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“Just another one of God's gifts”: Prince, African-American masculinity, and the sonic legacy of the eighties
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“Just another one of God's gifts”: Prince, African-American masculinity, and the sonic legacy of the eighties
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Dissertation
“Just another one of God's gifts”: Prince, African-American masculinity, and the sonic legacy of the eighties
2008
Overview
The popular recording artist Prince is known for his ability to fuse musical styles considered mutually exclusive on the basis of race—funk and new-wave, R&B and hard rock. Prince has also made a name for himself by moving between different identities—sexual savant, devout man of god, androgynous sprite—a strategy that fit the 1980s, an era of shifting identity politics. This dissertation expands on previous scholarly work, which has claimed Prince as a quintessentially “post-modern” figure, by showing how his music manifests a history of the struggle for African-American self-representation. As an artist well versed in American pop history and deeply engaged with the black church, Prince was bringing the liberatory strategies of African-American culture to bear even as he de-constructed gender and sexuality. This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the question of music and identity: by analyzing Prince's music with an ear for particular genre references, I present a snapshot of racial politics, music, and American society during a time period that few scholars have yet addressed. Musical genre is the discursive arena in which popular musicians navigate identity and history, and in each of my chapters I have focused on how Prince manipulates genre references, taking instrumental idioms as the signifiers of genre and identity. My introduction considers Prince's use of the guitar, a “white” rock instrument; chapter one deals with keyboard synthesizers, and how Prince blended R&B horn idioms with new-wave music; chapter two discusses the relationship between funk drumming and black identity, exploring Prince's symphonic transformations of the funk and his ambivalence to hip-hop. Chapter three connects Prince's vocal styles to gospel music and the cosmology of the black church; and chapter four details how Prince re-integrated horns into his music, engaging with jazz and R&B as a way to reclaim black musical history. In its blend of musicology, African-American history, and cultural studies, this dissertation captures the sounds of racial politics of the 1980s and 90s, as heard through the music of one of the era's most popular artists as he worked to transform and transcend those politics.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
ISBN
9781109120745, 1109120745
