In October 1981, 23-year-old Prince received an invitation to support the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Given that he wanted his own band to be “a black version of the Rolling Stones,” this was quite the coup. He boldly appeared in his regular stage gear of a trench coat and black underwear. The crowd booed and threw bottles. When his own tour began just weeks later, he abruptly switched to a purple coat, black trousers, white shirt and bow tie.
This tells you two things about the upstart genius from Minneapolis. First, that he had enough maverick confidence to greet a Stones crowd in a trench coat and underwear when, just after the “disco sucks” backlash, rock fans had never looked less kindly on polymorphous perversity. Second, that he was willing to turn on a dime if something wasn’t working. He wanted complete creative freedom but he also wanted success and he constantly sweated to reconcile the two goals. Fans relish the gravity-defying moments when it worked, as when the likes of Kiss and When Doves Cry turned an oxymoron — funk without bass — into miraculous pop. But often it didn’t. Even in his 1980s pomp, Prince’s career was studded with follies and flops. Only in 1984, with Purple Rain, when he simultaneously had the No. 1 single, album and movie in the US, did he appear bulletproof. But he couldn’t even savor that triumph. “We looked around and I knew we were lost,” he said. “There was no place to go but down.”
Unfortunately for biographers, Prince rarely giftwrapped a quote so neatly. The man whom Purple Rain screenwriter William Blinn dryly described as “not conversationally accessible” is a reluctant interviewee who inserts gag clauses in his employees’ contracts and leaves writers to puzzle over his contradictions from afar. On the one hand he was, in the 1980s, a controlling, insomniac workaholic who drove away countless friends and collaborators; he reportedly told backing musicians Wendy and Lisa that they would go to hell for being gay. On the other hand, he was an enthusiastic talent-spotter who credited his band, the Revolution, on his biggest albums and gave them each a surprise US$1 million bonus to thank them for Purple Rain.
But isolation won out. He caused outrage by visiting a Mexican restaurant instead of joining pop’s great and good at the recording of the charity single We Are the World. He failed to enlist Madonna’s involvement in his disastrous movie Graffiti Bridge. (In a rare instance of sound cinematic judgment, she described his bewildering screenplay as “a piece of shit.”) His fierce rivalry with Michael Jackson reached a comic apogee during a table tennis match in which Prince hit Jackson in the crotch with a power shot and crowed: “Did you see that? He played like Helen Keller!”
There’s plenty of juice here, in other words, for a psychologically curious biographer, but Ronin Ro isn’t it. Nor is he much of a critic. There’s more insight into Prince’s music in one chapter of Michaelangelo Matos’ slim 2004 volume Sign ‘O’ the Times than in 356 pages of Ro. And he is blithely uninterested in social context or Prince’s own beliefs. “Most American critics felt ... [the 1985 song] America contained demagogic red-baiting,” he reports. Well did it? And if so, why? He does not elaborate. He is interested in data, not speculation.
Ro’s obsession with budgets and sales figures is maddeningly dry when he’s dealing with Prince’s creative glory days, but it proves better suited to the 1990s, when Prince’s one-man war against the record industry almost ruined him. Famously, he changed his name to a symbol just as his songwriting discipline was waning, leading Jay Leno to quip that he should call himself “the artist who formerly sold albums.” He wasted millions of US dollars on unstaged tours and unreleased videos; squandered yet more on an erotic stage version of Homer’s Odyssey and a “poly-gender fragrance” called Get Wild. One weary fan compared Prince’s career to “a gigantic game that only he seems to know the rules to.” Ro painstakingly tots up the balance sheet and is tangibly relieved when his hero returns to cultural relevance and financial health with the blockbuster tours of recent years.
You emerge from the final chapter knowing a great deal about Prince’s business. But as for the man — challenging, secretive, incorrigible, gifted to a fault — Ro doesn’t add much to the 1985 Los Angeles Times report that pondered the artist’s peculiar media blackout post-Purple Rain and concluded: “Either he’s crazy or he’s Prince — or both.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and