‘Camille’: the strange story of Prince’s unfinished album
You can write and speculate as much as you want about him, but the truth is that nobody will ever be able to crack the crux of the mystery that shrouded the persona of Prince. Of course, people will still try – but he will forever be the source of the musical canon’s greatest lore, and in a perverted sense, it’s probably a relief that he went to his deathbed without anyone having ever fully broken down his impenetrable enigma.
Publicly Prince was synonymous with exuberance, flamboyancy, and his androgynous presence, but to a certain extent this also continued behind closed doors and into further musical ventures which never ultimately saw the true light of day. The ultimate example of this is Camille, an album Prince shelved that charted the characterisation of his gender-bending alter ego.
In many ways, it’s difficult to define what – or who – Camille really is, given they are a character without any assigned gender and never became visually manifested in any kind of real body, whether Prince’s or anyone else’s. Instead, they exist as an almost ghostly liminal figure of the musician’s back catalogue, never fully given their chance to be free in the world.
Prince began working around the concept of Camille at some point in the mid-1980s, as he then went on to test an album of the same name between September and November of 1986, ultimately deciding to shelve it at the end of this period. But clearly, the allure of Camille had left an impression on him as he continued to flesh out the character in more songs through the ensuing years, including them in the initial draft of Graffiti Bridge and allowing them to make an appearance in the booklet for the Lovesexy tour in 1988/89.
Indeed, given that the only solid traces of Camille as an entity exist just as a voice with an artificially altered pitch, it is nearly impossible to discern what Prince’s real intentions were regarding the character, and as such, this has led to a flurry of speculation and suggestion as to who they are.
Academic analysis indicates that Camille may be a manifestation of various characteristics and mind frames of the transgender lived experience, perhaps Prince’s own introspection over his androgynous persona, but also possibly more generally exploring the fluidity of gender as well as its boundaries and how this could be expressed in their creator’s performance. Were they just purely an experiment of fictional capacity, or was Camille an inward instinct of Prince’s manifesting themselves in an elusive, undefined world?
The reality is that no one will ever know. The Camille album is certainly a point of deep fascination for many within the scores of the Prince back catalogue, but is it really in its best interest to try and unpick the mystery? With all due credit, it sounds very much as though Prince himself didn’t have a fully delineated idea of what the character truly was, and so, in many ways, it must be better to leave Camille in peace, floating enigmatically through the ether.
