“All art aspires to the condition of music,” wrote Walter Pater, and
Prince’s lyrics are as hot and dreamlike and weird as his sound.
Saturated in color, wild with bizarre imagery, they overload the senses
and short-circuit the brain. Rolling Stone described the Purple One’s aesthetic as “sensual anarchy,”
a phrase that helps capture the intoxicating drive of his poetry. (What
if not poetry would you call these lines from “Raspberry Beret”: “Now,
overcast days never turned me on/ But something about the clouds and her
mixed.”) Prince told us to move and dance and fuck our way to utopia,
to grind “until the castle started spinning/ or maybe it was just my brain.”
He was our Dionysus, and his lyrics were full of beasts. “You’re just as soft as a lion tamed,” he crooned. “Take me to the place where your horses run free,” he begged.
And he saw in color: red corvettes, pink cashmere, purple rain, purple
everything. Prince understood T.S. Eliot’s notion of the objective
correlative, the concrete object that stands for a chaotic, vibrant mass
of emotions. “She wore a raspberry beret,” he sang, and once it was
worn he didn’t say much more.
