PRINCE’S LOVESEXY: ASSAULT/ARTISTRY/ATONEMENT

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The hydraulic-powered stage at London's Wembley Arena, he had been the embodiment of randy energy, a funk evangelist promising he could personally service the diverse sexual needs of a mesmerized crowd of eight thousand. He had the audience chanting that God was alive, that God was love. The message had been delivered in a choreographic display of Kama Sutra gymnastics, and in a dizzying gamut of musical styles with all the reflexive intensity of a man speaking in tongues.
By 1988 Prince had them all Converted. Over a decade-long career of twelve massively influential albums and three feature-length films, Prince has led his public through a game of hide-andseek with an unrivaled gut sophistication. His grudging early interviews offered cryptic contradictions and falsifications- about his age, his racial background, his parents, even his real name-while his records, from the beginning, were a psychosexual striptease (most provocatively on 1980's Dirty Mind in "Sister," a reputedly autobiographical exploration of the liberating powers of incest).
He is that artist who comes fully alive only in performance. By 1988, most Prince gossip told of a moody, socially awkward man who was spotted dancing abstractedly with his bodyguards at a New York nightclub; who refused to join his fellow stars for the "We Are the World" single because, he later apologized with atypical humility. (The best printed Prince gossip story, in the National Enquirer, had him losing both girlfriend Sheena Easton and his chauffeur because he insisted they communicate with him telepathically.) Even the supposed self-portraiture of his biggest commercial success, the movie Purple Rain, unveils nothing more than an alienated, inarticulate man whose communicative redemption comes onstage at the film's conclusion in a song entitled, no less, "Baby I'm a Star."
The results of this compulsiveness were breathtaking, an increasingly eclectic brew of black, white, funk, rap, jazz, pop-you name it-melded into one smooth, polyphonic, synthesizerstroked package. Critics and fellow musicians compared him to everyone from Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix, from Joni Mitchell to the Beatles to Philip Glass. He was rumoured to have watched Amadeus dozens of times, the way Nixon watched Patton. It was evident in the way he presented himself. After all, Prince too was a musical polymath, a foulmouthed convention breaker, a man with a giant contempt for commercial tameness.
Then there's God. "Why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?" laments Mozart's untalented rival, Salieri, in Amadeus. Ask Prince. The singer had always given God generous credit on albums and films, and a messianic strain has always been a part of his music. With Lovesexy, however, Prince had become divine. He shelved the gritty, funk-driven, decidedly earthbound Black Album (now the hottest bootleg tape around) and released the seraphic, sweeter-voiced (but still sex-dominated) Lovesexy, in which willing flesh and willing spirit are merged. In a parable in the tour concert program, Prince hinted that the Black Album was the work of "Spooky Electric," his name for the Prince of Darkness (who also showed up on Lovesexy, as the embodiment of youthful anomie, the force that drives people to drink and drugs). "Spooky Electric must die," writes Prince. "Die in the bodies of women who want babies that will grow up with a New Power Soul Love Life Lovesexy-the feeling u get when you fall in love, not with a girl or boy, but with heaven above." And in the haunting ballad "Anna Stesia," he segues seamlessly from girl to God. Prince has even been proselytizing offstage, in his own oblique way. At Wembley a congregation of selected fans received autographs. They read, "Love God P '88."
Like everything he did, Prince's new incarnation as holy avatar, was weirdly topical. In the age of AIDS, sex and religion were more explicitly linked than they'd been in years. The American leg of Prince's Lovesexy tour came in the wake of The Last Temptation of Christ. Not to mention the fall from grace of flesh-loving television evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Theirs, in any case, is one problem the evangelical Prince would never have to face.