The Sexy Androgyny of Prince and Purple Rain

A few days ago, Celebrate Brooklyn!, the series of concerts and events held in the Prospect Park Bandshell, held a Purple Rain sing-a-long in celebration of the film's 25th anniversary. The 2,000 seats and additional lawn space were full, with many fans clad in purple regalia, paying tribute to the man and his movie. The park joined media entities like SPIN Magazine and NPR's New York station, WNYC, which have hosted their own Rain discussions and commemorations. (SPIN has even produced a tribute album by a variety of artists, including a remake of "When Doves Cry" by The Twilight Singers, featuring Apollonia, one of the film's stars.)

The plot: Prince, starring as The Kid, is the head of a Minneapolis-based band whose sound falls outside of popular sensibilities. The group is barely hanging on to its headlining role at a popular venue. Enter gorgeous Apollonia, arriving with hopes of becoming a star while being romantically pursued by both The Kid and his archenemy, Morris Day, aka Purple Rain's main comic foil and scene stealer.

A mass of moviegoers singing and hooping and hollering to Purple Rain is perfect, for the plot is driven by the still-innovative music (I'm particularly fond of "Take Me With U"'s easygoing effervescence and whimsy), the concert antics, the comedy, and the sex. And what erotic treats there are: Apollonia's toplessness, and her lingerie and leather, and her love scene with Prince. And Prince's toplessness, and his blouses and leather, and his grinding and sweat, and almost perpetual aura of androgyny.

SPIN's Prince Cover, July 2009

It was the androgyny in particular that incited some of the women in the audience. High-pitched screams were elicited at key scenes -- the demure way the Kid tells Apollonia "stop" as they begin to groove at his place, the way he swivels his svelte hips and backside in his home, the way he parts his lips as he lay on stage, swathed in pink light at the end of his performance of "The Beautiful Ones."

It's an interesting lesson from a mid-80's film, that a man who exults in the feminine in his gestures and style -- lace, eye liner, curls, lashes, finger waves, head scarves, midriff tops, boots -- turns on legions and legions of women. And mind you, he's soaring with aspects of this style in a film set in a working class 'hood.

I spoke to some female Prince fans about their adoration of the man: two commented on their love of his uniqueness and willingness to do his own thing, with one woman exclaiming, "It's the heels!"

My suspicion: many women are thrilled by Prince because they readily see themselves in him, and vice versa, and the mutual love is visceral and real. And perhaps this lesson is lost on our current crop of soulful male performing artists who cling to a more rigid mode of masculinity. Andre 3000 and Maxwell come to mind as two artists with a huge female fan base who embrace "softness" in their creative instincts, yet note how anomalous they are in the current musical landscape.

(Special Note: Another shining star of brown androgynous manhood in film can be found in Chris Tucker's comedic character Ruby Rhod, a muscled, lipstick-wearing, squeaky-voiced radio personality who loves to pleasure women in the futuristic sci-fi flick The Fifth Element.)

The Kid is by no means a paragon of feminine virtue; he physically abuses and manipulates Apollonia, and is sometimes harsh and domineering with his bandmates, particularly Wendy and Lisa. Nonetheless, his fluidity onscreen is captivating, and makes me wonder how Purple Rain Prince would make out in these times of hardcore swaggering and conformity, where brothers take to the streets with an urban uniform and The Jungle Stroll -- shoulders hunched forward, fists clenched, arms swinging side to side.

Prince took his androgyny to the stratospheres of success, and we clapped, and continue to applaud. Yet in a cultural landscape where brown men who want to be seen as manly qualify acts of softness with the disclaimer "no homo," where r&b statesman Ne-Yo feels the need to issue a website statement defending his masculinity after crying onstage, how would new-to-the-scene petite royalty in golden gilded wraps and purple ruffled ascots fare?

Prince's compilation album cover showcases his signature styles

Comments

[washdcguy]

Trends tend to be cyclical. Let's hope the current wave of extreme machismo in music is just part of the last cycle. I say last cycle because of the progress the GLBT community and androgynous people have made in the last decade. Though we have a long way to go, the world has changed drastically since I was a child in the 80s and 90s. As more minds are opened to different types of people, perhaps a new crop of artists like Prince might be more palatable to younger generations.

[Ferentz LaFargue - Huffpost Blogger]

This is an interesting piece. In many ways the timing was perfect for Prince and Prince was perfect for this time-by which I mean we can identify shades of his androgyny in Little Richard and James Brown, two of his musical predecessors. Unlike Brown and Little Richard Prince was fortunate enough to come along in the late 70s and early 80s during disco's heyday and glam rock. While not a practictioner of either genre, he definitely benefited from their associations with party-sex and inquiry into gender-bending as another form of genre-bending. Which is why I guess we were privy to Blondie, Grace Jones, Boy George and Prince in the early 80s.

[Tavia]

Ferentz you've got a point. I wonder: was black androgyny more acceptable in the brief moment when pop music experienced its interracial opening in the early 1980s, before the music industry caught onto a particular gangsta image of hip hop that could be commercialized and sold back to both white and black youth as authentic, hard, black masculinity? Little Richard also came about in an earlier moment of interracial opening. It was different sure, pre-civil rights and all, but his effeminate and outrageous appeal helped cross black music over to white rhythm and blues fans. As with Prince, later black male performers mostly turned away from the outrageous image Little Richard cultivated, seeing it as a kind of "emasculation" that white culture demanded of black crossover artists. But thinking about the appeal of black male effeminacy (really I think more than androgyny, Prince was/is effeminate, even if he is also sometimes misogynist and homophobic. Effeminacy as a term did not originally necessarily refer to homosexuality but to men who enjoyed the ambiance of femininity ... Prince sums up the ideal in "If I was your Girlfriend") to women, not just "white society." Thinking about a secret history of female pleasure in these spectacular male performances -- which we see echoed in contemporary performers like Janelle Monae -- is a more generous way of thinking about these moments of interracial opening in musical history.

[Clarence Haynes - Huffpost Blogger]

Hey Tavia and Ferentz. Your comments make me think of a Tori Amos song, "Glory of the 80's." And I think effeminacy is better term for Prince than how we generally percieve or use androgyny, so thank you Tavia. (David Bowie and Annie Lennox come to mind as androgynous archetypes.) And I also wonder how women reacted to Little Richard and James Brown; they both had their own sex appeal, yet neither struck me as persistently erotic as Prince in the sensibilities of their performances and lyrics.

I also wonder what you two think about current state of music industry with the digital revolution, and if we're heading back to period of more gender bending and cross-racial music pollination. (I'd like to say "Yes!")

[WaveDave]

It's great, your looking for comments but real men don't comment about Androgyny...right :) Real men don't know how to spell it, let alone talk about it.

I admit to being drawn to androgynous men and women. Something about handsome women and beautiful men, really makes me sit up and take notice. I remember reading that the mark of royalty was that they crossed the boundaries that everyone else held sacred. Maybe part of our attraction is to those who completely ignore the rules that cage so many of is, so perfectly. Maybe until we see Prince and Michael...we don't even know we are caged, and for a moment, in them and in the music they make... we are free!

[Clarence Haynes - Huffpost Blogger]

I agree that some of the most compelling performers and artists serve as mirrors, reflecting back traits we're often frightened to display lest we be judged. And maybe there's a tragedy there, if we only allow performers to do that work for us instead of carrying the inspiration into our daily lives. I love your comment. Thanks very much.