Recommendations of the Editorial team
An archive text from 2022.
Criticism: Prince “The Beautiful Ones” – sketches of a life
“This is the view from my prison cell,” Prince wrote under a photo. “When I signed my first album contract.” That was in July 1977. The newcomer from Minneapolis enjoyed a very beautiful view in the Sheraton Hotel in, as can be seen in the picture Los Angeles. The musician was known for his black humor. Here, however, it also becomes clear how much he must have feared as a 19-year-old that the record label will try to get his genius. The struggle for autonomy would shape his artist.
This and other motifs are gathered in “The Beautiful Ones”. A life report consisting only of fragments. Prince died before completing his autobiography. He started his work in February 2016. Just two months before his death. The publisher and his co-author Dan Piepenbring (whom Prince did not know before-the then 29-year-old journalist applied for the job at his side by fan letter). The result consists of four parts. An introduction to Adlatus Piepenbring. Prince ‘memoirs, based on 28 handwritten pages about his childhood and youth. A photo and sketch route from the private collection. As well as lyrics and the draft screenplay for “Purple Rain”.
“The Beautiful Ones”: shrill, but unsatisfactory
So it is one, how could it be different under the circumstances, shrill, but in the end, unsatisfactory book. Like a illustrated reader. Prince was a shy ironic, a scarce commentator – not a storyteller. His oneliners were legendary, but he was not known for persistent, meaningful analyzes. Prince worked at short distances, after gut feeling, current projects quickly bored him. He was an intuition artist.
This is noticeable to the memories. Stronger passages are those of the fleeting sensory impressions, such as his love for the comic character Superman, the beauty of the mother in front of the make -up mirror or the first kiss – all also made for gags at your own expense. Prince succeeds in the almost cinematic sketch of a moment when he closes the spindle door at the high school and suddenly stands next to him-“like a John Hughes film”.
But of all things, the descriptions of his music are awkward. He judges via “Do Me, Baby” by footnote: “With this song I updated the R&B ballad shape for the eighties.” “Ballad shape” – “updated”? He abstractly describes the first erotic thoughts as a “birth of physical imagination”. Maybe the result of a weak translation.
Now Prince has not been able to edit his memoirs, the publisher transcribed notes. As Dan Piepenbring writes, Prince “The Beautiful Ones” not only planned as an autobiography, but also as a book “that would change us all”. He wanted to put on a work “that disbanded racism out of the world”. He commemorated the slave history of the African Americans with those miserable conditions under which blacks work for plate companies.
He provided his identity card for the book
Since Prince was chronologically, he could no longer come to this chapter – the influence of his label behind which he suspected racism, in 1984 used “Purple Rain”. He took his personal considerations of that time, his thoughts on racism.
“The Beautiful Ones” also maintains that aura of the unfathomable, which Prince surrounded. Piepenbring’s worries that an autobiography could destroy the artist’s mystery, of course, does not come true. Even the first editing of the lyrics published for the first time, the deletions and additions, appear as with the pen, instead of curled instead of the ruler. At Prince, notes became multi -colored works of art.
Prince will stay a little surreal forever. He provided his identity card for the book. The photo with the frontal recording of his face was not taken for the office – it is a non -used cover motif for the album “Parade”.
Oh prince.