12. P[ussy] Control

Oƪ+>: The Gold Experience (Warner Bros./NPG, 1995);
composed by Prince Rogers Nelson

It may have been the obscenity of Prince’s death from opioids that finally converted me into a sworn anti-reductionist, because I think the very second he was gone, absolutely everything he had ever done sounded like completely different music to me, not least because there could now never be enough of it no matter how jam packed his vault was. Notwithstanding the virtues of concision, the assumption that everything worth saying can be reduced to some essential “point” just fills your life with old herrings, and I would say that goes double for President Purple if that did not restrict the relevant multiple to real numbers. Thus, my abiding love for this song does not arise from it representing anything about its maker; it is more that the pitched orgasmic “Ahhh!!!” tethered to the atonal scale around which Prince structures its refrain resembles the parts of the elephant that stump all five of the proverbial blind taxonomists feeling it up for clues. “Are you ready?” Probably not. The universe of pitched and unpitched sound was to him what your mother’s voice is to you. He could not have converted me to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but every dinghy needs an oarlock.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).