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Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks, by Ronin Ro
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A fascinating, authoritative biography of one of the most commercial, controversial, and influential musicians of all time
In his three decades-long of recording, Prince has had nearly thirty albums hit the Billboard Top 100. He is the only artist since the Beatles to have a number one song, movie, and single at the same time. Prince's trajectory―from a teenage unknown in Minneapolis to an idol and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer―has won him millions of adoring fans.
Prince is the first book to give full treatment to this 30-year career of epic proportions. Acclaimed music journalist Ronin Ro traces Prince's rise from anonymity in the late 70s, to his catapult to stardom in the 80s, to his reemergence in the 21st century as both an artistic icon and a starmaker. Ro chronicles the music, showing how Prince and his albums helped define and inspire a generation. Along the way, Prince confronted labels, fostered other young talents, and took ownership of his music, making a profound mark on the entertainment industry and pop culture.
In this authoritative biography, Ro digs deep to reveal the man behind some of the most important music of our time.
- Sales Rank: #411264 in Books
- Published on: 2011-10-25
- Released on: 2011-10-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x 1.00" w x 6.14" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Review
“Did 10 years of researching the enigmatic Prince pay off? You bet.
For much of the 1980s, Prince was arguably the most important pop musician on the planet. He wasn't an originator, however, but a sponge who could take bits and pieces from different genres and manage to create something uniquely his own. The fact that he could sing well, play expertly on several instruments and wear the hell out of skin-tight leotards didn't hurt either. Considering his sales figures, influence and huge, albeit admittedly inconsistent discography, it's surprising that nobody has delivered a noteworthy Prince bio...until now. Veteran journalist Ro (Dr. Dre: The Biography, 2007, etc.) spent a decade researching this book-which shouldn't surprise Prince's fans, as the man is notoriously private-and it was worth it, as he was able to get vital information, opinions and anecdotes from Prince's close and not-so-close associates, everybody from sidemen to record-label execs. (Unsurprisingly, the man himself did not grant Ro access.) By utilizing verbatim dialogue, the book often reads like a novel; granted, some readers may doubt the veracity of every piece of dialogue, but it's enjoyable nonetheless. The author has an obvious affection for Prince's work, but he maintains enough objectivity to be credible.
An energetic, detailed balance of reportage and criticism about an icon of his era.” ―Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
RONIN RO has written for USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, MTV, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He has written several books about the entertainment industry, including biographies of Dr. Dre, Sean Combs, Run-DMC, and more.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prince
PART ONEThe RISE1THIS THING CALLED LIFEON JUNE 7, 1958, AT MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL IN MINNEAPOLIS, A baby was born. John Nelson faced his son in the crib and named him Prince Rogers Nelson--after his own musical stage name. "I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do," John later explained to Liz Jones.They lived at 915 Logan Avenue, a humble home in North Minneapolis. John worked at Honeywell, an industrial supplier, and he and his wife Mattie--a former singer that John met while playing parties with his group, The Prince Rogers Trio--together cared for their first son. They were already trying to raise five kids on what John earned at Honeywell when Prince was born, but within a year Mattie was again pregnant. When their daughter, Tyka Evene, arrived in 1960, John saw his dream of a music career slip even further away.Mattie also gave up her dream--since singing like Billie Holiday wouldn't pay the bills. She remained social, though, with a "wild side," Prince told Rolling Stone, while John was quiet, excited mostly by music.Since John still played shows around town with The Prince Rogers Trio, and still sometimes answered to his stage name, Mattie took to calling their son "Skipper." Prince obviously knew about his father's history leading "his own big band, playing around the Midwest and stuff," and how his mother sang for the group. But he didn't truly understand what his father did until 1963. One day, his mother took him to a local theater. They took their seats, the lights dimmed, and John emerged from behind a curtain with a smile. People applauded as he sat at a piano. While he played, the curtain moved again, and scantily clad dancing girls came out. "People were screaming," Prince recalled, according to Per Nilsen. "From then on I think I wanted to be a musician."The show took a hold of Prince, and for weeks after he tried to playany instrument within reach. He eventually settled, like his father, on the piano, and he would practice in the living room on John's. Then, in department stores, while Mattie shopped, Prince would rush to where the radios and instruments were kept to listen to music or play organs and pianos until his mother would get him. But piano wasn't enough. Prince would put two rocks in his hands, then smash them together to create a melody. He called this noise his first song. Soon, he'd use larger rocks to tap out a rhythm.But while Prince was taking his first musical steps, John was finding the pursuit a rough life. He was, according to local reporter Neal Karlen, "a Jazz musician in the whitest metropolitan area in the country" With a wife and six kids to support, he continued to work at Honeywell, but he couldn't accept that he wouldn't someday be a music star. So he kept creating new melodies. Despite a limited income, John did things like install a TV in the living room wall. Or he'd parade around in new suits and shoes, as if about to take the stage. By 1966, John had bought himself a snazzy new white Thunderbird convertible. His dream seemed by turns impossible and just within reach. When he saw that Prince and his younger sister Tyka were interested in music, he encouraged them to play his piano, realizing he'd have to live his dream vicariously through them. While young Prince tapped out melodies, Tyka told City Pages, she sang, "because that's what my mom and dad did."But just as quickly, moody John would see them bang away on the keys and tell them to get away from the piano. He needed it for his own dream, after all. Though the inner conflict persisted, inevitably he relented, and Prince showed him a melody he had written called "Funk Machine."Monday through Friday, Prince attended elementary school, where other students sometimes insulted his diminutive size. By 1967, the fifth grader was being bussed to a school in an affluent, predominantly white suburb. He wasn't thrilled. One day in class, he turned to a page in a textbook that had a black-and-white photo of a young, dead black man hanging from a rope on a tree.His sister Tyka recalled, according to Per Nilsen, that other students chased them back to the school bus many afternoons. "I didn't know it was because we were black," she said. Some days, other students by the bus protected them. But the next day would always bring another chase and more epithets. Inevitably, Prince tried to withdraw from the experience.One morning he hid his socks, believing this would give his motherno choice but to let him stay home. No dice. She yelled, "You're going to get to that school and find some socks!" He sighed and kept dressing. "She couldn't have them calling me a nigger with no socks on," he told PAPER Magazine, in 1999.Sundays, his mother took him to a wooden, two-story Seventh-day Adventist church where he was enrolled in a Bible study class. On these days, eight-year-old Prince bonded over music with his schoolmate, André Simon Anderson, the son of his dad's former bass player, Fred. "The most I got out of that was the experience of the choir," Prince said of church, according to Nilsen.During this period, Prince's older half brother, Alfred--Mattie's son from her first marriage--was trying to dodge a few rules. In his room, Alfred sang along to his many James Brown records. He styled his hair in a Little Richard--type conk. He always seemed to have money. He also ignored John Nelson's curfews. Late at night, Alfred climbed out of a basement window and hit the street. With him gone, Prince and his cousin Charles tiptoed into his room to try on his clothes and play his James Brown records. Sometimes, Alfred caught them in the act. But he didn't mind.In the end, things didn't end well for Alfred, Charles told author Per Nilsen years later. His recreational drug use led to confinement in a local mental institution.Prince, himself, was born epileptic. As a child, he had seizures. While he trembled and shook, his parents stood nearby, wondering how to help. Still, "they did the best they could with what little they had," he explained.There were other stressors. In 1981, Prince told New York Newsday that his father "felt hurt that he never got his break, because of having the wife and kids and stuff." With Mattie resenting this, "there were constant fights."By 1968, Prince was watching things finally fall apart between his parents. They began having high-volume arguments that sometimes left Mattie in tears. Mattie and John had always been different. She was louder and more vivacious, while John was serious and strict. She had set aside music in the interest of her kids, while John did manage to play some shows in local clubs. "I think music is what broke her and my father up, and I don't think she wanted that for me," Prince later told New York Rocker. Serious musicians, like his father, could be moody. They needed space. Everything in their environment had to be just right. "My father was a great deal like that, and my mother didn't give him a lotta space. She wanted a husband per se."Finally John and Mattie called it quits. After thirteen years of marriage, they decided to separate and filed for divorce. John packed his stuff and moved into a small apartment near Minneapolis's downtown. Prince was shocked when John left. He didn't even take his piano. "Everything was cool I think, until my father left, and then it got kinda hairy," Prince said.At home, it would now be only Prince, his mother, and Tyka. "He left when I was seven, so music left with him," Prince said. "But he did leave his piano." Prince faced the abandoned instrument. In the past, John had often kept the kids away from it. For good reason: they would just bang on it. With his father gone, Prince approached the piano; he was the only one that seemed to notice it was there. And he started to play it in earnest.Meanwhile, Mattie took three jobs.
Prince spent much of his time nearby on his cousin Charles's street. He told people not to call him "Prince." Referred to as "Skipper," he developed an acerbic sense of humor and coined numerous put-downs. But back at home, he'd return to being his father's son, playing melodies on the piano John left behind. At some point, Tyka stopped joining him. Though she never said who, someone, she said, had crushed her dream of singing, saying she was crazy to think she could be on stage. Prince taught her to draw and write stories. But he didn't abandon his own musical dream. Soon, he started practicing drums, playing on a box of old newspapers.Mattie, however, didn't support Prince's musical aspirations. She wanted him in school, and later in college. She sent him to different schools, where he maintained high grades, but Prince viewed his studies as "pretty much my second interest. I didn't really care about that as much as I did about playing." Since music had destroyed his parents' marriage, he explained, "I don't think she wanted that for me."Mattie eventually met Heyward Baker. With her divorce now official, Mattie married Baker and he moved into the house. Baker always brought the family presents. But, Prince told Barbara Graustark, "I disliked him immediately because he dealt with a lot of materialistic things."Prince tried to build a relationship with Baker, as close as the one he had with John. But when Prince tried to engage Baker in conversation, Prince claimed, the man seemed to merely tolerate him. He mostly spoke up, Prince claimed, when Prince did something wrong. "I don't think they wanted me to be a musician," he said of Baker and his mother. They didn't want him to be like John. But the more they pushed, the more defiantPrince became. Before long, he felt rejected, and bitter. He began to rattle off things he disliked about his new stepfather and "it kind of hurt our relationship."Years later, Prince credited Baker for helping to...
Most helpful customer reviews
63 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Another typical Prince tome
By Scott Woods
This is yet another largely non-exclusive look at Prince that doesn't stand out of the pack. Spending more time on the fat years of Prince and far too little time on the lean, this book reveals almost nothing that a fan of Prince - the most likely candidate to even pick up this book in this day and age - doesn't already know or have access to. There is virtually nothing distinguishing this book from the last five books about Prince that came out in the last ten years. Information is largely culled from the same sources as every other book, the anecdotes are largely old hat at this point, and there isn't the promised revelation of Prince's influence on much more than himself and his audience.
The biggest disappointment is that the opportunity to make a book that stood out is lost by committing the same crime that almost every other book about Prince makes: it acts like the last 15 years didn't happen. It spends 290 of its 356 pages of actual text on the albums leading up to 1996 (12 total, not counting soundtracks) and a practically scant 66 pages on the TEN albums that followed. It covers the early, more successful (and, not coincidental I am sure, thoroughly picked over) period of his career almost song by song, but then almost dismisses the last fifteen years of his career by comparison.
At this point I'd rather just read a book about all of the other acts Prince has launched, or a treatise that genuinely attempted to parse out his influence on culture and art during his tenure. if there's anything left to say about Prince, no one but Prince is likely to write the book compelling enough to warrant purchasing (and we all know how likely that is to happen). I'd say this is fine for people who are looking for an entry into Prince's world, but that's the same thing you can say about every other book about Prince.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
PRINCE!!!!!!!!
By LuvGirl
I was fan girl CRAZY for Prince when I was a teenager. Bought all his CD's sight unseen. Had his inappropriate half naked posters up on my walls with kisses all over them ( to my mother's horror). Turning down "Darling Nikki" real low so mom couldn't hear the very sexual lyrics, lol. Never thought I would be attracted to a man that wore makeup, heels, and thigh highs, but there you have it, I was! I was a fan for many years into young adulthood. Then marriage, motherhood, romance novels, (lol) and life took over whatever obsession I had with him. His death touched me deeply. More deeply than I expected... I guess it was because he bought a little purple to my otherwise colorless childhood, and to know that he's not with us on the planet anymore seems a little gray...
After his death on April 21st, 2016 (without realizing) I had missed out a lot on the progression of his career. Apart from dashing to the tv screen whenever I knew he would be on, I wasn't a very proactive fan anymore. Now I want to read all things Prince related. I can see the future, I'll be one of those Elvis like fan girl junkies, but instead for Prince!
while this book was enlightening in the musical areas though, it was pretty impersonal and cold. It was a lot about his music and a few disparaging tid bits here and there. Some of it annoyed because I guess I feel protective so soon after his death. I kind of felt that the author wasn't really a Prince fan at times. Nonetheless, I came away thinking that Prince really was way more talented than people really knew. His onstage persona was so flamboyant that it overshadowed his many talents. Most placed him in a purple box, but apart from his charismatic sexual demeanor, he was actually a musical genius. So even though I felt like the author wasn't really a fan, I think the legend that was Prince still shines through. Mmmm, maybe that was the authors intent all along...
P.S: I'm pretty proud of my teenage self to have picked a genius to be my Prince...
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A look into the purple one's haze
By The Booker
Here's an understatement: Prince has always remained a bit of a mystery even to his most loyal fans. For those of us on the more casual side of fandom, he's almost an unknown. Of course we know his hit songs, the mega successful rock film "Purple Rain," and his penchant for being different. For example, not every male rock or R&B star would choose bikini briefs and high heels for stage outfits or change his name to an unpronounceable symbol. For Prince, later known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and finally once again, Prince, these were only surface revelations. What was going on off stage and behind the scenes are what makes this book probably the most insightful study to date about his career, artistry, business dealings, and personal life.
As a more casual fan I found there was too much detail spent on what seems like every single song Prince recorded, demo'ed, or worked on for other artists. For the purists this is the mother load. But because of the vast output of music Prince has produced before, during and since the pinnacle of his chart success in the 1980's, this kept it from becoming the "page-turner" I would've hoped for in a bio. The man is revealed, or at least as best he can be without his personal involvement, but all the details about business dealings and recording sessions are once again, more for the dedicated than the casual fan.
This book is impressive in the writing and amount of research done by the author. It reportedly took ten years of detective-like work to follow and uncover every path taken by an artist that changed his music, personality, lifestyle, band members, business associates and as mentioned above, even his name, like a chameleon. Do I know Prince better after reading this? I would say yes, though I didn't know much about him before. The dedicated will love it, but as a casual fan I could've been told less and still enjoyed reading.
On an interesting note, this is the second rock music book I've encountered that references the small town of Vermilion, Ohio. Prince used a Post Office box in Vermilion for hidden business correspondence during the time he changed his name. In "The Beatles In Cleveland" the Fab Four stopped in Vermilion for ice cream during an early morning drive from Detroit for their 1966 concert in Cleveland. An interesting footnote in the history of rock'n roll...
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