Prince will be remembered for his genius and the sustained and extremely productive artistic output as a virtuoso musician, songwriter and producer for the past four decades. He was such a prolific creative force that music seemed to pour out of him effortlessly. The quality of his work is proof that it did not. The musical legacy Prince gave us is the work of a disciplined, committed artist who worked at his art relentlessly, studied music and other forms constantly, explored and contemplated technology and the humanities. In the quiet of his internal spaces with the lovely noise of ideas clamoring for attention and development, he could focus as all great artists do and transform the ideas into art, pulling them one by one out of his head into the world where he shaped them into the sound that was uniquely his. Above his celebrity, the persona and mystique, he was a practicing artist who loved the language of music, the musicians who speak that language and the people who can hear it.
He also understood the transformational importance and power of art and used it frequently as a tool, a weapon in the fight for a just and humane society. He challenged bigotry and racism through his music and the visual language he created to extend his ideas. Prince forced us to look at and accept our beautiful difference through his own costuming and theatrics while always performing with bands more representative of society than everyone else. Black, Hispanic and white, female and male, old and young, lesbian, gay and straight all found a place on stage with him when no one else had the understanding or courage.
His extraordinary contribution also included an ability to hear the whispers between musical genres and to facilitate their public conversation by expanding the vocabulary of contemporary American music deeply steeped in African American musical traditions of blues, jazz, soul, funk, gospel and rock. Consistent with the text and subtext often heard in those forms, Prince played between the secularity of human behavior and the sacredness of human yearning. His exploration of the carnal desires of sexuality and sexual identity was always balanced by attention he paid to the importance of love. Prince songs speak openly of love that is intimate and reckless, romantic and committed and familial for those close and all of humankind we’ve yet to meet.
Inside his deep body of work Prince placed a persistent invitation. He was on a quest for deeper spiritual understanding and connection and he always invited us to travel with him beyond the obvious to something more profound. He wanted us to see that in the fabric of his and the stitching of his music was a map to a spiritual journey where dancing was heavily encouraged. Whether we consciously understood or not, engaging in his recorded or live music took us there and that is the reason it moved us so. He was like the rest of us, searching for deeper meaning in human life and its relationship to everything else. Like John Coltrane perfecting his musicianship so he could get closer to God and better serve God’s people, Prince understood his great gifts meant something beyond entertaining. He dedicated himself to the exploration of music, the elevation of his own abilities and a life of creating remarkable work. He lived what the poet Sonia Sanchez calls, “Art as spiritual practice.”
