San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Two fanboys send literary kisses to Prince
All of Gen X has a relationship with Prince. Even if you aren’t a fanatical fan (and there are legions), his music is the backdrop to many a significant life moment. It has to be; there is more of it than there is music by any other 20th or 21st century artist. Six years after his premature death from opioids, new Prince music is still being released. He remains both ubiquitous and mysterious, familiar and unknowable. But mostly, he remains relevant.
If you’ve forgotten what a distinct pleasure it is to read Nick Hornby, may I suggest “Dickens and Prince,” his odd, extended musings on the similarities between Charles Dickens, one of the most-read writers in the English language, and Prince, perhaps the most prolific and listened-to artist of the 20th and 21st centuries?
Hornby is the first to point out that throwing these two men together is a bit of a stretch. He writes, “When I was thinking about linking Prince and Dickens in an extended essay, I had one coincidence to work with: They were both fifty-eight years old when they died.” Later in the same paragraph, he admits that Prince was actually 57 when he died in 2016, thus erasing that particular similarity.
Hornby writes about them not because there are a bunch of coincidences between them, but because they are both what he calls “‘My People — the people I have thought about a lot over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work.” In other words, he’s a bit of a fanboy.
As it turns out, Hornby’s admiration is not the only similarity between the man who wrote, “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” and the one who sang, “I’m not your lover/I’m not your friend/I am something that you’ll never understand.”
There are many connections: Both men had impoverished and difficult childhoods. Both men experienced fame and professional recognition at very young ages. Both men produced more work in their short lives than perhaps anyone before or since. Both men had a weakness for young, beautiful women. The most persuasive and interesting chapter is “The Working Life,” in which Hornby notes the speed and unfussiness with which both men worked. They wanted to create, not edit, and they were unencumbered by perfectionism. Their talents allowed them to be.
Hornby stretches mightily in some cases to make the parallels stick. In a chapter called “Movies,” he argues that Prince’s movie career, including “Purple Rain,” and the movies made from Dickens’ novels in the 152 years since his death, have helped to forever embed them into pop culture. “Many of us cannot hear ‘Dearly Beloved’ in any context without thinking of the introduction to ‘Let’s Go Crazy.’ Anyone who has ever asked for ‘more’ of anything has, at some point, been met with a mock-disbelieving roar.” Both are certainly true but can also be said of a million other famous song lyrics and movie lines.
But it doesn’t matter if some of his comparisons are sometimes a bit flimsy, because that’s not the point. The point is to be in the company of Nick Hornby, which is always a pleasure. His writing is so quick and generous and conversational and breezy that he could write an entertaining and informative book on the history of mayonnaise. Luckily, he’s chosen two of the most captivating artists of the last 150 years instead.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als is also a Prince fanboy, and in “My Pinup,” his 48-page mini-memoir/essay, he filters Prince’s significance through his own identification with the Artist as a “Black queen (if only in spirit).”
“My Pinup” is a strange hybrid that blends the fragmented story of Als’ fraught romance with his “sensitive, ‘understanding’ white boyfriend” with dreamlike images that read more like poetry than prose.
We get to be there when Als meets Prince for the first time backstage for an interview before the “Musicology” concert in St. Louis. They chat about film vs. music, about business and Black artists being mistreated by the industry. After the show, they discuss a possible collaboration and talk about what it means to Prince to be a Jehovah’s Witness. It is the most corporeal version of Prince we get in “My Pinup,” the only place in which he appears as a real human and not a representation of something else: Blackness, gender fluidity, queerness, art, masculinity.
In the book’s second section, titled “Dorothy Parker, Part II,” Als speaks directly to Prince about the failing relationship with “the man whose girlfriend I wanted to be” while simultaneously comparing the unnamed boyfriend and Prince. “I saw his skin color. It was like yours, Prince. I saw his thinness. It was like yours, Prince. I saw his difference. It was like yours, Prince. Was I in love with him or with you …?” It’s an examination that feels deeply personal but somehow intentionally vague and frustratingly opaque.