A photo recently circulated on social networks showing Prince in a suspender belt and bikini, grinning like a thieve. The picture was probably a fake. Not because Prince wore women’s underwear; At the beginning of his career he even went on stage in sexy lingerie. But because he grinned as if he was making fun of men in women’s clothing.
In reality, Prince took cross-dressing seriously: the strapped musician never looked prouder than on the “Dirty Mind” cover from 1980. With “Purple Rain” he would be the first to win over America’s white rock audience in suspenders and pumps. For “Sign O’ The Times” he finally created an artificial character: Camille, whose voice is screwed to such smurfy, artificial heights that it was not clear how much man, how much woman, or what he actually was. When Camille sang in “If I Was Your Girlfriend” about wanting to dress her girlfriend, it remained a mystery whether this was a heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual wish – or even that of a non-human.
Prince was perhaps the first straight pop superstar to embrace such ambiguity, not caring what conservative listeners thought. He included four Camille songs on his most celebrated album, and even had a hit with “U Got The Look”. What was behind Camille?
Camille the witch?
“Prince developed Camille by accident,” believes his sound engineer at the time, Susan Rogers. He became aware of his friend Jesse Johnson’s album, which was titled “Shockadelica” – without any song being called that. That outraged Prince. “And then,” says Rogers, “he postulated something that wasn’t true: ‘All great albums have one thing in common: the best song is their title track!'” So he recorded “Shockadelica,” but for his own next record. The birth of Camille. Ironically, he originally sketched the character not as a champion of diversity, but as a “witch” who sets fires, he sings: “The Bed’s On Fire, Your Fate Is Sealed”.
“During breaks in recording,” Rogers remembers, “I would draw figures. Where there should have been eyes, they had crosses. Were they dead or alive? Men or women? Were they zombies?” Prince liked the idea of someone from the afterlife causing mischief. In “Rebirth of the Flesh”, first released on the deluxe edition of “Sign O’ The Times”, Camille finally greets the undead as a shaman, awakened by his funk.
It wasn’t until “If I Was Your Girlfriend” that Prince portrayed this devilish, black sheep of the family as a person struggling for commitment in the here and now – and as one who saw her ambiguous gender as an advantage. Although in the countless interpretations of the song, only the first part of the song is in the foreground, in which Camille remains calm. The dramatic finale, an inner monologue as spoken word that becomes increasingly despairing, suggests that Camille is suffering from disturbed perception. But there is one thing, says Susan Rogers, that most journalists misrepresent: that Prince only invented his high-pitched voice with Camille. “It started in 1984 with ‘Erotic City’”.
After “Sign O’ The Times,” Prince would quickly give up playing with the genre again. Maybe because he tried to gain a foothold in hip hop, which was becoming popular, from the beginning of the 1990s. Like almost all artists in the genre, he believed that only a strongly masculine image would work. With the “Diamonds and Pearls” album, he portrayed himself as the leader of a rap gang, now pointed his microphone at women, and the microphone was shaped like a gun.