in those days, everything he learned about God was that God hated queerness. and something in him loved queerness, loved lesbians especially. "vagina was half boy and half girl/best of both worlds"... i mean, that's a gross way of looking at lesbians, but there's a _fascination_ there, at least. his closest collaborators were wendy and lisa, the work he did with them was the best of his career, and then he fired them for, well, being lesbian, mostly. he loved women, loved being around women, and he abused women. abused everyone around him, but especially women. he sings about wanting to be alone, and at the same time he kind of hated being alone. he sings about not taking pills and he took them, took them to deal with chronic pain, pain that stemmed in large part from his spending all those years walking around in high heels, and they killed him.

life gets complicated. sometimes. i mean, you look at little richard... with prince it was always a two-step, prince was never openly _queer_, he just had a, uh, sexuality. but little richard, him and queerness and god... it was complicated. little richard hated himself, and that's really sad to me. he shouldn't have had to go through all of that. it doesn't excuse anything. it's just what happened.

that's an even-handed and generous reading of prince imo.

i've cooled on him since his death tbqf

yah great post Kate

Excellent post Kate.

Also, just in case it wasn't known, Prince was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist, so he was probably surrounded by very social conservative brands of Christianity his entire life. And IIRC the Star-Tribune published an epic oral history after Prince's death where Wendy Melvoin mentioned that during one attempt at reconciliation (well after Prince had converted to JW), he asked her to renounce her sexuality and convert as well - pretty bad, but it's probably something I would've predicted given what was publicly known about his faith. It was a bittersweet remembrance though - Wendy knew the path he had taken and what it meant in terms of their friendship, that things would remain a mess, but she forgave him.

Thanks to Kate and bird for the nuances

https://polishedsolid.substack.com/p/my-2023-prince-year-in-review

The person who does this Substack just had a Prince conference this weekend in NY and am seeing lots of folks speaking highly of it online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi9nlmMA12Y

A good bit of pre-1999 concert footage is out there, but it's usually in-house video feeds or video shot from a distance, so professional multi-camera videos like this are kind of startling for me to see for the massive jump in production quality. I really hope they do an early Prince box set soon, especially of the Dirty Mind era - for whatever reason I gravitated more towards that stuff when I was binging Prince the week after he died. Just amazing to see them as this hungry little band that was still trying to make a career of their music. (And tbf, at least one of them ended up with a regular day job despite their talents.)

According to IMDb, this was his first national TV appearance. I think he did American Bandstand shortly afterwards, and a little over a year later he was co-musical guest (with Todd Rundgren!) on the notorious episode of SNL where Charles Rocket said "Fuck" on-air (supposedly Rocket said he only did so because we thought it was okay since --he believed-- Prince had already just done so in his performance of "Partyup").

I have an incredible pro-shot single-cam video (torrent) of:

PRINCE LIVE DIRTY MIND TOUR
NEW YORK
THE RITZ
MARCH 21 1981

but have never seen any other early stuff out there