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Why do we love the music we love?
I've been asking myself this question ever since the news of Prince's untimely death broke last week.
Here's the thing: I was a Prince fan — a fact that embarrassed me a little, actually. Not that Prince wasn't worthy of some serious fangirling on my part. Oh no, no, no. Prince Rogers Nelson was a natural-born musical Force of Nature who fused rock and pop, funk and punk, Hendrix and Brown to create a wild sound that was unmistakably his own.
It's just that I'm sort of an unlikely fan, right? Would super cool Prince even have wanted someone like me — a super NOT cool old middle-class white lady from Utah with a carload of kids — to sing along with his sexy-time songs whenever they came on the radio?
Which I did.
I still sing along whenever I dial up my Prince playlist, because who can resist belting out a line like "act your age, mama, not your shoe size." Also (if no one is looking) (so please don't be scared) I dance. In fact, "1999" may just be the best shut-up-and-dance song in the history of the world.
When I taught creative writing, I sometimes even used the lyrics from "Raspberry Beret" to talk about the elements of a good story. Consider the song's first two verses.
I was working part time in a five-and-dime
My boss was Mr. McGee
He told me several times that he didn't like my kind
'Cause I was a bit too leisurely
Seems that I was busy doing something close to nothing
But different than the day before
That's when I saw her, ooh, I saw her
She walked in through the out door, out door
Holy cow! Look at all the narrative work that gets done here in the space of a few short sentences. You have a "setting" (the five-and-dime and all that implies, including a minimum-wage salary and jackalope postcards for sale on the counter). You have "characters" (a grumpy boss and an underachieving employee who totally reminds you of that guy you used to work with at Taco Time back when you were in college). And best of all, you have the sense that something is about to happen the instant a certain girl walks IN through the OUT door. Boom! And also "plot"!
So yes. I like Prince's sly intelligent lyrics. But it goes deeper than that. Somehow his music just … resonates with me. I heard it, and once I did, it stayed inside my skin. Which brings me back to my original question: Why do we love the music we love?
I think it's this: Somehow a certain piece — whether it's an aria or a rock-and-roll anthem or a blues riff or a lovelorn CW ballad — calls up a primal joy that we feel in the hearing. In the moving. In the remembering.
Music, in fact, calls up all the selves we have ever been — the barefoot girl playing neighborhood night games beneath an August moon, the adolescent girl crushing on a boy who never noticed her, the grown-up girl who notices for the first time that her own baby has grown into a man and wonders when AND HOW THE HELL that all happened.
But most of all, music calls up a deep, deep joy that we feel in Just. Being. Alive.
So would've Prince been embarrassed by a fan like that?
Naw. I think he'd have given me the look, addressed me (and everyone else within earshot) as "Dearly Beloved" and told us all to go crazy.
RIP, Prince.
Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.