Vacancy

During 1985-1987, when the 1980s started to slowly recover from being the 1980s, Prince was so driven by quality it was inspiring. It was easy to admire him. Like too few of his admirers, I was disappointed when his inventive nature gave way to cultish behaviour. His actions spoke truer than anyone knew, including himself, when he scrawled the word “slave” on his cheek.

After Alex Hahn’s Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince was published, Prince staged another comeback, already forgotten, although his stature as a live performer is apparently much repaired if stories about his finances are to be believed. The book is chilling, and in spite of some kneejerk criticisms, I found the premise to be completely sound: you can draw a line between Prince’s ascent and the moment he threw it all away; the rest was all a steep decline.

Overkill spoiled aspects of his personna that were once tolerable, like the successive denials of obvious affairs, cute at first, then simply tiresome. (If irrelevant, why draw the attention in the first place?) Imploding his group The Revolution should have been a more costly error, but too many of the converted were unwilling to be discerning. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman never recovered the momentum of Dream Factory; ultimately, they disappointed too. (From psychedelia to the 70s is always a crushing drop.) The establishment of the new order in the form of the New Power Generation was the last straw in that enforced “positivity” became symptomatic of brainwashing. Prince’s bizarre repression of feelings he deemed “negative” cast a perennial sunshine day that bleached away all of the contrast that made the work of his most productive period so evocative. Without direction or substance, and without the cross-pollinisation that enabled the Revolution period, Prince withered. The too-public dissatisfaction with Warner Bros. proved simply a distraction from the actual issue; once the contract elapsed, his productivity plummeted and years began to elapse between releases. There was a time when Prince was known for more than discovering Carmen Electra. Possessed establishes when and how he got lost.