The dark origins of Prince’s risqué edge: “My mom used to leave trashy pornography around”
I’d start this article by listing some of the most outrageous things Prince has ever put to music, but I worry it might be reported as too NSFW and land me in trouble.
Straddling the worlds of pop and rock, Prince was the ultimate provocateur of the 1980s and beyond. After proving his talent on his debut album, when he managed to convince a record label to not only fund a new artist, but fund him alone to do absolutely everything on that album, he then used that trust to get wild.
Once he had his labelled locked in by proving his virtuosity, Prince seemed to quickly relax into the mindset that, really, he could do anything. He could push things as far as he wanted, he could experiment to no end, he could walk onto the stage to support The Rolling Stones in a pair of heels – and he did. There were no limits both to where he’d push his art or to his bravery and boldness to take it far.
Being provocative was a huge part of that. From the start, he cast himself as a seductive figure, opening up his career with tracks like ‘Soft and Wet’, finding huge success with the wailing ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’ and then moving on to pose in next to nothing on the Dirty Mind cover and then shock even more as Controversy was not only seductive, but also deeply political.
On each and every album, there’s something to make you blush. “I knew a girl named Nikki I guess you could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine,” he sings on Purple Rain. “Twenty-three positions in a one-night stand,” he called for on Diamonds and Pearls.
Even on the last album he released during his lifetime, he was busy moaning “Do you wanna uh-uh-uh-uh-ahh-ahh”.
Sex was a cornerstone of Prince’s brand. But in interviews, he also suggested that it was a cornerstone of his life, and always had been. “My mom used to leave trashy pornography around, and I used to sneak it out of her room when I was eight years old,” he said in an interview in 1981. Exposed at an early age, he essentially chalked up his adult perversions to childhood obsessions.
It wouldn’t be Prince, though, if that comment on the filthier side of things didn’t also come with a comment on his own genius. “Then I got sick of those and started writing my own,” he said, almost crediting the start of his career to the crafting of his own fantasies. He dared to suggest that maybe erotica was the start of it all, as if it opened up some door, stating, “I didn’t know the two went together: people’s feelings and music.”
In fact, he seems to credit early experiences with sexuality for a lot. He recalled a night at his friend’s house where the now-teenager was with a girl. “One night Andre’s mother said. ‘Prince. Is that girl still down there?” I got nervous but said ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Okay. just lock the door when she leaves,’” he remembered adding that, to him, it was a night that unlocked something, “After that I knew things weren’t forbidden anymore.”
The issue is, though, who knows what to believe?
Prince was notorious for lying about his childhood and his family origins. He wrote a whole semi-biographical movie about his life and half of it was made up. Time and time again, the star re-wrote his own narrative into one he seemed to think was more interesting, especially when it came to his family life. So are we supposed to trust that Prince’s mother was a sex fiend who inadvertently changed his life through her inappropriateness? Or is that just another story Prince wanted to peddle to shock?
