ABSTRACT
It is a characteristic of the visual marketing of Prince that he has integrated a diverse range of genres and styles, including references to various cultures, identities and sexualities. We know in pop music that conventions are smudged in order to create new spaces for defining spectator/listener identities that in turn enable promoters to develop new markets. Consequently, popular music scholars have theorized pop as a constantly shifting social plane where the appropriation of styles and idioms can tell us everything about our culture. In this respect, performativity is implicit in any discussion relating to Prince’s own awareness of himself as a performed act. That he communicates through the recording in so many different ways that are socially circumscribed, means that his performances operate in a sphere that is transitory. Furthermore, Prince’s creative agency ‘can be associated with a profusion of styles that simultaneously articulate the conditions of authenticity and artifice in musical expression’ (Hawkins 2002, pp. 160–61). This notion of ambivalence forms part of a discourse on his Otherness, which we intend to illuminate in this chapter.
