Make-Up: Bowie, Blitz & The Makings of Prince

By Michael A. Gonzales

Artist | Alena Galayko

“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I am something you’ll never understand.”

                              Prince, “I Will Die 4 U” (1984)

Back in the 1980s, Prince was everything: the cool brother with perfect hair, arched eyebrows, modish threads, and an exquisite female companion on his arm. He also made some of the most eclectic music of the era. Having debuted in 1978 with the For You album, back when he still dressed in regular off-the-rack fashions from the men’s department while sporting an amazing Afro, Prince was a cute pin-up boy whose handsome looks fit perfect with the other teen idols (Switch, The Jacksons) in the pages of Right On! 

Although For You was a commercial failure, the following year, after setting off the disco dance floors and Black radio with “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” the first single from his self-titled second album in 1979, the Minneapolis native began establishing himself in the ears and eyes of Planet Pop as an artist ready to rebel against the status quo of music, fashion, and sexuality. While the album’s back cover showed a nude Prince riding on the back of a Pegasus, the soft photo projecting a storybook sweetness captured the wild boy he’d unleash a year later. 

Prince’s third album Dirty Mind (1980) was a coming-out album in terms of sound, style, and sexuality with him testing us from the moment we gazed at the stunning black and white album cover shot by Allen Beaulieu. Posed in black bikini briefs, trench coat and bandana tied around his neck, he stared defiantly as though daring you to question him; flipping the cover, we saw Prince laying on the couch in thigh-high stockings looking both sinfully seductive and homoerotic as a Robert Mapplethorpe subject. Is he waiting for a woman or a man? “What difference does it make as long as the music is good,” the picture replied. 

After the release of Dirty Mind and his rise as a musical innovator, Prince’s constantly changing look foretold and inspired an androgyny movement in Black music in the ‘80s. While the decade before he-men stars Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Barry White, and Teddy Pendergrass projected a brute force Alpha male vibe in their music and images, recording artists including Jermaine Stewart, Micki Free, Georgio, Mazarati (who recorded for Prince’s own Paisley Park label) and Chico DeBarge refused to get caught up in labels of straight, gay or bisexual and just be free.  

However, whenever Prince was discussed amongst friends (especially other Black men), inevitably someone would mention “his look” as though they didn’t approve of his ruffled shirts and high heels, the coiffed tresses, and obvious make-up, the falsetto softness of his voice and love for the color purple. “His music might be cool, but he still looks a sissy to me.” To many men in my community, where they prided themselves on being macho, being “a sissy” was seen as an offense. Thinking perhaps that listening to a suspected sissy sing would make them suspect, their admiration for Prince was often conflicted by the extravaganza he projected in his (mostly) falsetto singing voice, colorful wardrobes, high-heeled shoes, and black mascara. 

On Prince’s strange song ‘Bob George,’ a rather brutal track from The Black Album, Prince jokes about his own persona, referring to himself as “that skinny motherfucker with the high voice.” The song was poking fun at the he-men who refused to open their minds and be accepting of a different kind of man. For these men, any feminine traits, any gender-bending androgyny, was viewed as a sissified state that was simply unmanly and had little to do with their idea of soul men. 

With Prince also coming from a working-class Black community, he understood well the macho stance of brothers when it came down to homosexuality, perceived or otherwise. Critic Nelson George, who later became a supporter of Prince’s artistry, spoke for those name-callers in his book The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988) when he wrote that Prince had a “disquieting androgyny” that was an “alarmingly un-black, unmasculine figure.” Living Colour leader and guitarist extraordinaire Vernon Reid, who was friends with Prince said, “Back then people were asking, ‘Why is he wearing a long coat and lingerie.’ But, they didn’t understand that Prince was playing two roles; he was the hoe and the pimp.” 

The paradox of Prince was that while he was obviously in touch with his sensitive side, he also had a macho swagger that came across on stage as well as in many paparazzi photos where he was walking with yet another exotic woman who was almost as pretty as him. “Whenever we’re together, I always feel underdressed,” Esperanza Spalding said in 2016; and though as she laughed, we surely know that more than a few of his dates have felt the same way. 

Prince didn’t pioneer Black pop androgyny, but he did, in the ‘80s, bring the concept back into our homes via his stylishly flamboyant image in videos, magazine photoshoots, and album art wearing something we’d never seen anyone else dare. As The Cut writer Allison P. Davis pointed out in her 2014 essay on his freaky fashion reign, “…he's delighted our eyes with his eclectic, boundary-pushing stage costumes and "everyday" clothes. From the high-cut women's panties he sported in the early '80s, to his Purple Rain–era love of high-neck ruffle shirts, metallic purple suits, and perfect curls, to his countless crop tops, to that time he wore an assless bright-yellow jumpsuit onstage at the 1991 VMAs, Prince has been an inspiration. After all, everyone and anyone can appreciate a butt cutout.”

Early in his career, as a student of music regardless of era or genre, Prince was an admirer of “the real king of rock ‘n’ roll” Little Richard, the raging voice behind ‘Rip It Up’ and ‘Tutti Frutti’ who wore thick makeup, pompadour hairstyle and spoke in a feminine tone in the 1950s. However, before Richard came out of the closet, he used to tell journalists that, because of racism in America, he wore makeup because he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls whose parents might not understand their daughters swooning and screaming over a Black sex symbol. “I decided my image should be crazy and way out so adults would think I was harmless,” Richard once said. 

Dressed in black velvet pants, chartreuse shirts with layers of ruffles and dabs makeup, Little Richard’s gender-bending ways, which was inspired by fellow recording artist Esquerita, was cause for loose-lipped chatter in both communities, but that didn’t stand in the way of him becoming a star. Recording in a genre that was still in its infancy, where most rock and roll men, no matter their race, still wore suits, Little Richard was a pioneering rock ‘n’ roll spectacle, a vision of glam and glitter whose music and persona inspired some of pop’s biggest influencers. 

David Bowie, who was one of Prince’s musical and style heroes, loved Little Richard too and adopted his own glam “androgynous everyman pose.” Throughout the 1970s, Bowie’s style became the standard bearer of pop virtuosity whose perfect pin-up photos and sumptuous stage act was important. For Bowie, all of life was a stage play written by the dandy spirit of Oscar Wilde and consisting of frequent makeup touch-ups and costume changes. There were a litany of “pretty thing” artists on both sides of the Atlantic that were considered glam including Roxy Music, Gary Glitter, Alice Cooper, Elton John, New York Dolls, Kiss, and Jobriath, whose 1973 single ‘I’m a Man’ was one of the best androgyny (explainers) anthems ever written: “So I'm an elegant man, I'm a man Clara Bowes and open toes/Are what I am Yes I maman/Yea I'm a fragile man, I'm a man light, of step and soft of touch/a gentle man.” 

Not surprisingly, UK kids who were David Bowie fans would go on to create their own music/style movements that embraced forward-thinking in terms of genderbending sexual politics, innovative music, unpredictable fashions, and a dramatic presence. Called “Blitz Kids” or “The New Romantics” by the press, these children of the post-punk revolution changed the world's style and music. A few personal favorites include Japan, Visage, Spandau Ballet, Billy Idol, Bow Wow Wow, and Adam Ant.

Beginning in 1979, the same year that Prince released his self-titled second album, these Brit boys (some who looked like girls, others who were simply dandies) became the cutting edge of music with (mostly) synthesized soundscapes. They would soon become a major influence on Prince, who read about them in the U.K. publications New Music Express, Melody Maker, and The Face (“The World's Best Dressed Magazine”) that he bought at Shinder’s, a shop a few steps away from Musicland Record Store, where he bought the new British imports. “Prince was into everything,” Andre Cymone, his friend, and former bass player recalled. “He was always more of a ‘head’ than I was, meaning if he was into a certain artist, he wanted to hear everything that they did and study it.” 

A few years before, when Prince was twelve, he ran away from his mother’s house and lived with Cymone’s family until signing his solo record deal with Warner Brothers in 1977. Cymone was beside Prince when he was playing in basements and gyms and was privy to the “black secret technology” that transformed their drab Midwestern community into a future shock landscape that was as wild, loose, stylish, and musically daring. “I can remember my older brother giving us a magazine that was talking about Adam Ant and the new Brit invasion,” Cymone said. 

While they were on tour in late-1979/early-1980, Prince received a stinging review that reshaped his entire program. “A lot of Prince’s flip had a lot to do with the journalists and some of the reviews and things they were saying about him and the group and where we were coming from,” Cymone said. “In early 1980 when we were on tour, there was an English writer who had said something like, compared to British artists, Prince was tame. He took that very seriously and told me, ‘Maybe we need to step things up a little bit.’ He was serious too.” 

Shortly afterward Prince appeared on the American television program Midnight Special wearing zebra-print underwear, black leggings, stack-heeled boots, and long hair when he performed, but still, he was determined to push that image further. A few months later, Dirty Mind hit record store shelves and, though commercially it wasn’t a hit, this was the disc where Prince proudly became a pop provocateur in the tradition of Little Richard, David Bowie, and the Blitz Kids. 

In addition, Dirty Mind also brought androgyny to the lyrical level on “When You Were Mine,” he told one woman, “I used to let you wear all my clothes,” while on the title track, a honey tries to pick Prince up by bluntly asking, “Are you gay?” Looking her in the eye, Prince flippantly replied, “No, are you?” It was a question that many would ask themselves and others throughout his career, but as he knew quite well most of us are, “…just a victim of society and all its games.”  

For Prince, Dirty Mind was simply the beginning of a journey that would take him from playing small venues to opening for the Rolling Stone while also breaking down barriers on radio playlists and MTV. He’d go on for the next 36 years as one of the most important bravest and stylish musical artists of his time. Cultural critic Greg Tate once commented that when Black folks got a hold of something new, be it skateboarding or making doughnuts, they flip it up and make it funky, and that is exactly what Prince did with the lessons he learned from Bowie and the New Romantics crews. 

Prince was an avant-garde superstar, and throughout a long career that came to an abrupt end on April 21, 2016, his cutting-edge music and androgynous style influenced several generations of creative folks to be as bold and free as they wanted to be.

Michael A. Gonzales wrote the David Bowie essay “Dispatches from Ground Control: On David Bowie and Science Fiction, 1969-1980” for Fade to Grey. He also writes for Catapult, Longreads, CrimeReads, Wax Poetics, and Soulhead.com. 

INTRODUCTION

CURIOUS BEGINNINGS: GENDER IN FLUX, MUSIC IN THE MIX

By Adrian Loving

Artist | James Van Der Zee

[1] Interview with Donna Van Der Zee

[2] “Ain’t I A Woman” Sojourner Truth

[3] Interview with Curator Tanya Barson on Georgia O’Keefe | Tate Modern

[4] Roxana Robinson | Georgia O’Keefe: A Life

[5] Dazzler As Grace Jones | John Romita, Jr. (Marvel Comics)

[6] Marvel’s Tom Defalco on X-Men’s Dazzler

[7] Tom Molloy on X-Men’s Dark Phoenix 

Video clips | What’s Opera Doc (Bugs Bunny)

17 DAYS

By Miles Marshall Lewis

Artist | Alena Galayko

Rolling Stone Magazine Prince’s Hot Rock: The Secret Life Of America’s Sexiest One-Man Band

[1] Questlove on Prince

[2] Oprah Winfrey Show