The Man Nobody Knew - Not Even Himself

A review of "This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, On and Off the Record"

Who was Prince?

That’s the question at the center of This Thing Called Life: Prince’s Odyssey On and Off the Record, writer Neal Karlen’s fascinating and intimate account of his own relationship with the late, great Purple One. It’s one Prince himself often had trouble answering, Karlen notes, leaving him a painfully lonely individual who repeatedly and cruelly sabotaged relationships with close friends, creative collaborators, and lovers out of terror at the possibility that they might abandon him first. Prince also comes across as a consummate bullshitter – Karlen calls him “a fantastic liar” – who did his best to obfuscate and mystify his past, an impish trickster deity who took pleasure in misleading others and far too often himself as well.

Karlen draws from notes and recordings of interviews he conducted with Prince at the height of his popularity and creativity in the mid-to-late 1980s, in addition to personal conversations he had with the artist over the years. This intimate if somewhat intermittent dialogue continued up until the weeks before Prince’s death, and it included early morning phone calls from Karlen’s fellow Minneapolitan – his Jewish immigrant grandparents resided in the same Northside Minneapolis neighborhood at the same time as the young Prince – as well as casual talks over pick-up basketball or ping-pong games at Paisley Park. The details of these discussions lend Karlen’s part-memoir, part-biography a freshness and personal familiarity that other entries in the burgeoning literary genre he dubs “PrinceLit” lack.

There’s genuinely new information here, too, and it helps Karlen cut through the thick wall of bullshit that Prince threw up around himself throughout his life. Prince repeatedly slandered his saintly social worker of a mother, for instance, saying she used drugs and left hard-core pornography around the house for her son to encounter at a young age – despite the fact that she cared for him when his abusive, deadbeat father failed to do so, much less that she served as his closest adviser and confidant until she died. Nor was Prince kicked out of his house and left to fend for himself at age fourteen, as later legend had it. According to André Cymone, perhaps Prince’s only lifelong friend and to whose home he relocated, the future rock god simply “got sick of living at his mother’s house… He wasn’t broke; his father gave him a ten-dollar-a-week allowance, and his stepfather helped him out, too.”

But once he hit it big – stratospherically, intergalactically big – with Purple Rain, Karlen poignantly observes, Prince

had to figure out what he wanted, which was not necessarily, not even probably, what the fans who’d made him rich and famous wanted… Prince knew where he was going, he thought, but only for the moment; he knew the truth, but only for that second, and even if he could wriggle himself free from all the contractual, cultural, and interpersonal bonds that tethered him to earth and to others, he still had to deal with himself – and in his kayfabe lived life, who was that?

He never did quite figure that out, and his ingrained fear of abandonment led him to sabotage virtually all of his closest personal and professional relationships. Prince sundered his childhood relationship with Cymone, for instance, by treating him like an employee rather than a friend. He summarily dissolved the Revolution in October 1986, unceremoniously dismissing guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman – women he’d called his musical soulmates. When Karlen confronted Prince several years later over his callous treatment of his one-time bandmates, Prince responded with a question of his own: “What if everyone around me left? Then I’d be left alone, and I’d have no one to fend for me but myself.”

Prince expressed similar sentiments when he launched his jihad against Warner Bros., his longtime record label, in the 1990s. Widely respected record executives Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker had signed a young Prince to the label and gave him enormous creative freedom from the very start, a fact Prince himself recognized even as he turned on them with an absurd vengeance. In the process he became a “cartoon idiot asshole,” a well-compensated musician with wide artistic latitude who nonetheless preposterously insisted that a ten-album record deal was the moral and practical equivalent of slavery. It was, he explained to Karlen in 1996, a preventive strike more than anything else: “What if they left me first? I’d be all alone.”

So strong was Prince’s desire to spare himself the emotional pain inherent in close human relationships that he eventually wound up dying alone, exactly what Karlen says he feared more than anything else. A lifetime of rock and roll wear-and-tear had taken a toll on his body, leaving Prince with chronic pain that by the mid-1990s had led to an addiction to painkillers – first Percocet, later the black-market fentanyl that killed him in 2016. In the end, Prince deceived himself more than he did anyone else: terrified by the prospect of abandonment by those closest to him, he actively drove them away and ensured his own deepest fears were realized.

It's also clear from Karlen’s narrative that Prince needed squares to rebel against, and that growing up in Minnesota shaped him in ways neither he nor Karlen might admit. In New York or Los Angeles – or even Chicago – Prince might have been just another oddball in a city with a critical mass of weirdos of every shape and size. But in Minneapolis, Prince stood out against what Karlen calls a stifling and conformist “Scandinavian ethos of not calling attention to yourself.” Minneapolis may not have been “Funkytown,” as another band from the city put it, so Prince and other artists had to invent the place for themselves.

Few things are more Minnesotan than the self-loathing Karlen wallows in when he disparages the state as a cesspool of self-repression and passive-aggression. Still, it’s not hard to understand where Karlen’s own love-hate relationship with Minneapolis comes from – especially his contempt for the city’s posthumous embrace of Prince as a local hero. He does admit that this sort of thing has happened in the past, as when the city of St. Paul couldn’t be bothered with The Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald in life but lionized him in death.

At the same time, however, Karlen’s experience wasn’t my own growing up in the Twin Cities suburbs in the late 1980s and 1990s, listening to my dad’s LP of Purple Rain on my bedroom stereo or rocking out to The Gold Experience on rides to and from school. For me – and I suspect many of my generation – Prince was a spectral, larger-than-life figure in the late 1990s, a brilliant eccentric who lived in a mysterious mansion on the edge of town and added a touch of funk (in every sense of the word) to our hometown. Then again, I may just be an odd duck in my own way, disconnected from the wider cultural streams and currents in which I swam as a kid.

Nonetheless, Karlen errs in conflating the way Prince serves as an identifying symbol of the state – an easy shorthand that gives others an instantly recognizable way to place Minnesota in their own mental geography – and the state’s popular embrace (or lack thereof) of Prince and his music while he was still alive. Again, it may simply be a generational issue; those of us who heard “When Doves Cry” repeat over and over again on the radio in the early 1990s and titillated ourselves with “P Control” in high school probably had a different relationship with Prince than his own generation of Minnesotans did.

All the same, many if not most artists have difficult, conflictual, and even downright hostile relationships with their hometowns – and it would have been truly strange if Prince had been an exception to that rule. In Karlen’s telling, though, Prince resembles no other cultural figures so much as the Romantic poets of early nineteenth century England: bad boys like Byron, Keats, and Shelley. These immensely talented but rakish and outré writers likewise rebelled against the prevailing norms of their day with their often-risqué verse and libertine lifestyles, becoming literary rock stars over a century before the musical genre itself was invented.

Prince likewise embodied the contradictions of his day and age, putting on so many controversial personae that he never quite figured himself out and alienated virtually every one of his closest partners in the process - all while producing works of creative genius that his contemporaries and successors can only hope to equal.