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I Wonder U How Prince
Went beyond Race and Back
Adilifu Nama
New Brunswick (New Jersey): Rutgers University Press, 2019 Paperback. vii + 173 pages. ISBN 978-1978805163. $24.95
Reviewed by Georges-Claude Guilbert Université Le Havre Normandie
Adilifu Nama
is an African American studies professor at Loyola Marymount University in LA. In
2011, he published Super Black : American Pop Culture and Black
Superheroes, a book that many of us thought was long due. And it was
released, of course, seven years before Black Panther (Ryan Coogler,
2018), which—whether one approved of the movie or not—definitively changed the
black superhero debate. Nama notably looks at all the Marvel Comics Black
superheroes, including The Falcon, obviously, and most convincingly details all
the shifting political discourses that have been conveyed by Black Panther
comics since 1966—in a way that no superhero scholar had done before. Nama writes about the “appearance of black super-heroes in the broad and sweeping
cultural trends of American politics and pop culture during the 1960s and
1970s,” and discusses “the increasing convergence of the popular and the political
in American culture […] as a significant catalyst for the appearance of black
superheroes.” [6] Naturally, this can be applied as such to a great deal of
African American musicians. In 2008, he had analyzed as comprehensively and
compellingly the racial politics of several science fiction movies (with or
without black characters) in Black Space : Imagining Race in
Science Fiction Film. This book is still totally relevant today,
although it could do with a minor revision of its passage on the Star Wars
franchise, whose racial discourse has since substantially changed—or so it
seems to me.
Nama is also the author of the 2015 Race on the
QT : Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino, in which he
stated, against those who quickly dismiss Tarantino as simply a racist, that “beneath
the adolescent giddiness of Tarantino’s gratuitous displays of violence and
fetishistic film gaze are articulations about race that challenge myriad racial
taboos, cultural expectations, and power dynamics concerning race relations in
America.” [134] He went on to say that “most specifically, his films constantly
implicate America’s historical angst over race and invite the viewing audience
to confront blackness as a source of optic, political, and cultural anxiety.”
[134] David Roche, in his review of the book for Transatlantica, writes
that “some white viewers may, indeed, be laughing for the wrong (i.e., racist) reasons, but some may also
be laughing for the same reason as the African American viewers Nama mentions.”
He goes on to explain that, indeed “the limitation to Tarantino’s approach to
filmmaking is that it is so steeped in intertextuality, cultural references and
film genre conventions that it requires an informed viewer to decode it, which
is exactly what Nama does in his book.”
Naturally, such readings could only make the Nama
reader eager to discover if the same kind of sophisticated research was to be
found in a book on popular music, namely, on Prince, who always led his
attentive fans to ponder questions of race, just like Black comic book (or now
cinematic) superheroes, some science fiction movies and most Tarantino movies. The answer is yes. Prince was, in more ways than
one, a superhero of popular music, clearly. From Nama’s point of view, he has
the distinct advantage of being deceased—and many of us still mourn him. This
allows for a comprehensive look at his entire career, and a final
assessment—although clearly not everyone is going to agree with everything Nama
says (as he predicts [153]). I, for one, totally refute the comparison he
establishes with Leif Garrett, even if only fleetingly [22] The book is
divided into seven cunningly titled chapters: “Incognegro,” “On the Black Hand
Side,” “Enfant Terrible,” “Cherry Bomb,” “Chaos and Crossroads,” “Don’t Call It
a Comeback,” and “Dearly Beloved : An Epitaph.” Nama discusses the
unexpected geographical origins of Prince and his occasionally puzzling star
persona. He details his genre-bending work and his gender-bending, as well as
his initial oversize Afro, a hairstyle whose political symbolism diminished,
even though it remained by the late 1970s and early 1980s “a powerful sign of
black racial identity rooted in black cultural history and social memory.” [18]
Prince moved on to chemically straightening his hair and he “utilized androgyny”
as well as homoeroticism in a way that was more associated with white
performers such as David Bowie [21]. One of Prince’s principal aims, it would
seem, was to “distance his music and himself from any R&B typecasting,” owing
much, as he did, to glam rock, punk, and new wave music [23]. Nama
usefully compares Prince to Rick James, Barry White, and Donna Summer,
wondering about the degree of “queer identity” intimated by Prince’s album
covers (although some may dispute the expression here) [25]. He repeatedly
refers to “sex magic,” whatever that might mean [26], and wonders about
Prince’s “punk sensibility,” which is debatable—but the reader understands the
points he makes [27]. This reader, however, wishes he distinguished more often
between Prince Rogers Nelson the realitatis vir, Prince the star persona,
and the dramatis personae and/or narrators who sing the songs on the albums. He
keeps referring to Prince as a “sexual outlaw,” perhaps exaggeratedly, but it
is true that “sex was all Prince would ever need (at least for quite a while)
to provide a distinct thematic” to his work in the MTV era [35]. That and his outstanding
music, that is.
The rest of the book looks at Prince’s cunning collaborations
and subtle entourage-building, destined to launch a crossover career, while
delving into interesting historical forays of the afore-mentioned MTV
era—taking in Michael Jackson, obviously. I myself would have spent more than
two pages on the reasons why Jackson generated more “crossover appeal to breach
MTV’s Jim Crow programming,” but that is not the point of the book [55]. In the
same way—considering the three of them were born in 1958 and embody MTV culture—I
would have spent more than a page on Madonna and the reasons why thousands of Prince
fans were appalled at the notion that she was chosen to perform a
tribute to Prince at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards [149]. The book examines
Prince’s protégés and evolution, and indeed beautifully explains how “Prince
went beyond race and back.” Popular music was and is “racially constricted,
Prince’s music was not,” he still has millions of fans across the globe
(notably in France), “which testifies to Prince’s racially transcendent
appeal.” [152]
I
Wonder U : How Prince Went Beyond Race and Back is a must for cultural studies practitioners, especially those who
analyze the work of iconic figures. As Nama puts it, “a significant part of the
iconic nature of Prince is the stimulating debate he can engender.” [153]
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