Prince Philosophy and How Accepting the Mess of America Might Help Us Get Our Groove Back
What 8 years in America and Prince’s song-lyric wisdom taught me about the complexity inside us all and how we really need to just dance
The recommended soundtrack for this article is “Purple Rain” by Prince. Listen on YouTube or Spotify.
“Everyone has their own experience. That’s why we are here, to go through our experience, to learn, to go down those paths.” — Prince
Last year I returned to Australia after eight years in the United States. I saw Obama go, Trump reign, and Biden’s early moves. In that time, I witnessed a country descend further into political division and try to destroy itself.
I bore witness to inequality and saw a city collapse into civil unrest as it reckoned with its dark history and very real present-moment experiences of racial injustice and inequality.
Naturally, many people ask me what my experience was like. It is easy to recount tales of fear and cynicism. But America is also powerfully magic and beautiful.
The United States is the best and the worst of the world. It is courageous, creative, and insanely innovative. Often, it's the same innovation that both builds and destroys.
Americans are equally intent on protecting and destroying the natural world. It is these polarities that make it such an alive and anxious place to be.
I’ve long since abandoned the false promise of hope and hold both cynicism and optimism as necessary dualities to move forward in life.
The picture I paint here will likely displease some people. But I discovered truth can be found when you can see beyond illusion and merge with the polarities. Gratitude and wisdom can be found in the darkest of places.
This is what it sounds like . . .
“Hard to say what’s right when all I wanna do is wrong.”— Prince
I was living in Minneapolis with George Floyd was murdered by police. This wasn’t the story of one event. It has been the tragic three-hundred-year reality for generations of African Americans and people of color. But it was a major tipping point, with reverberations felt around the world.
I often wondered whether George Floyd's death would have resulted in the necessary reckoning if it had occurred in Atlanta or Detroit or even Los Angeles. In many senses, in any other city, George Floyd could have been another death swallowed up by the media cycle.
But there was something about what happened that hit Minnesotans and the country in a peculiar way. These things just don’t happen in a place like that.
Of course, many of my African American friends in Minneapolis-St Paul attest to racial profiling long being the grim reality for many people. It isn’t uncommon for a mother to fear for her children as they leave the house.
This is the kind of fear we white people haven't had to ever contend with. And then, suddenly, I was given a homeopathic taste of the kind of fear so many people deal with on a daily basis.
In a single night, 167 businesses were burnt to the ground. Within days, the city was overtaken with National Guard tanks on every third block. Rows of storefronts were boarded up.
Near-daily reports would come in of drive-by shootings, and not in historically dangerous neighbourhoods. It would be akin to walking down King Street in Sydney’s Newtown or Brunswick Street in Melbourne and risk being mowed down by a random shooter with semi-automatic weapons.
For a long while, COVID protected us from going out. But when restaurants began to reopen, I would always get a booth as it was the safest place to hide if there was an active shooter. What place is worth living when you need to scan a restaurant or supermarket for safe hiding places?
I was never afraid of race. I was afraid of gun-toting right-wing actors who needed to shoot people to assert their beliefs. I was afraid of parents who bought guns for their children.
But as difficult as it was for my privileged white ass, I am glad I had that experience. This is the kind of fear that generations of people deal with daily.
And if that real and palpable fear gave me even a little empathy for the experiences of others, then I am better for it.
“Why do we scream at each other? This is what it sounds like, when doves cry.” — Prince
Prince as the nation’s mirror
Make the rules, then break them ’cause you are the best. — Prince, “Cream”
I missed the full force of the Prince wave in my childhood. I had come across a couple of his songs — When Doves Cry and Cream — but somehow bypassed the rest.
I remember when he abandoned his identity as Prince to become known by a symbol. He became the artist formerly known as Prince. The conservative Australian media painted him with a quizzical, disparaging brush.
When I arrived in Minnesota, I was startled by the people’s adoration and fierce loyalty to Prince. He was an unlikely hero for what is often perceived as a culturally bland state. But they loved him. Purple Rain was its own anthem.
Prince was a symbol of America’s dichotomy. He was an adherent of one of the most fear-fuelled conservative religious movements in the country and yet also an artist who eschewed gender norms and embodied sexual freedom and self-expression that made Madonna look conservative.
“People say I’m wearing heels because I’m short. I wear heels because the women like ‘em.” — Prince
Prince loved women and women loved him. Scenes from Purple Rain could be interpreted as misogynistic (check out the abandoning-the-love-interest-in-Lake-Minnetonka scene) and yet he worshipped womanhood and keenly promoted and nurtured several women artists.
In a country divided by the left-right polarities, Prince was a symbol of the messiness of division. Countries are not split along clean lines. Trump attracted some unlikely traditionally left-wing supporters and repelled some of the most conservative Republicans.
The paint-by-numbers approach of modern media doesn’t allow for grey. Or purple. Everything is delineated by hard lines with a limited palette of blue and red.
Prince, and America more broadly, remind us that people are inherently complex. It is neither possible nor fair to put people in boxes, and it gets dangerous when we do.
When the January 6 insurrection happened, a friend came to me in tears. “This is not our story,” she said as a way of defending her country and trying to convince herself that this was a blip in the national conversation.
I struggled with compassion as I held up a mirror by saying, “Are you kidding? This is your story. This has been the American story since the beginning.”
“Peace will come when it becomes irrelevant to strike out at people. When you see that it’s striking out against your own genome.” — Prince
Until we can see that the polarity that exists outside of us as an inherent part of ourselves, every conversation is an act of denial.
America taught me to meet people in their complex messiness. I learned to see and accept my own messiness. I am a walking polarity, a messy contradiction of competing ideas, values, and beliefs. Nothing about being human is neat and trying to represent it as such is to deny reality.
Religious freedom
You cannot know America without knowing religious freedom. If America was conceived out of persecution, it was birthed out of freedom.
America has become home to millions over recent centuries who fled persecution in the hope they could practice their faith without retaliation.
It is a messy promise still finding itself, and a belief so strong that it seems like nothing will ever break it.
Australia can be a religiously cynical nation. People will accept another’s faith so long as they never talk about it. Evangelism is widely regarded as ugly here, despite Australia being the birthplace of what has become widely regarded as the world’s most successful evangelical church — Hillsong. I guess Australia, too, is a land of contradiction.
But despite how messy religious pluralism might be, I also saw the beauty in it. On one occasion I was in conversation with three people in a Starbucks — a Hindu, a Baptist, and me with my own progressive spiritual views. The conversation was remarkably filled with genuine curiosity and acceptance.
From experience, what American-of-faith seem to have a harder time with is atheism. The baseline cultural belief is: Of course there’s a God. It’s not having a belief in God that is deeply un-American.
Prince wasn’t the only person with a complex relationship with faith. I encountered hundreds in my time there. Christians who practiced yoga and tarot, a transgendered child of Catholic and Buddhist parents, gay Muslims navigating faith and culture, and even a faitheist who was trying to bridge the cultural divide between faith and atheism.
Pluralism doesn’t just exist in our societies. It exists in our families and even in ourselves. Many people hold a mishmash of a different beliefs. Personal spirituality these days is more pluralist than pedigree.
Big nature
There is no country that is quite as naturally diverse and majestic as America. And there are few other countries quite as hellbent on both protecting and destroying it.
The size of its mountainscapes, big fauna, stunning canyons, old-growth forests, and river systems are nothing short of breathtaking.
America is arguably the birthplace of modern Western naturalism. I don’t mean to discount the ancient practices of indigenous cultures here, but Western cultures have for centuries been disconnected from landscape and nature. And out of that, inspired by people like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, a contemporary movement of reconnection is brewing.
America created the national parks system, which has since been replicated in over 100 countries.
And after years of persistent attempts to eradicate species like the wolf, more recent conservation attempts are seeing promising results in restoring ecosystems and species levels.
It is in my view that while greed and unrelenting economic growth have seen the decimation of the natural world, and while America has dragged the chain when it comes to responding to climate change, it is also the country that offers the greatest hope in being able to do anything about it.
The sheer size of the population (and thereby consumer market) coupled with its creative innovation prowess puts America in a singular position to lead a meaningful counter-response to the climate crisis.
Change is here
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“Sometimes it takes years for a person to become an overnight success.” — Prince
It seems like an inappropriate time to be quoting Lenin, but interestingly we are seeing this principle lived out before our eyes.
After decades of disagreement in Europe over how to respond to Russia, one week sparked the almost-complete unification around agreed ideals.
It is a reminder that a decade can happen in a week. After all these years, we can still become an overnight success. It is possible to turn around a fifty-year denial of climate change if we want to. Perhaps it simply needs for the stakes to be high enough.
As Prince said, we “make the rules, then break them.” We don’t need to keep living this same story. We can become the world formerly known as.
“I don’t live in the past. I don’t play my old records for that reason. I make a statement, then move on to the next.”― Prince
This whole article started as a reminiscence of my time in the America. I was trying to make sense of my experience, wanting to deliver some eloquent wisdom about how to accept our inherent messiness and celebrate the joyous polarities of America.
But Prince kept popping in. His wisdom didn’t care for my erudite nonsense. His words carried power because they rode in on funky grooves.
If Prince was here, I imagine he’d not get caught up too much in all this intellectual posturing. He’d look at me, without even bothering to read this article, then turn to nod to his band and play . . .
War is all around us My mind says prepare to fight So if I gotta die I’m gonna listen to my body tonight, yeah
They say, 2000–00, party over Oops, out of time So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999 — Prince
Dedicated to Prince and his loyal subject, César “Infinity” Garcia.
