PRINCE OF MINNEAPOLIS?
MINNEAPOLIS—For starters, we're talking God or at least E.F. Hutton. You drop the name Prince in a lot of Minneapolis circles and suddenly you're reading from the Bible at a tent revival. It wasn't always that way. Here in separatist Minneapolis (probably the only city that would dub one of its black-settled suburbs Coon Rapids and let the name stand), Prince Rogers Nelson came from the northside—not exactly a ghetto, but a doomed side of the tracks considered Nowheresville by the tight-lipped white folks who roll through on the Freeway and never stop to smell the barbeque.
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PRINCE OF MINNEAPOLIS?
FEATURES
by
Greg Linder
MINNEAPOLIS—For starters, we're talking God or at least E.F. Hutton. You drop the name Prince in a lot of Minneapolis circles and suddenly you're reading from the Bible at a tent revival.
It wasn't always that way. Here in separatist Minneapolis (probably the only city that would dub one of its black-settled suburbs Coon Rapids and let the name stand), Prince Rogers Nelson came from the northside—not exactly a ghetto, but a doomed side of the tracks considered Nowheresville by the tight-lipped white folks who roll through on the Freeway and never stop to smell the barbeque. Within that sealed-off community, Prince was the product of a 90-proof troubled family, shuffled from mom to pop to step-pop to relatives until he came to roost in the basement of his friend Andre Anderson (later to become Andre Cymone).
For a while, it looked like basketball might be Prince's salvation, but the competition at his high school was stiff and the kid was/is too short (now about 5'4"). So by the time he was 15, music was his obsessive focus and he was playing in his own obscure band Grand Central (later known as Shampayne), rehearsing eight hours a day, dreaming big and funky adolescent dreams. The local reaction, you might say, went way beyond skepticism.
More than most places even, Minneapolis doesn't cotton to black music being played on its radio stations ("Not enough of a demographic," program directors routinely insist). And black unemployment in the bars is staggering. You can catch the black man or the black woman not playing on the stage of just about any Twin Cities music hall you care to name. Blacks have virtually no outlet, so what can a poor boy do?
He can take it outside and appeal to higher authorities. He can send demo tapes like tickets outta here, and he can reconstruct himself in purple more carefully than any pharoah ever constructed his pyramid. For insurance, he can incorporate the white Midwest rock he hears every day on local stations into his cocoacolored night dreams, and he can offer himself upon the altar of sexual idolization. Just so, the Minneapolis sound was born—and too bad our radio stations made sure we were literally the last ones to catch on. It was^way past 1999 before we got our invitation, but when we did we went directly to church.
In some ways, Prince has been nothing but good for and good to his hometown congregation. He's a reclusive godfather who's become the root of all funk thereabouts, and he spawned, the Purple Mafia: Andre Cymone, the Time,
Dez Dickerson and Vanity 6 were the first generation; Sheila E. (George Duke's former percussionist, now Prince's girl singer), the Girls (Andre's project, new CBS recording artists) and Mazarati (newcomers "sponsored" by Prince bass player Mark Brown) are the second generation. Because of the Minneapolis sound, which is really nothing more than the Prince sound, we find ourselves on the music industry's map.
Nor did Prince turn tail and head for L.A., pretending he never knew us. He filmed Purple Rain here in Wavetown last winter, which means cast, company and crew dropped untold hundreds of thousands of bucks on local businesses. He graced us with brief appearances at both of our local music award ceremonies this year—the Minneapolis Music Awards (AKA the Yammies) and the racespecific Black Music Awards. And this month at the state-of-the-city saloon First Avenue, he threw us a birthday party (tickets $20 each) and performed for a full hour (eight brand new songs plus "Irresistible Bitch" and "When Doves Cry"). You gotta give the guy credithow often do you suppose Michael Jackson performs in his Gary, Indiana hometown?
The rest of the news is that, even here, Prince is a stranger—he attracts worshipers and imitators instead of friends. As one local writer noted, Prince has "such a passion for insulation, such a thirst for secrecy" that the mask stays on, and the view from Minneapolis is no more intimate than the view from anywhere else. His omnipresent bodyguard, a big tattooed guy named Chick with tons of white hair and biceps like watermelons, is the enforcer of Prince's arms-length isolation. Prince's purple house in the northern suburb of Chanhassen, where even the neighbors are carefully locked out, is his refuge. Although he's visible, Prince is a tease whose peekaboo hometown appearances seem like nothing so much as offBroadway tests of his ability to manipulate us via his persona.
The crowd at Prince's birthday soiree (he's 26) half-heartedly sang "Happy Birthday" to him at one point, and Prince assured us as always that he "loves us," but it was an exchange in a show-biz vacuum. It was an exchange between a community that ignored him until he invented an extraordinary mythological character called Prince, and a star who is now captive to that character and has painted himself into what must be a very lonely corner. Sadly, Prince is a man without a real hometown and Minneapolis is a town without a three dimensional hero. We can worship him, idolize him, imitate him, and be amazed by him just like the rest of the country, but it seems we'll never know him. (Greg Linder is the music editor of Minneapolis' City Pages, a weekly "alternative" newspaper in the Twin Cities.)
