Graffiti Bridge did entirely too much, but it laid out a couple of aesthetic paths for Prince and the New Power Generation (NPG). One is that of the visuals of the Diamonds and Pearls era. During this period, Prince presented tableaus of Black pleasure that countered earlier solo video performances of his own private or privatized desires, including the desire to be seen. From the bravado and peacocking of Prince’s play with the Game Boyz to his submersion in women-dominated spaces, Prince prioritized shared pleasure and collective glamour. As he moved away from video visions of privatized pleasure, Prince’s imagery also transformed from dreamy to corporal, with significant changes in staging, design, and performance. In this talk, I will also explore Rosie Gaines’s prominence in this period, her particular presence in these videos, and generally, the way that Black women figure into and out of Prince’s gaze. I will touch on the Love Symbol and 3 Chains o’ Gold as children of the other aesthetic path set out by Graffiti Bridge and the peculiar place The Beautiful Experience holds in his exploration of Black women’s interiority.

Melay Araya is an artistic director, writer, and archivist. A multimedia artist with three decades of experience, Ms. Araya continues to study, compose, record, and perform. Melay first presented a paper on the Jet/ Ebony archives at Black Portraiture[s] V Conference at NYU and has since gone on to speak about art and archives at universities, festivals, and in classroom settings.

In recent years, “he did not see color” has become a common refrain from some fans when attempts are made to center blackness in the narrative of Prince’s life and art. Given Prince’s rebuke of racial boundaries and the fact that he forged his iconic career during the post-Civil Rights era when America adopted colorblind ideology as an antidote to racism, it is understandable why some continue to perpetuate colorblindness when discussing his work. However, though Prince himself even espoused the colorblind ethos in his chart-topping single “Diamonds & Pearls,” the reality is that Prince was anything but colorblind. Rather, he was profoundly aware of color, race, and racism and their impact on his work. As culture critic Greg Tate has noted, Prince was a “pop music tactician and strategist.” This presentation will demonstrate the role that race played as part of the strategy that made Diamonds & Pearls one of Prince’s most successful albums.

Kamilah Cummings is a writer, editor, and visiting senior lecturer in writing and communications at DePaul University in Chicago. In addition to presenting at Purple Reign (University of Salford), the EYE NO Prince Lovesexy Symposium (NYU), the Batdance Symposium (Spelman), the virtual Prince #DM40GB0 Symposium, and the virtual #SOTTSDC: Peach + Black 2 – Sign O’ The Times Super Deluxe Celebration, she has developed the interdisciplinary course Prince: A New Breed Leader. Her essay “Sisters in the Shadows: an Examination of Prince’s “Strange Relationship” with Black Women” is featured in the Howard University Journal of Communications special issue Prince in/as Blackness: Explorations of a music icon and racial politics. She has also contributed to Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life. A lover of House music as well, she has presented on House music and taught her original course The House Chicago Built. Her research interests include exploring the intersections of media, pop culture, and history in representations and constructions of black identity.

This presentation will examine how His Royal Badness used his fourth studio LP, Controversy, specifically through tracks like “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “Annie Christian,” as his debut vehicle to deliver social commentary and critical analysis on hot topics.

Christopher A. Daniel, M.A. is an Atlanta-based, award-winning journalist, cultural critic, ethnomusicologist, professional development coordinator, and multimedia journalism professor at Clark Atlanta University. An alumnus of Johnson C. Smith University and The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Mass Communication, Christopher’s work is featured on NBCBLK, Shondaland, The Root, Shadow & Act, Billboard, Atlanta Magazine, ESPN The Undefeated, Huffington Post, Albumism, soulhead.com, Rolling Out, Blues & Soul Magazine, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, CBS News, Food & Wine, BET.com, and GRAMMY.com.

A Prince enthusiast, Christopher has conducted, moderated, and published interviews with many artists to emerge out of the His Purple Majesty’s camp as well as collaborators including André Cymone, all the original members of the Revolution, Sheila E., Morris Day, Monte Moir, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and Najee. He was a panelist curated by the African American Film Critics Association [AAFCA] at the Auburn Avenue Research Library that concentrated on Prince as a film icon. Christopher is also instrumental in the City of Atlanta honoring both Sheila E. and Morris Day with proclamations.

Prince reportedly told his one-time guitarist, Dez Dickerson, that he and his other bandmates needed to choose a stage persona. And that Prince himself would portray pure sex. It was a risky move for the musician/singer/songwriter. Consider this. The Sexual Revolution was over. The 1980s heralded the arrival of Reaganomics and the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis. It is useful to situate the sexual politics of Controversy (1981) in this moment and consider its enduring appeal for several reasons. His sonic and visual elements—funk, glam, punk, pop, R&B, and sexual persona—extended the conceits of Dirty Mind and delivered an inventive, experimental album that set the stage for future pop explorations uniquely his own.

Steven G Fullwood is a documentarian, archivist and writer. He is the co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project, an initiative that partners with organizations, institutions, and individuals to establish, preserve, and enhance collections that explore the African Diasporic experience. His published works include Black Gay Genius (2014), To Be Left with the Body (2008), and Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (2007). He is the former assistant curator of the Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In 1998, he founded the In the Life Archive (ITLA) to aid in the preservation of materials produced by LGBTQ people of African descent housed at the Schomburg Center.

The U.S. LP release of 1981’s Controversy came with a fold-out color poster of a remarkable image. In the photo, Prince poses seductively in the shower, wearing only his black bikini briefs, a gold hip chain, and an insouciant stare. A vulgar stream of water trickles from the bulge of his crotch; a crucifix is mounted beside the showerhead. This poster–the scourge of thousands of early-’80s parents, and likely more than a few domestic partners–is a crucial, but overlooked part of Controversy’s visual presentation: dramatizing in a single image the various racial, sexual, and religious ambiguities laid out in the title track. My presentation will examine the infamous “shower poster”: both as a linchpin for the disparate elements of Prince’s Controversy-era aesthetic; and as a cultural artifact that has retained its divisiveness and, well, “controversy,” for the past 40 years.

Zachary Hoskins is the author of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, a song-by-song blog examining the music of Prince in chronological order. His essay, “Rude Boy: Prince as Black New Waver,” was published in 2020 in a special issue of Spectrum, A Journal on Black Men. He has presented and appeared on round tables at the Prince #DM40GB30 virtual symposium in June 2020 and at the University of Minnesota’s Prince from Minneapolis conference in April 2018. He holds an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Arizona and B.A.’s in Film & Video Studies and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan.

This presentation will encompass a listening to the echoes of Prince’s re-emergence through The Rainbow Children (2001) as amplified in the invention of B.Slade in his EP and mixtape Rainbow (2008) and The Children (2012). Best known as the gospel artist formerly known as Tonéx, B.Slade is a queer preacher-musician who embodies a combination of the most popular archetypes of African-American men’s worship—the preacher and the vocalist head musician—while wielding multifarious rhetorics during his musical performance. Tonéx and B.Slade’s combined corpus contests the portrayal of same-gender-loving men as down low, secretive, deceptive, and always withholding information about who they are from their loved ones. Instead, he proposes that queer believers are “sheep of another fold” (John 10:16) emblematic of an abiding promise that there is hope for musical siblings on the margins.

Alisha Lola Jones, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University (Bloomington). Dr. Jones is a graduate of University of Chicago (Ph.D.), Yale Divinity School (M.Div.), Yale Institute of Sacred Music (ISM) and Oberlin Conservatory (B.M.). Dr. Jones’ is a council member of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s (SEM) council and the co-chair of the Music and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Additionally, as a performer-scholar, she consults seminaries and arts organizations on curriculum, programming, and content development.

Dr. Jones’ book Flaming: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (2020) breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music-making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among black men. Dr. Jones’ research interests include musical masculinities, gastromusicology, global pop music, future studies, ecomusicology, music and theology, the music industry, musics of the African diaspora, and emerging research on music and future foodways in conjunction with The Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, CA.

Far too often 1981’s Controversy is labeled as an in-between album, a transitional phase between the rude boy sound and image as presented in the ‘Dirty Mind’ era and the full-blown crossover pop superstar that had emerged by the time the 1999 album rolled around. The significance of the Controversy era has always been hiding in plain sight though. In the lyrics Prince presented those that were willing to look beyond the obvious with themes and ideas that would be dominant in his career for years to come. “Reproduction of a new breed, leaders, stand up, organize,” Prince exclaims in ‘Sexuality’ and two decades later he would repeat the exact same statement in The Rainbow Children. This presentation will argue that all three albums that are celebrated during the #1plus1plus1is3 symposium are all part of the very same narrative that started in the Controversy era. “New age revelation, I think we got a case!

Edgar Kruize is a freelance author, journalist and content creator based in the Netherlands. He is co-owner of communications agency buro33. He is specialized in music in general and specifically the entertainment industry. Kruize has been working for various (trade) magazines, concert and tour promoters, festival organizers and record companies for over two decades. He has written nine books on various musical subjects and is co-owner and publisher at Permafrost Publishers.

All it took was a cough in the Raspberry Beret video to have the young Edgar notice the artist he’d later found out to be Prince. Prince’s impressive body of work has been an inspiration in life and work. Kruize is the author of the book Prince: The Dutch Experience (2017), in which all of Prince’s steps in the Netherlands are retraced. Also, he co-hosts the Dutch Prince-blog PurplePicks.net, wrote the liner notes for the 2019 Sign “O” The Times deluxe DVD/Blu-ray set (along with appearing in the documentary about the making of that movie), and (co)hosted multiple Prince-themed lectures and live interviews. He is also the co-host of the #PrinceTwitterThread series.

“Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore

What is “the work”? From the beginning of his career, Prince advocated for the liberation of the oppressed, including the Black American working class that raised him. Work as a motif in Prince’s songs was sometimes limited to the doldrums of a part-time job at a five-and-dime, but more often, especially as a trait of performance and ethos, it was positive, progressive, and constructive. However, as I argued at last year’s symposium, in the early 1990s Prince began to more fully understand himself as a historical subject—that is, subject to and subjugated by the predations of systemic White supremacy and capitalism’s exploitation of Black labor. The consequences of this understanding were never just about his own situation with Warner Bros., and after he emancipated himself from the label, his critique of what Cedric Robinson termed “racial capitalism” continued to evolve.

And so: The Rainbow Children…and “Avalanche.” In the first years of the new millennium, deeply inspired by a spiritual rebirth, and reinvigorated by jazz, Prince questioned history to envision a better future. Compellingly, The Rainbow Children‘s narrative situates “the work” as a necessary deconstruction. Oppressed people are born into structures of racial capitalism and mediated history—the “Digital Garden”—built through the exploitation of their ancestors. For the sake of the pluralistic, free, and equitable future he’d always imagined, Prince dramatizes here that labor must be redirected toward the dismantling of these structures and the so-called knowledge that enshrines them. Responding with Black liberation theology, Prince examines contemporary media in “The Work Pt. 1” and slavery’s legacy in “Family Name.” But perhaps his most pointed deconstruction occurs on “Avalanche,” a ballad recorded for One Nite Alone while The Rainbow Children was being mastered and usually performed every night before “Family Name” on the 2002 ONA Tour. Fusing history, politics, and the music business, Prince again shows that the mythically natural disaster of racial capitalism is, in fact, socially constructed. Who, he asks, will take the responsibility for it? Who will be willing to do the work?

Robert Loss is an associate professor in the Writing, Literature, and Philosophy department at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He is the author of Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21^st-Century American Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic) which includes a chapter on Prince’s later work. His essay “How the Exodus Began: Prince and the Black Working Class Imagination” appeared in a recent special Prince issue of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. He has presented at numerous academic conferences, including last year’s Prince #DM40GB30 Virtual Symposium. A member of the band Blind Engineer, he lives in Columbus, Ohio. He’s hard at work researching and writing a book about Prince.