THE BOOK
Prince’s position in popular culture has undergone only limited academic scrutiny. This book provides an academic examination of Prince, encompassing the many layers of his cultural and creative impact. It assesses Prince’s life and legacy holistically, exploring his multiple identities and the ways in which they were manifested through his recorded catalogue and audiovisual personae. In 17 essays organised thematically, the anthology includes a diverse range of contributions – taking ethnographic, musicological, sociological, gender studies and cultural studies approaches to analysing Prince’s career.
TOM’S CHAPTER
As part of his ground-breaking work as a stylistic provocateur during the 1980s and 1990s, blues music and blues culture provided a fundamental element of Prince’s composition, production and live performance practice. This chapter constructs a continuum of blues music performance including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix, positioning Prince as a performer in full command of the aesthetic qualities that characterise African-American music-making with specific reference to the stylistic gestures particular to the blues.
This chapter does not attempt to delimit and collapse Prince’s activity into a single style or genre of practice, or to disregard his wider contribution to popular music. Neither is this an attempt to claim Prince purely as a bluesman – although the figure of the bluesman is one of great complexity in cultural studies. This is not a reductive polemic. The intention is to deconstruct several key performances and rehabilitate the artist’s practice as part of the ongoing continuum of the blues aesthetic.
“Prince and Popular Music interrogates how each changed the other, offering a spectrum of approaches to an iconographic and enigmatic presence who graced any number of vibrant culture scenes with 40 years of innovation and invention. The contributors to this book got the music, and they got the look.” – Benjamin Halligan, Director of the Doctoral College, University of Wolverhampton, UK
“In a detailed examination of one of the most important and eclectic popular artists of all time, Alleyne and Fairclough curate a wide range of perspectives which detail music, aesthetics, representation and politics. This impressively comprehensive study is essential to any study of Prince but is also an important contribution to musicology, celebrity studies, American studies, issues of identity, gender, race and more. The significance of Prince is reflected in the significance of this book.” – Robert Edgar, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, York St John University, UK, and co-editor of Music, Memory and Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2019)
“This collection from the first-ever Prince symposium offers a compelling look into a wealth of interdisciplinary research inspired by and devoted to a pop artist of rare depth and complexity. The diversity of scholarship herein is a fitting tribute to Prince’s opulent creativity and unbound persona.” – Albin Zak, Professor of Music, University at Albany, USA
Prince and Popular Music is published by Bloomsbury Academic: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/prince-and-popular-music-9781501354656/
