I Would Die 4 U

March 25, 2013
Through interviews with Prince's current and former band members, managers, notable musicians, and musicologists, Toure (Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?) presents an eclectic portrait of the musician and composer. A pop star uniquely suited to speak to the alienation and sexuality of generation X, Prince is also deeply religious, and, in his personal and professional life, emotionally distant. He was precocious and ambitious from a very early age, a latch-key kid whose extreme devotion to music served as an escape from a dysfunctional upbringing. This later translated to intense and complicated relationships with his backing bands over the years, as well as difficulty forming intimate relationships. Highly conscious of his public persona as a "hypersexual trickster" in touch with his femininity, Prince employed "a plethora of identity idioms to break free of the conventions and strictures of Black male identity." However, Toure makes the case that his music has always been a "collision of the spiritual and profane," as rife with sexuality as with profound, sincerely held religious images. In this sense, even his most iconic, memorable hitsâ such as "Purple Rain" and "When Doves Cry"âcome from "the most badass preacher that pop music has ever seen."

March 1, 2013
Interpretive exegesis of the songs and style of the artist formerly and currently known as Prince. Toure (Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now, 2011, etc.) argues that though Prince was chronologically a late boomer, he became an icon for Generation X, people born between 1965 and 1982, a time of lower birthrates and social anomie. Prince's own difficult, lonely childhood gave him the ambition and remove to forge a rock-funk hybrid that was both spiritual and highly sexual, and this gave him an iconic appeal to the disillusioned demographic that came of age in the 1980s, during Prince's run of hit albums beginning with "1999." In support of this, Toure discusses the content of many of Prince's songs, focusing more on the responses to Prince's work than on what Prince actually did to create it. Toure also discusses Prince's relationship with his backing musicians, significant to his thesis since Prince was one of the first rock stars to recruit a fully diverse band. Although the author talked to other scholars, Prince's collaborators and former lovers, he's not pursuing a concrete look at the nitty-gritty of Prince's innovations in the studio or a narrative of his career arc's sharp rise (and moderate decline). Instead, he offers a broad overview of Prince's life and career, tied to his own ideas about demography and race. Toure spends lots of pages of this slim volume returning to his meditations on the qualities of Generation X relative to Prince--e.g., "It's appropriate to critique the media vision of gen X as unfairly whitewashed, but to say that Blacks are not part of gen X is short-sighted"--and this aspect of his approach comes to seem repetitive and dated. Mostly engaging and will hold greatest appeal to readers who are already fans of Toure, Prince or both.

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