National Post (National Edition)
Behind the purple passion
Will we ever really, truly know Prince?
Music came so easily to Prince, one of the most difficult things in his purple life was convincing others that he was real.
From the start, too. Go back and read a clip from 1977, when a scribe from Minnesota Daily was sent to investigate the local 18-yearold wunderkind, and you can practically hear the reporter sigh with relief when Prince pulls a prank at a restaurant — proof-positive that this super-freaky prodigy was “a real live kid, packed with talent, but basically normal and mischievous.”
Nearly four decades later, in the pages of Rolling Stone, an eyewitness describes how bizarre it was to see a deity performing the mundane tasks that fill most everyday lives: “Prince being Prince, it’s fascinating to watch him do just about anything. The more ordinary the activity — clicking a mouse, say — the weirder it feels.”
Prince was human, though. We confirmed it in the worst way on April 21, 2016, when he was found dead inside an elevator at Paisley Park, the suburban Minnesota recording studio that he treated as a laboratory, a bunker and a vault. Since then, we’ve been bombarded with books about the reclusive virtuoso — by journalists, by critics, by anecdote-collectors, by his ex-wife — all of which seem to prove how unknowable he ultimately was.
For those hoping to notknow him a little better, there’s Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Penguin Random House), a new compilation of profiles and Q&AS previously published in a delightfully disparate array of outlets, including Minnesota Daily, Rolling Stone, Vegetarian Times, Yahoo! Internet Life and Prince’s high school newspaper.
In the book’s introduction, the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib hypothesizes that, despite his enigmatic ways, Prince came to each of these conversations hoping that his inquisitors might “understand him beyond his superhuman capabilities.” For fans, that’s always been hard. And for mourners, it’ ll always be. How do you grieve a sphinx? Can we assemble the meaning of Prince’s life based on all of the things he didn’t say? It feels like there must be some elusive truth waiting for us in the negative space, lest all of that lavender-scented mystique have been for naught.
Unsurprisingly, these 10 interviews uphold Prince’s reputation for being tightlipped with his interrogators — not always down to play ball, but occasionally playful. When Ben Greenman asks him about “cybersex” in 1997, Prince winks back with six words: “Ain’t nothin’ like the real thang.”
But he also knew how to deflate a discussion. In a 1985 interview with MTV, when asked whether he could have ever foreseen the success of Purple Rain, he flatly replies, “I don’t know.”
The only thing more vexing than the questions that go unanswered are the questions that go unasked. Prince cites The Matrix in interviews with The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Did he ever read Jean Baudrillard? During the book’s titular 2015 interview — an awkward group-chat at Paisley Park in 2015 with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis and other European journalists — Prince explains how the internet has forced his critics to be more honest, and concludes that “it gets embarrassing to say something untrue, because you put it online and everyone knows about it, so it’s better to tell the truth.” So what did a pop utopian of his stature make of all the trolling and disinformation that had begun to foment on social media around that time?
And when The New Yorker’s Claire Hoffman asks him about his stance on gay rights and abortion in 2008, Prince taps his fingers on a nearby Bible and replies, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’” Prince had become a Jehovah’s Witness by this point, but his position still baffles. How could a writer of visionary songs about radical acceptance believe anything even close to that?
To be fair to the journalists, Prince didn’t dig followup questions. He didn’t really like answering questions at all. Starting in the 1990s, he famously asked that his interviewers no longer use recording devices or notebooks — and according to a 1994 profile in Q Magazine, his handlers added a third demand: “that no questions be asked.”
By most accounts, he was difficult and defiant with the press. But Prince probably didn’t spend all of those decades being evasive for the mere fun of it — at least not entirely. Maybe the commitment to his mystique was just Prince’s way of protecting our idea of him. To be known is to become static, stiff, frozen in time. To be unknown is to remain flexible and free. Now, even though he’s gone, our understanding of him can still change shape.