Prince, Gender and Sonic Futurity

‘If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them’ (Jones, 2010: 66)

It has been almost seven years since Prince’s death, but the allure surrounding his music still endures. As the pioneer of the Minneapolis Sound, an eclectic mix of funk, synth-pop, new wave and punk, Prince and his influence on the contemporary music landscape – be it within the sounds of Silk Sonic, or the queer aesthetics of Lil Nas X – is undeniable. Across a body of work that spans 48 studio albums, and a speculated thousands of unreleased songs, Prince constantly unsettled conventional understandings of race and gender. I look to map his resistance towards and reconceptualisations of these intersecting identities within the song ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.

Kodwo Eshun is one of the key interlocutors who has established the sonic as a primary means by which Black diasporic musics’ speculative capacities can be thought through. In his extraordinary book “More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction’’, Eshun (2018) proposed that something of an epistemological break occurred within Black music during the 1970s, as it began to move away from its embodied social imperatives towards radical experimentations with what the very term ‘Blackness’ embodied (Jones, 2022). Reverberating through machine mythologies, conceptechnics and computer rhythms, these complex techno-assemblages were symbolic of a move away from the Black soulful era toward a new post-soulful age, one which began to speculate on the posthuman potentialities of what he called the Futurhythmachine.

‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ can be situated within Eshun’s (2018) framework of the Futurhythmachine and posthuman potentiality. Within the song, Prince channels Camille –an androgynous alter-ego – which, through technologically distorted, higher pitched vocals, evokes a sonic intensity unconfined to the male or female. The suppressed funk buried within the song feels peculiar yet strangely familiar, embedded somewhere between (and yet also radically outside of) the feminine, masculine, and technological. At first, the title implies a female identity, yet as the song develops, we realise Prince is a heterosexual male playing a role, imagining the possibilities of a more emotionally intimate relationship with his lover, an emotional intensity that up until that point, had only been reserved for women (Thorne and De Abaitua, 2011). Whether it’s picking his girlfriend’s clothes before they go out or imagining going to the movies and crying together, Prince aligns himself within this liminal space of vulnerability that is neither masculine nor feminine, an ambiguous space which, as Clifford (2020) rightly points out, also works through racial dimensions by resisting the historical hyper-sexualisation of Black men. Through the alter-ego of Camille, Prince defies identifiability, knowability and classification into heteronormative systems by reconfiguring the Black heterosexual expectations that underpin modernity.

But perhaps there is more at work within ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’. Saldanha (2018) speculates on another possible reading: suggesting that with the alter-ego, Camille, there may also be something non-human, perhaps even supra-human going on. If the technological mediation of the human voice takes us beyond the masculine/feminine binary, beyond the human into something that is neither wholly human nor wholly technological, one might speculate the voice is also tinged with elements of the demonic and angelic. This supra-human reading of Camille not only prompts a rethinking of heteronormativity but also radically questions what humankind is about, what music is, and how humans relate to one another through music. This ties back into Eshun’s (2018) idea of the Futurhythmachine that moves beyond embedded social imperatives toward an experimentation of Blackness which ventures into the posthuman, the cyborg, the cosmic, and the alien. Or as Fisher (2017) might say, venturing into the weird.

‘The weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sense of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid’ (Fisher, 2017: 15)

‘The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate’ (Fisher, 2017: 15)

Amiri Baraka’s theory of The Changing Same is a particularly useful conceptual tool to think about when reflecting on these different readings of Prince. Baraka (1971) argued that whenever we get what appears to be innovation in Black diasporic music, those conditions of innovation always rely upon fragments of the past and fragments of memory. Black music for Baraka then, situated itself within a temporal loop, a state of temporal nonlinearity within which there was no such thing as ‘total newness’. Such an understanding encourages us to think more relationally about Prince’s music. Prince and his androgynous persona, Camille, do not unsettle heteronormative conceptualisations of Black men within an isolated vacuum. His thinking is not cut off from other modes of speculative thought flowing through the Black diaspora. There is far more at stake. Prince builds on queer Black artists that came before him (e.g. Little Richard and Betty Davis), while also working in constant dialogue with artists that came after him (e.g. Andre 3000, Lil Nas X and Janelle Monae). His use of an androgynous alter ego (as an experimental tactic which speculates on Black queerness) flows through a larger Black consciousness spanning the Afrodiasporic experience. A Black consciousness that throughout history (and in the future), has always reverberated with a particular force and intensity both of this world, and yet strangely beyond it.