Salad Cream, Sha-Boogie Bop
by Wrongtom
Last week I was blocked on Twitter. This has only happened a handful of times, the last was a few years back when I made a quip about being offered Salad Cream in a cafe in Wanstead where the waitress placed the bottle over her arm as if it was a fine wine. An angry stranger on the internet unleashed his wrath, accused me of being classist, had a big pro-Salad Cream rant, and then blocked me, all before I’d finished my first cup of tea of the day.
I don’t mind a bit of online confrontation but generally it’s not worth the effort. The other night, however, someone I don’t follow popped up in my timeline decrying Prince as a Black Lives Matter supporter and claiming “the Prince I loved would’ve been more in the ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ camp.”
I was ready to doze off, but through bleary eyes I decided to pass comment…
I cringed at my sleepy-typos the next morning — “Travis” Smiley, “BlackLivesMaters” — the latter of which I’m happy about since becoming aware of the problem of cluttering the Black Lives Matter timeline with useless information — but I also laughed when I realised I’d woken up blocked. The exchange had quickly descended into purple bedlam after he called out my Prince fandom credentials. “I lived him!” he assured me before making the confusing claim that no one knew who Prince was in the UK in 1987, that was, until he’d introduced Prince to his raving friends. Yep, I’m as confused as you.
In short it was nonsense, and arguably not worth anyone’s time, but his initial “all lives matter” comments worried me because they represent the deeper issue of Prince’s more toxic fans, and I promise you, this guy is far from alone.
It’s no myth that Prince’s rise to superstardom went hand in hand with his reinvention from coquettish disco-waif to MTV-friendly sex-rocker on the release of Purple Rain in 1984. A demographic shift in his fanbase had been happening over the past few years, perhaps due to an increasing new-wave influence in sound and style, but with his name above a movie title and his first “rock” LP, Prince met a wider, and whiter audience.
Ok, Purple Rain isn’t strictly a rock album. It may have a stadium sheen and a big lighters-up crescendo, but it still has his familiar Linn Drum thud in places, especially on the sparse electro-gospel of ‘When Doves Cry’, but even that opens with a wailing guitar solo.
GRENADE LAUNCHER ROARS IN A TELEVISION SKY.
MTV has defended the lack of black content in their early years due to an initial rock remit, claiming it was a struggle to find any bands with playable pop promos, let alone black rock artists. Things changed in 1983 when Michael Jackson released ‘Billie Jean’ and, legend has it, CBS president Walter Yetnikoff had to threaten the station to get them to play the video, which MTV denied. What’s certain is, Jackson nudged the door open for more black artists, but this was still essentially a rock station, so the “black-rock” problem remained.
Prince took a hiatus of sorts in 1983. His first break from releasing an album a year since For You in 1978, and he returned in ’84, poised for domination. Following the expansive double vinyl of 1999, the new LP was streamlined, no filler, no extended funk workouts, no funk at all in fact. His skimpy psycho-sexual stagewear was now replaced with 18th century ruffles designed by Marie France, adding Mozart-like nuance to his genius-composer image. European audiences were growing fast. Purple Rain hit the top 10 in the UK, Germany, France and Switzerland. It went to number 1 in the Netherlands.
AM I BLACK OR WHITE, AM I STRAIGHT OR GAY?
So here we have a breakthrough black artist, all over a rock video channel, making waves on mainstream radio on both sides of the Atlantic. Inevitably his colour came under scrutiny. Prince had been fielding questions regarding his racial and sexual ambiguity for years, and addressed it in the opening lines of 1981’s ‘Controversy’. Three years later he may well have been embracing it. He even riffed on his light skin tone in a scene from Under The Cherry Moon, claiming the authorities would never believe he and his cousin Tricky, played by Jerome Benton, were related. “Butterscotch…chocolate” he vamps at his bemused sidekick.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I once sat in a meeting about a mainstream reggae project at a major label. They were still looking for a vocalist to front it. When I asked who or what they were after they seemed a little cagey. “Black… but not too black” someone replied with a dismissive chuckle.
If this was still happening in the big business of selling black music to mainstream audiences only a few years ago, imagine how it was in ’84. I couldn’t tell you if this was premeditated. Prince had certainly promoted a multi-racial image with his technicolour backing band. Rumours surround his sacking of Alexander O’Neal as the lead singer of The Time due to being too dark-skinned, though O’Neal claimed it was actually because he asked a lot of questions about the group’s finances.
However he arrived there though, it’s easy to see how a broader white, rock audience might perceive Prince as “not too black”, and how we’d wind up three and a half decades later with confused fans claiming he wouldn’t support Black Lives Matter.
PEANUT BUTTER LOGIC, RAISED ON A BED OF LIES.
I’m sure the “all lives matter” brigade would love to believe Prince’s light skin meant one of his parents looked like them but, I’m sorry fragile white folks, they didn’t. Both his parents were black. His black grandparents all hailed from Louisiana, and at least 6 of his great grandparents were born into slavery, one of which, according to records, was the daughter of a slave owner.
With Prince embracing his ambiguity, it’s easy to see how this could be ignored. Much of his lyrical content is concerned with sex, and love, and sexy love, and of course God, or “Lovesexy” if you follow the themes of that particular album, but scratch beneath the surface of Prince’s smut, and you’ll find smatterings of socio-political content, often written from a black perspective. ‘Dance On’ asks “Tell me how many young brothers must die?” and it’s safe to assume he didn’t have white folks in mind when he referenced 17 year old boys “in a gang called The Disciples, high on crack and toting a machine gun” in ‘Sign O’ The Times’.
In 1990 The Young Disciples lifted that line and gave it a positive spin with the affirmative action of their debut single ‘Get Yourself Together’ helping to usher in a new afrocentric musical language in London alongside the likes of Soul II Soul and The Sindecut.
THE FIRE THIS TIME.
Did you catch Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman a couple of years back? As we sobbed into the end credits, Prince’s lonely piano drowned out the sniffing and nose-blowing. Lee chose Prince’s previously unreleased 1983 recording of 19th century spiritual ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’ and it works as a warm embrace after the atrocities which unfold in the minutes prior.
Writer/activist James Baldwin named his 1962 book of essays The Fire Next Time from the song’s line “God gave Moses the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time”. Whilst his and Prince’s religious backgrounds and spiritual journeys differed, their experience as black men in America, the recent descendants of slaves, was a shared one. As Baldwin reflected in Horace Ove’s 1969 documentary Baldwin’s Nigger “…if I discovered that these songs the ‘darkies’ sang were not just the innocent expressions of a primitive people, but extremely subtle and difficult, dangerous and tragic expressions of what it felt like to be in chains, then by one’s presence… you begin to frighten the white world.”
When ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’ was eventually released in 2018, Warner commissioned Salomen Ligthelm to direct a video which depicted the events and fallout following the shooting of a young black man in NYC. I’m sure some might see this as putting words in Prince’s mouth posthumously, but he was outspoken on the subject of gun violence in his final years, donating money to the family of Trayvon Martin, and pledged his support for the young people of the Black Lives Matter movement, of whom his friend Van Jones quoted him as saying “I hope that they become an economic force. I hope that they use their genius to start businesses.”
Would someone who didn’t support Black Lives Matter have performed at a charity concert in 2015 alongside Beyonce, Nicki Minaj and Damien Marley which raised $1.5m for *checks notes* Black Lives Matter?
Would someone in the All Lives Matter camp appear on Tavis Smiley’s chat show to speak in depth about notions of black excellence, and claim he was moved by Dick Gregory’s 2008 State Of Black Union address? “I show it to everybody… especially white folks” Prince continued “so they know more about all of us.” Granted, Prince seemed especially taken with Gregory’s interest in chemtrails, but that shouldn’t detract from his use of “us” as he acknowledged his place and platform in African American community.
Prince’s presence on Smiley’s show reminds us that he never lost his black audience, beyond a few soul purists in the early ‘80s.
Detroit radio legend Charles Johnson aka The Electrifying Mojo was so enthralled by Prince that he’d dedicate entire shows, playing his latest LPs in full. As a beacon of black radio in Motor City, Johnson influenced a number of emerging artists, most notably Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson who presided over the birth of techno. Tracks like ‘Dirty Mind’, ‘Controversy’ and Vanity 6’s ‘Nasty Girl’ are all present in techno’s DNA, and, like Prince himself, the genre found a huge white, european audience, many of who forgot or simply weren’t aware of it’s black roots.
Speaking of Roots, Questlove’s purple fandom is well documented, and what’s more his run-ins with Prince would make quite the sit-com. My favourite being the after party where he had to compete with the artist’s love for Pixar cartoons.
This CGI interest was confirmed by writer Dan Piepenbring who worked closely with Prince on his memoir The Beautiful Ones in the months leading up to his death. In a piece for the New Yorker Piepenbring described how “Prince regularly arranged for private after-hours screenings at the nearby Chanhassen Cinema. We were going to see Kung Fu Panda 3.”
A RACE TO WHAT, AND WHERE WE GOING.
Much of Pienpenbring’s conversations with Prince concerned racism and blackness. He lamented his early experiences with racism, having started at a mixed school after growing up in a black neighbourhood. He wanted to tell people about “the Black Wall Street” in Greenwood, Tulsa. He asked his new writing partner “can we write a book that solves racism?”
Most importantly here, Piepenbring has Prince on record, amidst an increasingly complex line of questions regarding racism, referencing the whataboutery of the BLM counter-slogan “I mean ‘All Lives Matter’ — you understand the irony in that?”
There’s two things I’m certain of here. Prince was no wishy-washy “why can’t we all just live together?” type, he was a softly spoken activist, a black revolutionary.
Also, all salad dressings matter.
