Music be the Food of Love?
Last week I found myself trying to digest an extraordinary piece of information. A knowledge that I was only partially able to digest after reading Sasha Weiss’ unputdownable, yet oddly expected revelatory New York Times Magazine piece on Prince.
Andrew Hickey has created an incredible podcast called A History of Rock Music in500 Songs, the title for which explains itself. I listen to roughly an episode a week on Mookie’s and my extended Sunday walks. This past Sunday I embarked on my third (or is it fourth?) on the song Respect as sung by Aretha Franklin. Hickey has a mesmerisingly appropriate voice for his subject matter. Laissez-faire, yet direct and informative in his slightly lisped tenor. Even as he forewarned listeners about the touchy nature of the episode,I was being lullabied into a state of ease. When he mentioned ‘talk of child abuse’ I was not surprised, this being the story of a Black American woman who lived a hard life, yet I was shocked to the core when within the span of 15 minutes,Hickey mentioned that C.L. Franklin had a child with a 12-year-old girl in his congregation and that Aretha also birthed a child at age 12. Even as I write this,‘holy shit, holy shit,’ is what I mutter. ‘What the actual fuck,’ comes shortly afterwards.
Aretha Franklin was known to be an incredibly private woman. She switched on when she was on the stage and instantly off the minute the spotlight went out. How much of that ‘being private,’ had something do with the unimaginable situation (let’s make that plural because she had her second child at 14) she found herself in when her brain, much less her body, was fully formed? There is no fucking way you’re coming back from experiences like that as a woman without gargantuan amounts of therapy. And if the record speaks truthfully, she was not raised in an environment where restorative self-justice was thought about, much less encouraged. The black and white keys of the piano and singing were her comfort and therapist, and she naturally found herself drawn into an industry that both harboured the predators familiar to her and provided her with purpose and self-worth. Thus, continuing the horribly sickly cycle of being torn down and built back up. I could write a dissertation about the psychological impact of early childhood trauma on the .5%of artistic geniuses who survive. I probably will one day, but right now, I’m trying to illuminate that Sisyphus had nothing on the lives of Black American musicians.
It took me a very, very long time to understand the genius of Prince. The first album of his I bought was 3121 from the bargain bin at the glorious Tower Records that used to be at Lincoln Center.I liked it, but I didn’t love it. When my beloved Aunt passed I inherited her music collection and was surprised to find every single Prince album present. I kept them, but didn’t listen to them for well over a decade. Even after he passed in 2016, I didn’t. So, he was a multi-instrumentalist, big whoop, many others have been too. I just couldn’t get what was so great about this guy—though I’m probably one of the few people who really dug his Batman soundtrack.Everyone saw a sex symbol, a maverick, a musical genius—all which he was—but what I saw was a terribly unhappy and lost man. His sex appeal was always lost to me by the distant look in his eye and the lyrics of his songs, when you really listened to them, always had this tinge of longing, for what, I didn’t know. A friend once made me watch Under the Cherry Moon, and it was an uncomfortable slog of a watch. Why were chics—and dudes—taking their panties off for a guy who was so clearly desperately needy for love?
I have always said that to reach a great height means to know an incredibly deep low; to be locked in your room for six weeks by your father is an abyss. That Prince experienced this, along with constant abandonment, denigration, abuse and homelessness, to be become a definite pillar in music history, is testament that there is a God. I had no idea Prince had such a hellish formative years. I figured he dealt with the usual unending familial disapproval all artists deal with, especially when they belong to very religious families. When I read that his parents were awful on a whole other level, I understood the sadness I always saw in him. Another thing I always say: you don’t become a genius because you compromise easily, and that’s definitely the case with Prince. Music is a tricky art, it’s one that requires perfectionism on an unimaginable level,because you’re dealing with the very raw and immediate emotions of listeners.When a song is bad, it’s bad. When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s great, it transcends time. Unlike a painter who can add another layer of oil paint to the finished product to fix a mistake, once a master is completed and coasting on the airwaves, a musician cannot go back and change a thing. Every note of a song has to be in the right place at the right time. So, they’re maniacal these troubadours.
People aren’t so finite as that. They have their own little minds, and thoughts and feelings, and quite often don’t take it too well to being put in a particular box.That was clearly the case with Prince and women, and it could be very successfully argued that his love ‘em, worship ‘em, destroy ‘em attitude towards women had something to do with his terrible relationship with is mother. Yet for me, though I empathise with his experience, I in no way shape or form excuse his building up to break them down behaviour towards all the women in his life.A pattern that he replicated as it had been done to him. Yet, still even when he could get away from these horrors, to truly find and have what he so desperately sought, he stayed, continuing to keep his family close. How one brings their eternal tormentor to an important career event like the American Music Awards is bizarre to me, yet it makes sense in the narrative cycle of being brought down to have the audience bring you back up. On and on it goes.
Tina Turner is the one anomaly I have thus far discovered. Her early life was not so hot, but she as a child had a very rare inner strength. A strength that I suspect helped her survive the horrors we know her of experiencing later in life. Tina Turner was the greatest female rock and roll performer ever.No one came before her and no one has matched her. But Tina Turner was not a musical genius. She knew her lane and stayed in it, knowing when to let the people who did know what they were doing take over. Her survival as an adult and that she died peacefully without a mess of will, can be attributed to the fact she left. She left the United States and the incredibly ridiculous expectations it puts on its performers, the Black one’s especially. She chose the path of healing and in doing that she sacrificed crazy stratospheric stardom (though she was and still is MEGA). She also went against a code that I have found to exist in the Black American community. One that allows men like C.L. Franklin, Ike Turner and the man who impregnated young Aretha to treat Black women like shit and it be kept secret. Open or otherwise. I have heard very well-educated Black women deride Tina Turner for what she did by outing Ike as a horrible man. They put her down, saying if it weren’t for Ike she wouldn’t have been anything,which is true, even Tina admitted that. But how much destruction of self is one expected to take for acceptance? Tina drew her line in the sand in a way Prince and Aretha did not and for that, she lived her life to the fullest she could.
Rockstar's, actor's, and Kardashian's are worshipped in this country like gods. Punters see their life of flash and money and aspire to it, at the same time as they bow down at these mortals feet. It’s funny to me when the very often ugly truth about these people is outed and the population is shocked and outraged. ‘What did you expect?’ I say. You think there aren’t extraordinary sacrifices on the road to stratospheric stardom? Just this week I had a hearty chuckle at everyone’s amazement at the horrendous thing ‘nice guy’ Dave Grohl did to his wife and family. Yeah,all that glitter is never gold, especially when it comes to false idols. No one’s life is perfect, not mine not yours, and certainly not theirs. We are not happy every day but can be content on a daily basis. It’s about accepting, doing the hard work, forgiving and living life with presence and kindness. It’s about balance of self and of talent. The Kardashian’s scare me, but I respect those women for their hard work and the fact that in the millions of cosmetic procedures they’ve done to themselves, they’re quietly saying ‘yeah, we’re just as fucked up and insecure as the rest of you.’
