How Can You Just Leave Me Standing?
How can you just leave me standing?
Today was the first triple digit day of the season. The heat hit me like a wall. Thick. Heavy. Choking. Even shade felt like a heat hammer.
I parked my car in the morning and walked a mile to my office. Hunched under street lamps in tiny slabs of shadow as I waited for lights to turn from red to green. Moved fast across six lanes of traffic trying to reach the next piece of shade.
It was a co-worker who told me. “Did you hear that Prince is dead?” He looked like he would cry. I shook my head, felt a lump come to my throat. I normally don’t get emotional over celebrity death, but this hit me hard.
I turned on my computer and found “When Doves Cry” on youtube. Listened to the song. Felt.
Flashback to yesterday. I was running at twilight listening to music on shuffle mode on my iPod. Nothing sounded good. I kept clicking past songs. Then I landed on The Be Good Tanyas’ cover of “When Doves Cry” and thought “That’s it!” I ran six miles listening to different cover versions of the song. It’s always been my favorite Prince song. That was yesterday. Today, the doves were crying. And one of them wasn’t because he has left this world.
I called Casa Video and reserved a copy of Purple Rain to watch. I decided I want to write something on the movie, the songs, and Prince in general. I’ll write my article over the weekend. It will be published in CounterPunch next week. Perhaps these words are my warm up, trying to grasp where I’m going because I’m not sure which makes sense when thinking about Prince.
When I first started listening to Prince, and especially Purple Rain, I didn’t really think too deeply about music, identity, race, performance, and all those things. I just knew I loved the man, and I loved his music.
I realized today that there are so many reasons why I would love Prince. First of all, his music is a hybrid that is a lot of things while also being very uniquely its own thing. There is no other Prince. The man could write a song, sing his guts out in an incredible range that could rip your heart to pieces, play the living hell out of the guitar and piano, and put on a mind blowing spectacle of a performance.
On the surface, Prince felt like pop. But he also had deep soul to rival the best and has been compared to Soul Master Sly Stone by many. But he could also rock, coming out of Milwaukee at the same time as post-punk bands like Husker Du and The Replacements.
But none of that is why I liked Prince.
Touch if you will my stomach
Feel how it trembles inside
You've got the butterflies all tied up
Don't make me chase you
Even doves have pride
I love Prince because the man was working out his struggles with identity through music. I identified with him because he could not be categorized, because he was so many things yet he was nothing and mostly he was his own thing. I love him because he defied labels, and because his personal cosmology made him an outsider from the outset. He wasn’t black or white, rock or soul. He was . . . Prince.
And his music came to me at a time in my life when I realized I would never belong anywhere. I didn’t know who or what I was, but I knew I would never belong. Ever.
Even as a kid I didn’t belong. I was the kid who was beaten by her dad who all the other kids feared. I was the kid who cussed like a sailor and whose friends were forbidden to play with me because of my bad mouth. I was a kid sent to isolation in juvenile hall, and isolation is the world I have lived in.
I left home at fifteen and spent my entire teen years off the grid while girls my age were going to proms, having boyfriends, and planning for college. I don’t understand those girls. I don’t understand people. So many things people take for granted, and I have no idea what they are. I am an alien.
I lived with black pimps and drug dealers, and I lived with the Italian mafia. My experiences forever marked me as sexually “other,” yet I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t hetero. I was just a . . . freak.
Dream if you can a courtyard
An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you
Yet I had a big old heart of gold (to be cliché). I grew up listening to soul and had a killer collection of Motown 45 rpms. When I finally started buying albums, two of my first were The Who’s QUADROPHONIA and Elton John’s GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD, both of which were kind of rock operas. I loved how they told stories through songs. I loved how they were confused yet whole. Splintered but sincere. One thing and many.
I realized today that Prince’s PURPLE RAIN was a lot like these two albums. Both of them are all over the place in sound and style, just like Prince’s music. The move from slow ballads to frenetic pop and hybrid genre pieces. They can’t be categorized. They’re not sure what they are. Just like Prince. Just like me.
Prince took his uncategorical difference and belted it out in music that constantly shifted, that never gave up its soul, but also bumped and grinded some of the best pop in rock history.
I feel for Prince because I feel for his scattered identity. The fact that he created this alter-ego out of his real struggles and put his soul into it. He’s Prince, but who is he really?
I created an alter-ego when I was nineteen because I realized that I didn’t belong anywhere. Her name was Kim Dot Dammit. I’ll be 54 years old this July, and Kim Dot Dammit still lives.
But who am I and what am I? There are times in my life when I have really held onto my Italian genes because they gave me some kind of sense of heritage or belonging. Race. Class. I may have a lot of Italian genes, but even that identity is largely constructed. My family is dead. I never knew my biological father. After I got off the streets where I was completely invisible, I spent years scraping together an identity out of pieces of myself and the shit I made and wrote. I am a montage of sorts. But who am I really?
PURPLE RAIN is a beautiful album because it covers the spectrum of young confused life. Fighting with identity, genes, family. The need for and impossibility of love. Desire. Hope. Heartbreak. Alienation. And the one thing holding the human soul together - soul as expressed through music.
With Prince, there was always hope in all the freneticism and pomp and gut wrenching pleas in his music. There was hope even while recognizing hopelessness. In his music there is belonging with self and understanding that self is something we feel intensely but can never really be defined or belong. It is the hope in PURPLE RAIN mixed in with regret, pain, longing, desperation and the sense that he will never belong but wants to belong, not necessarily to a group but to himself, that struck my heart deep and still does.
How do we who live beyond categories navigate the tumultuous terrain of our souls in a world that insists on categories that will never accommodate us? Through art, writing, music, creative expression. We try to find love, but it’s very difficult when we realize that our otherness not only hurts ourselves but others. Still we keep hoping.
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
And I guess that’s why I cried when Prince died. Because hope didn’t win out for him.
End ramble. These are photos I shot while running tonight and listening to and thinking about Prince. This is what the sky looked like when the doves cried.
Dig if you will the picture
Of you and I engaged in a kiss
The sweat of your body covers me
Can you my darling
Can you picture this?
One of my favorite Prince covers. Also all quoted lyrics in this post are from "When Doves Cry"
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