It’s been a decade since Prince died — though his words are with me every day.
The tattoo on my right biceps reads “rich in personality,” borrowed from the opening verse of 1984’s “Baby, I’m a Star.”
Hey, look me over
Tell me, do you like what you see?
Hey, I ain’t got no money
But, honey, I’m rich on personality
Growing up poor during the 1980s was like being in an upside down version of “The Wonder Years”: I wondered if the lights would be on when I came home from school; I wondered if we would have enough to eat that night; I wondered if poor was all there was.
As such, the songs about poverty I heard on the radio — John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” “The Message” from the Furious Five, Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” — were more than hits. They were snapshots of different, yet familiar worlds. So naturally, a song with the line “I ain’t got no money” feels like home. And those same five words were the opening line of Prince’s first hit, in 1979, “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”
I was too young to understand sex, thus the full meaning of that song wasn’t clear to me until later — but I knew what it meant not to have any money. In fact, one winter it seemed everyone in school wore these black boots with a large white kangaroo logo on the side. Don’t ask me why, we just did. Anyway, the poorer kids — trying to keep up — often bought knockoffs, which usually came with a noticeably smaller logo. The really broke kids, the ones like me, well, we had an entirely different animal on our boots. I think I had a polar bear or a scorpion wearing a scarf or something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t right.
Even some of the teachers laughed.
We never really leave behind our early years. Even decades later, I tend to hear lyrics about poverty like an echo from nearby.
In the opening five words that began his ascent, Prince told his crush he didn’t have any money before quickly pointing out the ones who do “always seem to let you down.” The sense that there’s more than the material hark back to him being raised a Seventh Day Adventist and spending his high school years as a de facto orphan. When you don’t have much, you have to shape your sense of self-worth around something greater than yourself, to look outside of your situation. It’s in doing so that words like “nothing comes from dreamers but dreams” and “nothing comes from talkers but sound” act like breadcrumbs leading to a higher place. The spiritual nature of Prince’s songwriting provides constant reminders that there’s more to living than the trappings of a glamorous life. You can wear furs, read the Robb Report, watch “Dynasty” but:
Money only pays the rent.
Love is forever, that’s all your life.
Love is heaven sent,
It’s glamorous.
That’s why Prince’s observations reverberate after his passing more than the sexual innuendos he was initially known for. It was his storytelling, not the salaciousness, that made the sound of “Purple Rain” during the montage of the “Stranger Things” finale move audiences. Not just the generation that grew up hearing it every hour on the radio. Also those who didn’t know who Prince was until Eleven told Mike goodbye.
Although admittedly on occasion, I think about the robin that “sings a masterpiece that lives and dies unheard” from “The Screams of Passion” or his sonically lush collaboration with George Clinton, “We Can Funk”:
I could tell you things to get you excited, things you never heard.
You know the Kama Sutra?
I could rewrite it with half as many words.
In lesser hands, the line would sound like overcompensating projectile from the bowels of the manosphere.
But Prince’s words about sex feel less like macho boasts from an insecure man and more like the surrendering of an attentive lover … if only for the night. This is the craftsman who is also vulnerable enough to write “would you run to me if somebody hurts you, even if that somebody was me?” and to proclaim “love is too weak to define just what you mean to me.”
Amna Nawaz, co-anchor and co-managing editor of “PBS NewsHour,” told me nowadays she often finds herself quoting “dearly beloved, we are gathered here today, to get through this thing called life.”
For Donnie Wahlberg, whose band New Kids on the Block shared the charts with Prince in the late ’80s and early ’90s, one lyric stayed with him even though he missed a key part of it for years.
“I never knew what he said after the words ‘and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy’ … like ‘one, two, three, four,’” Wahlberg told me recently. “One day my friend heard me sing along to the intro and incredulously asked, ‘What the heck did you just say?’”
Prince’s version is: “If the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy, punch a higher floor.”
To mark the 10th anniversary of Prince’s death, which will be Tuesday, celebrations are planned across the country, including in Minneapolis, where his life and career began. His former art director and personal photographer, Steve Parke, who recently published a photo book called “Prince: Black, White, Color,” told me he misses the friendship more than the opportunities life working with a rockstar provided. When Parke feels down, he thinks of the words from “Pop Life”:
What’s the matter with your life
Is the poverty bringing you down?
Is the mailman jerking you ’round?
Did he put your million-dollar check in someone else’s box?
“He wasn’t about dwelling on the bad, he wasn’t about waiting for things to get better, like hoping to get a check in the mailbox,” Parke said. Instead, Prince sought to “spread good for goodness’ sake regardless of the circumstance. That’s really who he was at his core.”
At a time when greed was considered good, Prince was among the lyricists reminding us that being good still mattered more.
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