ABSTRACT
The Minneapolis-born musician, Prince Rogers Nelson, has become legendary within pop history. Exploring the ways in which the politics of performance pull together issues of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and race, this study further concentrates on the concept of identity as an integral part of musical meaning in pop texts. This chapter explores the relationship between the performer's body and aspects of production it is possible to reveal important elements connected to questions of musical meaning. The pop score is fixed by the recording, it is important to bear in mind that, in a sense, it represents just the final stage of one set of musical ideas within one performance rendition. Stylistically, the music and video are funkadelic with the glam pop dimension heightened by Prince joining in as 'one of the girls' in the tightly choreographed dance sequences. In music videos, the implications of race-based scopophilia are as rife as misogyny, homophobia and sexism.
