Griffin Woodworth’s Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity is a rigorous and admirably readable book about Prince Rogers Nelson, the Black, Minnesota-born polymath whose genre-bending oeuvre from the late 1970s until his death in 2016 informed popular music in myriad ways. This is a layered analysis of the cultural work of artistic expression, arguing that Prince’s prolific output is better understood when cast within and against the intersection of genre and identity. It illustrates how formal analyses of popular music are enriched through understandings of its social location.
Woodworth, associate professor of popular music studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, skilfully complicates oversimple readings that cast shadows over Black popular music discourses. The book explodes facile, long-held narratives constructed by the industry, journalists and even scholars by analysing Prince’s career arc and artistic decisions to render his music and the genres he was said to be working in with more suitable technicolour complexity. Woodworth does this while painting a rich tapestry of the intersecting power dynamics of place, race, sexuality, industry power and discourse, showing how the fixity of genre was incompatible with Prince’s stylistic multiplicities.
The book states that its central thesis is ‘that Prince’s music was, at every point in his career, deeply and consistently informed by the history and techniques of Black expressive culture’ (p. 10). That thesis is skilfully achieved in the pages that follow, but I think, though, that this sells the successes of the project a bit short. Instead, I would argue it compellingly presents Prince as an artist whose rare dedication to practicing and maintaining creative freedom should be read as seeking and achieving a capacious Blackness in music and self-presentation. Genre-bending becomes the way Prince’s strategic navigations produced distinct and influential musical-representational modes of Black identity, breaking new ground and opening pathways for those who would come after. If anything, Woodworth’s achievement in this book is that it makes an already generational artist’s work seem even more innovative, significant, and unique.
The book is divided into five body chapters, each of which uses an instrument (i.e. the rock guitar) or a stylistic signature (i.e. Prince’s vocal innovations in high and low registers) to do three things: (1) contrast the artist’s work against the hegemonic ways genre and identity are defined in concert, (2) locate this within larger critical junctures in Prince’s career in popular music, and (3) offer cornerstone musicological close-reading analyses of songs from Prince’s oeuvre that evidence the chapter’s arguments. In doing so, it unpacks both static and dynamic racialisations of idiom, musical gesture, timbral, and rhythmic choice contained within genre structure to show how Prince’s artistry often reworks Black traditions to explode convention.
At the same time, each chapter feels distinct rather than formulaic. For example, Chapter 2, ‘Cyborgs, Sex and Synthesizers’, offers a helpful and efficient re-historicisation of electronic synthesiser technologies before elaborating its primary argument – that Prince’s uses of the instruments might be read instead as a refiguring of the traditional, Black-coded horn section into an individuated Afro-alienated cyborg persona. Chapter 3, ‘Symphonic Funk and “Hot Rhythm”’, is at its surface a reading of the rhythmic minimalism of ‘When Doves Cry’ and the Afro-cosmopolitan, orchestral funk of ‘Anotherloverholenyohead’ as a way of playing against stereotypes of Black masculinity. But at its heart, it is also a rich engagement with longstanding, uncomfortable debates around what scholars should (and should not) ascribe to ‘African rhythm’ and its relationship to time. Its other body chapters – ‘Confrontation, Crossover and Rock Guitar’; ‘Ecstasy and Prophecy in Prince’s Singing’; and ‘Horns, Masculinity, and the Anxiety of Influence’ – offer similarly complex combinations of formal analysis and extra-musical context. This type of depth makes the chapters – and the book on the whole – an exciting and effective work of contemporary musicological scholarship, one that I expect to return to time and time again because of how many different ways of looking at its material it offers.
Locating agency within musicological analysis is challenging, and the book’s only mild shortcoming is the degree to which its conclusions about Prince’s intentions stretch a bit too far at times. Often, Prince is said to be actively ‘fight[ing] against racism’ (p. 27) and ‘fight[ing] for Black liberation’ (p. 28); the ‘why’ of his stylistic and idiomatic choices is quite frequently attributed to his role in the struggle. The degree to which a Du Boisian Double Consciousness is presumed risks underselling Prince’s contributions as responses to white supremacy, rather than as artist expressions that self-evidently disrupt it.
To a similar end, at times, the work risks prescribing a bit too much intent in ways that align with (or, perhaps, prove) the author’s theses. Did Prince eschew horns early in his career because he was trying to work out his relationship with his father’s preferred genres and to deconstruct heteronormative masculinities? Or, perhaps, did he eschew those horns because he did not hear them in the songs he wanted to write?
That aside, the book’s successes far outweigh these minor limitations, and it ultimately shows how theory-informed close readings of songs can fit within the knowledge-project of critical studies of identity. In that way, it continues the work of scholars such as Daphne Brooks, Emily Lordi and others producing interdisciplinary endeavours that enrich and expand musicological methods. Woodsworth has offered a fitting entry at the intersection of artistic production and meaning-making, where to know Prince as best as one can is to understand the centrality of his work in this thing called life.
