MY PINUP

A tale of a brief encounter and long obsession with the late musical icon Prince.

Prince (1958-2016) contained multitudes, and every book about him seems to explore his aura through a different filter—musical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and so on. In this slim book, first published as an essay under a different title in Harper’s in 2012, Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural critic Als emphasizes Prince’s role as a queer Black icon, somebody who challenged the notion that “for sex to be sex it needs to be shaming.” Prince’s 1988 album Lovesexy wasn’t his most successful, but for Als, it represents the high point of Prince’s sexual fluidity, his "DJ-like mixing of homosexualist and heterosexualist impulses.” The author reads Prince’s defiance toward the mainstream record industry in the 1990s as symbolic of his effort to challenge the supremacy of heteronormative, White behavior. But Prince is still a slippery persona for Als: He writes about interviewing him backstage before a 2004 concert and being simultaneously charmed by him (his face “had the exact shape, and large eyes, of a beautiful turtle”) and put off, as when he evangelized on his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. Prince at once lamented male journalists who feared their femininity while projecting a "new, heterosexualized, Jesus-loving self.” At fewer than 50 pages, this book is too short to address Prince’s protean nature in depth. But as an appreciation of the liberating power he had over Als as a gay Black man, it’s undeniably engrossing. (Straight men felt that power, too: The book opens with a Jamie Foxx stand-up routine about having his hetero identity rocked by Prince.) In that regard, it’s a story about love in general, delighting in seeing yourself in a star, and lamenting when that star flickers in a different way.

A lyrical, provocative take on pop music’s power.