Prince, The Racy-Religious-Conservative-Purple Enigma
Prince
Is it too soon? People everywhere and rightfully celebrate what a genius Prince was, what musical icon he had become and what a deep hole his death has made in our culture. There is absolutely no doubt about all this but the man was an enigma for me… Is it too soon to see Prince under the right light? Remove all these gentle purple filters, Prince was a weirdo. Everyone remembers about him as a good, loving and caring man who made a career on gender confusion, ‘his daring difference in gender-bending style and fashion liberated generations more,’ wrote the LA Times. Sure but what about his homophobic comments?
‘God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough’, he said to the New Yorker in 2008. In the interview, he clearly opposed to gay marriage and homosexuality, which comes as a shock from a man who liked to dress up like a woman, on high heels and wrapped in a purple velvet shawl.
Prince was a devout Jehovah’s witness, he converted to the cult in 2001 and as everyone knows, this is not a religion which agrees with gay lifestyle! ‘The Jehovah’s Witness religion teaches its membership to believe that homosexuality is ‘detestable’, ‘an abomination’, ‘abhorrent’, and is caused by demon possession,’ you can read on a website describing the religion. Have you ever looked at one of these Watchtower pamphlets in your hands? ‘Soon God will turn earth into an eternal paradise?’… ‘There are billions of people who do not know Jehovah. Many of them in ignorance practice things that God’s Word shows to be wicked. If they persist in this course, they will be among those who perish during the great tribulation’? I know, all religions are crazy, but isn’t it surprising that for the last 15 years, his purple highness on heels had embraced this super conservative cult? This is a guy who wrote stuff like ‘If you’re tired of the masturbator/Come on over 2 my neighborhood/We can jump in the sack and I’ll jack U off” or ‘I knew a girl named Nikki, I guess U could say she was a sex fiend/I met her in a hotel lobby, masturbating with a magazine’ and so many more sexually provocative lines, and we only were in the 80’s! This dirty-mind sex symbol had a very complex relationship with his religion,… unless, of course all these lyrics were written before he found religion,
Prince even did this door-to-door Jehovah’s witness thing and one of the guy in his congregation once said: ‘We have watched Prince since he started studying the Bible and noticed a dramatic change. We go on Bible studies together and work in field service, the door-to-door ministry that Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for.’
His faith in god can be discovered all over his songs lyrics, but his devotion to the cult went much further. When he talked to Tavis Smiley, in 2009, he explained why he didn’t vote for Obama: ‘The reason why is that I’m one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And we’ve never voted. That’s not to say I don’t think … President Obama is a very smart individual and he seems like he means well. Prophecy is what we all have to go by now.’
The prophecy was preventing him to vote? Was Prince a bit insane? And what about his hate of the internet? Remember when he said that ‘The internet was completely over’ to the Daily Mirror? ‘The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you,’ declared Prince in 2010, he had since made some concessions and was even on Twitter and Tidal, but ‘the internet is over’ and ‘the numbers that can’t be good’ were coming straight from his cultish faith.
Did the Jehovah religion ruin Prince like Scientology ruined Beck? Was Prince a Christian songwriter? He was certainly a man who believed deeply in God, and whose lyrics were the proof of a sincere faith… but they also were intertwined with a raunchy display of male and female sexuality. Prince was an ambiguous character, deeply religious but writing about masturbation when he was not promoting female sexuality, he was an androgynous fashion icon opposed to gay marriage, he was too sexy for Christians, too conservative for liberals, he was unique, one of the kind, and he wrapped his image in self contradictory as mush as he wrapped his body in purple… although Prince never saw any contradiction in anything he ever did. Prince was, as he said himself, ‘something that you’ll never understand’.
