Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity

Throughout his career, the Minneapolis musician Prince was known for fusing different musical genres as well as moving between different identities-sexual lothario, devout man of God, androgynous sprite-qualities that fit the postmodernism of the 1980s.This volume takes a fresh look at Prince’s work, arguing that his music was deeply informed by the history and techniques of Black culture, and that his multigenre fluency and changeable image were weapons that he deployed in a career-long fight against the racially segregated structures of the American music industry.Using a methodology that mixes musicology with African American literary theory, queer theory, and gender studies, this book analyzes the ways that Prince mixed and manipulated musical genres that are indexed to racial identities-such as “white” rock or new-wave, and “Black” funk, gospel, or R&B-in order to construct pluralistic identities. Each chapter includes detailed musical analyses and transcriptions of Prince’s songs