{"id":566,"date":"2016-04-22T12:30:50","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/?p=566"},"modified":"2016-04-22T12:30:50","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T16:30:50","slug":"the-religion-of-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/2016\/04\/22\/the-religion-of-prince\/","title":{"rendered":"The Religion of Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Religion of Prince by Todne Thomas<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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4\/22\/16<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cDearly Beloved, <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We are gathered here today<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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to get through this thing<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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called life.\u201d \u2013 \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy\u201d by Prince<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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On April 21, 2016, music icon Prince Rogers Nelson died at the age of 57. A creative genius, disciplined musician, charismatic performer, and prolific songwriter who fused rock, R&B, soul, and funk, Prince engineered a career that spanned four decades. Prince is widely lauded for his considerable musical talent. Prince is also notorious for his public performance of an overtly sensual sexuality that defined gender conventions. Prince\u2019s concerts and music were vital contemplative spaces that illustrated the socially constructed character of gender and sexuality as well as the myriad embodied and performative hybridities that gender and sexuality can entail. For Prince to debut an overtly gender-transgressing sexuality in the 1980s as an African American man was incredibly significant. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the emergence of Neoconservatism and the\u00a0Christian Right that attributed black poverty in the United States to black cultural deficiencies and a pathologized rather than institutional racism. Family values, and more specifically a corrective heteropatriarchy, were proposed as a way to end what was a perceived to be an onslaught of black welfare queens, absentee dads, and broken families. Prince\u2019s performance of an embodied black sexuality that did not conform to a hypermasculinized black masculinity or a respectable black patriarchy was a defiant rejection of the intersectional hegemonies that sought to discipline black sexuality. Even amidst the controversial perspectives voiced by Prince after he became a Jehovah\u2019s Witness in 2011 that have been associated with anti-gay and anti-bisexual rhetoric (which in their own right merit analysis), the transgressive legacy of Prince\u2019s career remains. His music and performance contained not only a confident pulse and an arrogant swagger but also a soulful rebuke of the constriction of sexuality\u2014a counter-church if you will with “Purple Rain” as a hymn that airs the ambivalences, contradictions, and challenges that shape the affective and material contexts of black intimacies.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In\u00a0addition to the ways in which Prince\u2019s music located itself against the grain of conservative religio-political formation that constituted and demoralized blackness as nonheteronormative, is the aesthetics of Prince\u2019s music and its religious and spiritual implications. In Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering<\/em> by Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Harding writes of the broad registers of an indigenous black folk religion.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The meaning of religion for Black folks, they insist, is in the heart of our history, our trauma and our hope. It is what makes us indigenous to this place, to modernity. As [Charles] Long puts it, Black religion is the way have oriented ourselves\u2014over the centuries in these Americas and extending back before our arrival on these shores\u2014to \u201cmash out a meaning\u201d of life in the midst of tremendous suffering and pain. Religion, in this sense, is not simply a doctrine of faith or the methods and practices of church; rather, it is all the ways we remind ourselves of who we really are, in spite of who the temporal powers may say we are\u2026.Black religion then, is not only in the music, the drama, the communion, and the interpretation of text within the walls of the physical church; it is also in the orientation of Black people to so-called secular culture. Black religion is Otis Redding and D\u2019Angelo as much as Mahalia Jackson and Mary Mary; it is hip-hop as holy dance; and root work as much as the laying on of hands. [Harding 2015, 118].<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Black religion then constitutes an interpretive grid by which black people make sense of their place in the world, construct meaningful, hopeful, and even sensuous identities for themselves against hegemonic colonial narratives that confine blackness to abjection or the underside of morality and power. Whether in the moan of a woman rocked by the Holy Spirit or the ecstasy of a sexual moan sung by Prince followed by a pronouncement in \u201cD.M.S.R.,\u201d \u201cGirl it ain\u2019t no sin to strip down to your underwear,\u201d both embodied performances aid a \u201cbeloved\u201d in \u201cget[ting] through this thing called life.\u201d The throaty screams of Prince\u2019s singing catapulted in tenor tones somewhere into a universe of the future is call for a radical immanence. In a time in which <\/span><\/span>#BlackLivesMatter<\/span><\/span><\/span> activists invoke black matter, bodies, and immediacy, in a way that I argue unseats a hegemonic Christian emphasis of ascetic suppression of the body and emphasis of a future messianic salvation, Prince is a priest of a black religion of here and now, of a this-lifeness that beckons us to contemplate how we love, inhabit, and move our flesh.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Religion of Prince by Todne Thomas 4\/22\/16 \u00a0 \u201cDearly Beloved, We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.\u201d \u2013 \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy\u201d by Prince \u00a0 On April 21, 2016, music icon Prince Rogers Nelson died … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4woDM-98","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":567,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions\/567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}