[retroactive]
Senior solo sung by a sweet young woman with blue hair at this weekend’s a cappella concert. A cappella was somewhat the bane of my existence at a small liberal arts college: it’s a small enough place that you invariably know a few people in every group and therefore are constantly showing up to support them at shows. Which means you are constantly listening to a cappella, which is in real life like neither Glee nor Pitch Perfect.
Still. It has its moments.
[retroactive]
I suppose it was inevitable that I would have to share a Smiths song at some point this year. Might as well be this one, which yet another earnest senior sang as her solo at the a cappella concert. I mean, it is a beautiful cemetery and Wilde’s is the better side.
What are friends for if not perking up a rainy day by reminding you of your youth.
The original song is one of my favorites. Growing up in a college town, it seemed like we had the entire place to ourselves during the summer. Empty streets as we biked to the pool or to get pizza or to the house parties where our friends bands riffed on the porches because there were no college kids to fill the basement for a show.
In our inverted reality, the boys of summer were just the boys from the high school across town who were temporarily not outshone by moody 19-year-olds. When I look back it seems like there was never mosquitoes, humidity, or late afternoon thunderstorms. Just sun, white clouds, and riding around in the beds of pickup trucks.
This version is surprisingly decent.
Variations on a theme: before I moved to DC, I was a summer girl. Summer everywhere else I ever lived is like spring in DC, 70s and 80s, low humidity building to a muggy August, clear blue skies, breezes, and clouds. We got that weather here last week and there’s nothing like it.
Summer meant the pool, first being dropped of there for the afternoon and then doing my share of early morning lap swimming shifts and spending long summer days on the chair as a lifeguard. It meant music: in the car, in my room, at shows, or at the endless practices of our friends’ bands. It meant working for the money to buy pizza and some new Chucks, biking or walking wherever we wanted to go, and pushing the limits of our curfews.
When I romanticize summer, it’s because it was pretty much this. Staying with my grandparents, watching Spinal Tap a hundred times in a row in the basement of the kids across the street, getting a crush on a kid named Marco whose seriously Italian house had a marble foyer complete with statues of cherubs.
Summer was the time for little festivals full of death trap rides that I would never let my own child near. Ferris wheels, the Gravitron, that nauseating octopus one. Fry bread, cotton candy, $100 lemonade. Fireworks.
Prince was the best thing Minnesota created but not the only thing.
Still listening to the broadcast of his catalogue and trying to adjust to a world where Prince is dead. When tasked with choosing a song to mark the 40th anniversary of Ramones, this is it.
Hey, little girl.
There is so much I could say about Prince, and I am not even the most diehard of his fans out there; I’m hearing a lot of older stuff for the first time as MPR streams his catalogue. When I think of Prince, and what he gave me, at the heart of it is his unabashed love and appreciation for women in all our fabulous regular glory.
In an era of insipidly vapid gigglers draped across the hoods of cars in bikinis, you didn’t have to be rich to be Prince’s girl. You could be any size, not cool, and definitely not the kind of person who would be caught slavering over Steven Tyler’s leather pants. Prince knows how to undress Prince, and he expects you to know how to undress yourself too.
Threading together all of his most sexy, provocative, and controversial songs, there is a manual for being a real live grown-ass woman. Prince himself was the inspiration for wanting to achieve that status; if someone as fabulous as he could appreciate a girl who walked in through the out door and was willing to be ferried to a farm via bicycle, maybe there was hope for the kid working at the actual drugstore down the block. Maybe there were more men out there who would appreciate the color purple and women who had their shit together and laughed as loud as they wanted, no giggling required.
A basic part of this manual for adulthood was a complete absence of slut-shaming. You may be a little too fast, but that only made Prince long to be the one worthy of taming your little red love machine and inspiring you to settle down. His only concern about having a one-night stand was how to make the most of those hours, and he strongly suggested that men’s lives would be better in general if they oriented themselves to this accepting vision of women as (what I think we’re still calling) fully actualized sexual beings.
All my sisters of the 70s, 80s, and 90s who learned to love themselves and not wear much more with their berets, I salute you! Seen through Prince’s eyes, we are some seriously badass babes.
(Once Prince’s lawyers get done with the estate stuff, I am sure these videos are gone, so enjoy them now in the spirit of celebration.)
I am experiencing all the stages of grief at once.
When I was in elementary school, I didn’t have a lot of friends and some of the friends I did have didn’t acknowledge me at school. I spent a lot of time on the playground alone, and my favorite spot was the swings. I was the kid who could spend hours out there, flying and daydreaming. While I flew, I sang all the songs I fell asleep to on the radio at night and none more enthusiastically than “When Doves Cry.”
In middle school, I first danced with a boy to “Purple Rain,” an event that would have no doubt been less mortifying for all involved had we picked a shorter song. When I was moving toward metal and then punk, Prince was the artist I took with me. The years of being teased about “Darling Nikki” did not dull the shine and all through college it was Prince we mixed up with the Beastie Boys when we pre-partied.
Just this week I was lamenting how difficult it is to find his music on YouTube or at karaoke. I respect his copyrights, I really do, but I wish it were easier to share the love.
When Michael and Whitney died, part of my childhood went with them. Prince goes way beyond childhood, though. Love and funk and heart, so much life. It’s just not fathomable.
I love you, baby, that’s no lie.