The one song Prince said would still be adored “in 2,000 years”
It is often said that Prince was an analogue artist in a digital world.
While technology was always central to his work, with the maestro even reinventing how machines like the Linn LM-1 were used in pop music, it was never the centre of it. As he put it himself, “Technology is cool, but you’ve got to use it as opposed to letting it use you.” So, Prince always used it in an analogue fashion, and for good reason.
This in itself was very forward-thinking. As it happens, ironically, analogue will always be the future of music. For instance, much of Netflix’s purely digital original content has already begun to disappear forevermore. Entire works of art, evaporated and rendered redundant. They’ve been deleted out of existence to make space for the next ephemeral shot at a hit. The same is true of music, and the trend is inhuman.
Beyond the myriad implications of digital art’s precarious nature, one of the more subtle potentialities is that musicians play into the modern ephemerality of art and things become fad-focused, viral-aiming, and ever-more niche, leaving timeless masterpieces on the mounting ash heap of burnt-up cultural history.
So, while Prince’s assertion about technology might sound blasé thanks to his typically laidback wording, it was an attitude that drove his own art forward and resonated within the art that he loved, in turn.
The pouting Purple one saw a kinship in John Lennon. The bespectacled Beatle was a musician who also had an analogue obsession, aware at a young age that the Fab Four were etching the essence of the zeitgeist onto their tapes, rather than merely just dishing out little ditties for the airways.
This gave a lasting, artful integrity to their work, reflecting what was happening in culture. Lennon knew that lasting showmanship needs depth, or it is destined to disappear. “The rock star thing is dead,” Prince once told the Minnesota Monthly, in an ‘eye on the times’ manner that the culturally observant Beatle could’ve quite easily uttered.
“I mean I still have bodyguards for my own personal safety but that whole deal is over for me,” he explained, “I’m not that anymore, that rock star trip, I did it. It’s finished.”
In a creative sense, his point was that music has to stay true to itself in order to endure. Whether that is literally analogue or the earnest sentiments that it implies, there has to be truth and integrity to what you’re doing if it is going to become timeless at a time where hundreds of thousands of songs are made every day. In his view, Lennon was a master of staying true to himself and the times he found himself in.
“Now lots of people say, ‘Oh yeah, Lennon lost his edge’, when he came out of that whole domestic scene and started to record again. Man, what does that mean, lost his edge. It usually means some kind of dysfunction of some sort,” Prince opined.
He continued, “The guy goes through whatever it is that makes him angry or alone or upset and comes out being able to manage it at a personal level and what happens to his music? They say it’s ’become domesticated.’ Hey, I hope they’ll say that about my music. I want my music to become domesticated.”
In fact, in falling back on a more contemplative mode, Prince thought that Lennon hit upon greater universality. He claimed that Liverpudlian “would have never written the beautiful music he wrote at the end of his life if he hadn’t gone through what he did with Yoko and himself.”
He continued, “He would have never written ’Imagine.’ And ’Imagine,’ thank God, is going to be around in 2,000 years, but a song like ’I Am The Walrus’ isn’t. You know why? Because John wasn’t the walrus, he was John. ’Imagine’ is a song about truth and will always win out in the end.”
Before concluding, “If John had never climbed up that ladder in that art gallery to see what Yoko had written there when he first met her, his life would have been completely different. What he found was the word ’Yes,’ and to me, that defined the beginning and the ending of their lives together as people and artists. To me, that one little word says it all.”
To Lennon, it said it all, too. As the Beatle explained, “I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass, and in tiny little letters it says ‘yes’. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder, and you look through the spyglass, and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it says ‘yes’.”
In that moment, he recognised the power of positivity at its most simple. That’s reflected wholly in ‘Imagine’. For some, it’s too saccharine to carry much weight, but for Prince it represented a sweetness that we’ll always need.
