Source: Public Domain

We may never get to see the nine-hour documentary about Prince that Netflix has paid tens of millions for because the late musician’s estate has legally stymied its release. So, it’s fortunate that The New York Times Magazine has run an enormous article, “The Prince We Never Knew” by Sasha Weiss, recounting the documentary in endless detail, even though Prince appears endlessly knowable.

The Prince documentary was directed by Ezra Edelman, a hereditary princeling of biracial America (his black mother is Clinton pal Marian Wright Edelman), who won a Best Documentary Oscar for O.J.: Made in America about how the O.J. Simpson ruckus was due to white violence toward black bodies, a thesis that sounded intelligent back during the Great Awokening.

For his follow-up, Netflix gave Edelman so much money he could work for five years on finding the real Prince.

Contrary to the article’s title, Edelman’s real Prince turns out to be pretty much who I always assumed he was, having enthusiastically followed his career from his 1980 Dirty Mind album onward. (I saw Prince live in 1983.)

Prince’s estate has vetoed allowing the documentary to stream, demanding certain revelations be cut, which Edelman refuses to do.

The worst scandal Weiss reports from the film is that Prince beat up one of his countless girlfriends (although being punched by the 5’2″ flyweight Prince sounds less painful than Nicole Brown Simpson being regularly whomped by the cruiserweight O.J.).

Otherwise, Prince comes across as fairly respectable for a rock star.

Like so many rock stars, he was not very masculine but also highly heterosexual. Despite all his tedious gender-bending costumery, he doesn’t appear to have even dabbled in gayness.

Mostly, he just really liked girls, constantly recruiting as his protégées lovely teenagers who could sing, for whom he’d compose their one hit song before growing bored with them until his next Pygmalion project came along. But, Prince showed commendable restraint: “He was careful not to sleep with them until they turned 18.”

Mostly, though, it turns out, the movie’s big revelation, to virtually nobody’s surprise, is that Prince was not a nice or a happy person.

This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive, and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling…. The story of Prince that was emerging was a story of a person bent on fame and control.

Okay, but who didn’t see that forty years ago? It’s not like Prince was covering it up.

As Edelman completed his interviews—more than 70 of them—he realized there wasn’t some big secret that people were hiding. Instead, what he found were the defining traumas of Prince’s childhood and his constant recapitulating of them.

After all, inheritance of family conflict is the theme of Prince’s most famous song:

Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied (she’s never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry

That we are our ancestors’ genetic puppets is a pretty awesome topic for a pop hit. Still…

Through a sort of brute force genius, Prince’s colossal musical talent made him a famous figure in the 1980s. He had the gifts of a Brian Wilson, but he conjured them up without drugs, so his creative peak was longer. (When he eventually developed a drug problem, it wasn’t from recreational drugs, but due to the pain pills that killed him at age 57. Like his contemporary Tom Petty, Prince’s show-must-go-on work ethic of jumping off amps in high heels led to this blue-collar addiction.)

But outside of his annus mirabilis of 1984, when his Purple Rain album and movie made a fortune, he wasn’t particularly beloved, and was especially not immune to second-guessing about what he should be doing with all those gifts.

Consider one often-discussed conundrum that runs through Purple Rain and his real-life career: Should he employ a full-time band or not? Of course, he needed one to back him when he toured, but did he really need them in the studio? Or should he just play all the instruments himself?

On the one hand, having friendly colleagues around made him seem more human. I liked Prince better when he was bantering with his white lesbian sidekicks, Wendy & Lisa, who weren’t susceptible to his diminutive masculinity.

On the other hand, Prince was musically superhuman, so mortal musicians tended to get on his nerves because they could never live up to his standards.

Having gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Prince’s music, I always wished him well and hoped he’d find some lasting happiness, although that never seemed likely.

Here are a few things that the article fails to mention. Whether the documentary does as well remains to be seen, if we are ever allowed to see it.

First, it’s an interesting question whether Prince would have been blustered into transitioning if he were a generation younger. He was one of the first extremely online celebrities in the late 1990s, so he was vulnerable.

Second, Prince was never cool.

Most famous rock stars became famous in part because they had the cultural winds at their backs. For example, while the Beatles definitely accelerated the trend for longer hair on boys (a huge issue in the 1960s for reasons that are hard to explain today), it would have happened anyway, whether six or twelve or twenty-four months later.

In contrast, Prince tended to be behind or just out of step with his times. His gender-bendery would have been cool in the 1970s, but by the 1980s it was old hat: Yeah, okay, you know, dressing like that’s what rock stars do.

Other Prince innovations, such as changing his name to a nonverbal hieroglyph combining the male and female symbols and a horn—“It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency”—tended to be lame. Granted, he was about 20 years ahead of the world in using emojis, but when I look up “Prince emoji” today, it’s a white boy with a crown.

And let’s not talk about purple paisley.

Third, all that nonsense aside, Prince was a great American.

It wasn’t just his unworldly musical talent, but also his considered judgment on what was best for American popular music, which was healthy and true.

Prince grew up in Minneapolis, which back then had so few black people that its one funk radio station only had a license for daylight hours. So, at night the adolescent Prince listened to the coolest white station.

Like Elvis Presley and Sly Stone, who grew up listening to both black and white radio, Prince learned to appreciate both races’ music.

Prince’s 2007 Super Bowl show in the pouring purple rain struck me as a stirring advocacy of the idea that American pop music is best when blacks and whites culturally appropriate from each other.

Princes’ three covers during his 12-minute Super Bowl set included the ultrawhite Foo Fighters’ corporate rocker “Best of You” and two songs by white songwriters that had been famously covered by black performers: “All Along the Watchtower” (Dylan/Hendrix) and “Proud Mary” (Creedence-Fogerty/Ike and Tina Turner).

Prince’s peak performance, at the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame Awards salute to George Harrison, when he upstaged the late Beatle’s aged friends Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty with his jaw-dropping solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” is depicted as a triumph over white racism:

But there’s also pain—in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers…. Suddenly, this triumphant performance is given this other dimension of insecurity and insistence in the face of all doubters—the white rock establishment, his uncomprehending parents, the demons in his head.

No doubt. But there’s also the chance that Prince, who never seemed much to like the dominant rap music of his adulthood, was also trying to educate black youth that musical instruments such as the electric guitar could be a worthy instrument for black genius.

That seems forgotten now.