JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Thank you for reminding me of the bit about Prince (who, being The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, is technically The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I think that to some extent it accounts for our own fascination with the funky little genius troll. In this excerpt, the narrator Lionel Essrog, an orphan and minor mobster with Tourette’s Syndrome, explains why Prince’s music is the nearest thing in art to his affliction.

I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music had never made much of an impression on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna’s Cadillac, I first heard the single “Kiss” squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly charmed my Tourette’s, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck—but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented, squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead…

“How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” is a ballad, piano strolling beneath an aching falsetto vocal. Slow and melancholy, it still featured the Tourettic abruptness and compulsive precision, the sudden shrieks and silences, that made Prince’s music my brain’s balm.

In the 80s Prince’s “Controversy” was the theme of an Inday Badiday showbiz chismis show. Probably without his knowledge. I don’t suppose German Moreno’s That’s Entertainment paid for all the songs that were covered, either. Those were less rigorous times.