What Prince Taught Us About Black Art and White Supremacy

June 7, 2022 would have been Prince Rogers Nelson’s 64th birthday. There are two things about that sentence that feel wrong to me. The first is assigning an age to someone who seemed to exist in a space beyond all human constructs. The second is speaking about Prince in the past tense — as a phenomenon that happened and that is no more. Still, this occasion provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the valuable gifts the Purple One left us beyond his extraordinary music catalogue. Prince taught generations of Black artists and creatives (yours truly included) the importance of owning our work and demanding that the white industry structures in which we operate value our humanity as much as they value our art.

What is there to say about Prince’s prodigious talent that has not already been said a million times over? The man was an incomparable songwriter and composer, able to imbue his songs with the full range of human emotion — adoration, lust, veneration, rage, irony, pain, betrayal and anything else he wanted his audience to experience. He was also a prodigious instrumentalist, once responding to Dick Clark’s inquiry about how many instruments he played with a simple, “Thousands.” He was only slightly exaggerating. His first studio album, “For You,” was released when he was just 19 and featured songs written, composed, and arranged by the young virtuoso. He provided all of the vocals and played all of the instruments on the album as well. Legend has it that he even took the picture of himself that became the cover art. Multi-talented is an insulting understatement when it comes to Mr. Prince Rogers Nelson.

Equally as admirable to me is how protective Prince was of not only his own genius but of Black genius generally. Prince spent his entire career showing Black people how to relentlessly affirm our personhood and protect our genius in a country that pathologically tries to strip us of one while commercially capitalizing on the other. If you know anything about Prince’s background, this is not at all surprising. He grew up painfully aware of the way America exploited Black people and Black artists, in particular. His mother, Mattie Baker, was a jazz singer. His father, John Nelson, was a songwriter and a pianist who named his son after his own stage persona, Prince Nelson. When reflecting on the royal moniker years after his son had become a superstar, John Nelson said, “I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do.” As a Black artist in America in the 1940s and 1950s, John Nelson was painfully aware of just how many of his aspirations were out of his reach. I’m not just talking about topping the day’s music charts or receiving industry accolades. I’m also talking about the simple, mundane things Black artists were denied, like the ability to stay in hotels or dine in restaurants near their performance venues because these establishments did not serve Black people.

Beyond these daily (even hourly) indignities, Black artists also had to contend with an industry that routinely coerced and cheated them out of their music publishing rights and profits. Little Richard and Sly Stone are just two examples of revolutionary Black artists who were cheated out of millions as a result of exploitative publishing deals. And as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, white artists would often re-record the songs created by Black artists and these covers would go on to receive more radio-play, chart higher, and make more money than the originals. For those of you asking for receipts right about now, here are just a few examples: Fats Domino’s 1955 song “Ain’t That a Shame” only reached #10 on the pop chart while Pat Boone’s cover, also released in 1955, hit #1 on the pop chart. Big Mama Thorton’s 1952 song “Hound Dog,” her only commercial success, occupied the #1 slot on the Billboard R&B Chart for seven weeks and sold two million copies. Elvis Presley’s 1956 cover was #1 on the pop, country, and R&B charts simultaneously for 11 weeks and sold over 10 million copies. And despite Little Richard’s song “Tutti Frutti” having now achieved legendary status and peaking at #2 on the R&B chart upon its 1955 release, it only reached #17 on the pop chart. Pat Boone covered the song (seriously, dude?) and scored a #12 hit on the pop chart.

It was with this heritage that a teenaged Prince embarked on a music career. Despite his youth, he was adamant about maintaining control of his creative process and the type of music he made. Following the circulation of his demo tape, record executives from Warner Brothers Records, A&M Records, and Columbia Records came running with offers in hand. Prince, then 15 years old, turned them all down. When questioned by an interviewer about his decision to reject these offers, he matter-of-factly stated, “They wouldn’t let me produce myself.” Prince eventually signed with Warner Brothers in 1977 and his parade of innovative, era-defining masterpieces began. He was prolific, releasing an album virtually every year from 1978 to 1990. But despite his earth-shattering success, it became clear by the early 1990s that all was not well in Paisley Park.

A large part of the discord stemmed from Warner Brothers’ ownership of Prince’s master recordings. A master recording is the original recording of a song and the source from which all later copies (both physical and digital) are made. Owners of master recordings can license third parties to use the recordings in TV, film, advertisements, and as samples by other artists. Consequently, owning master recordings is extremely lucrative. In concrete terms, Prince not owning his masters meant that when “Kiss” was featured in a movie trailer or “Little Red Corvette” was used in a commercial, Warner Brothers benefitted financially and not Prince. For Prince, the inability to control how his music was used was a threat to his artistic integrity. He also believed it was a grave injustice that a corporation rather than the artist who created the art benefited financially from such licensing. “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you,” he famously told Rolling Stone in 1996.

Prince pushed his comparison of the music industry to slavery even further by appearing in public with the word “SLAVE” prominently written on his cheek. In a 1995 statement published on his website, he stated that he found the lack of control he had over his career and his music “reminiscent of much that had been experienced by other African-Americans over [the] last couple of hundred years.” While many chafed at the suggestion that the plight of a rich and world-famous artist resembled that of enslaved Africans, there was an indelible truth in Prince’s words that still reverberates today.

This truth is that if you are Black in America, you are Black first and foremost regardless of what other identities you bear, what heights you have reached, what tax bracket you are in, and what accolades you have garnered. For all of his fame and fortune, Prince was still a Black man. Beyond that, he was a Black man who had the audacity to call out his record label’s predominantly white executives and a predominantly white industry infrastructure for making millions from the labor of Black artists while leaving these artists with a relatively minuscule slice of the profit pie. Prince was also, as has been discussed, a student of history and well-aware that Black artists had historically been targeted and exploited by the music industry in ways that white artists had not. He knew that his fight against the industry carried the weight of history. It carried the weight of all the Black artists, including his parents, that had come before and been robbed by a system that viewed Black art — — Black genius — as profitable but Black people as disposable.

Prince further upped the ante in his war with Warner Brothers by changing his name to an unpronounceable “love” symbol,” in 1993. At the time, industry insiders speculated that the name change was an ill-fated attempt to evade his contractual obligations. However, Prince never spoke of his decision to change his name in business terms. Rather, he spoke of the act in terms of self-ownership and autonomy:

Prince is the name that my Mother gave me at birth. Warner Bros. took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music that I wrote. The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros. […] They had turned me into a slave and I wanted no more of it.

While white America rolled its eyes at what it dismissed as a celebrity temper tantrum and further evidence of Prince’s “eccentricity,” much of Black America saw the name-change for what it actually was: a revolutionary act.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of a name. It is an integral part of one’s identity. It is fundamental to both the way we come to know ourselves and the way the world comes to know us. There is a reason that many Black revolutionaries renounced their birth names and adopted new monikers (e.g. Malcolm Little became Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael became Kwame Ture, and Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali). Changing a name divorces a person from their past, if not literally, at least symbolically. Black revolutionaries changed their names to divorce themselves from identities which had been forged in a system of oppression and, consequently, bore the marks of that oppression. For these revolutionaries, changing their names was a means of liberation. The same can be said of Prince. By changing his name, Prince sought to divorce himself from the commodity that had been created and monetized by Warner Brothers and the broader industry structure. Prince, a name that the man had been given at birth — that bore the weight of a father’s unfulfilled dreams and the history of a people — became a product that was advertised, wrapped in plastic, and stocked on store shelves for purchase.

Prince was certainly not the first artist to be commodified by the music industry. The music industry is a business built on turning artists into products that are as marketable as their art. I also note that this is not a fate suffered only by Black artists. However, woven into the American music industry’s commodification of Black artists is America’s history of commodifying Black people. This commodification is quite literally the foundation upon which America was built. America’s history is one of ceaselessly and systematically stripping Black people of their humanity in ways that are both blatant and covert — specific and general. Done in the past with whips and chains. Done now with an unjust criminal legal system, inhumane housing practices, and inequitable access to healthcare and education. Done in the past with undisguised hatred and vitriol — done now with calls for political moderation and polite smiles.

A commodity is, by definition, devoid of humanity. In its capture and enslavement of millions of Africans, America dehumanized Black people by making them literal merchandise. Through Jim Crow laws, America continued dehumanizing Black people by relegating them to separate and unequal educational, legal, political, and social systems. The inequities built by these systems persist today. The War on Drugs, which began in the 1970s and rages on to this day, continued the dehumanization of Black people by targeting their communities with excessive surveillance and punishing individuals with harsher penalties than those imposed upon their white counterparts for comparable offenses. The “Superpredator” myth of the 1990s continued the dehumanization of Black children by foisting the label of “criminal” upon them before they were even out of middle school. America continues to dehumanize Black people by brutalizing them under the flimsy guise of “law and order.”

As a result, when a Black artist is commodified by the music industry, it is not merely a business decision. It is America doing what it does best — profiting off of Black labor, talent, style, swagger, intellect — -Black genius — while hating, brutalizing, and killing the very people that are the source of this genius. Prince knew this. By changing his name, he was telling the industry and America more generally that his genius was inextricably tied to his humanity. It was tied to him and his Blackness — not a name. In demanding his masters, Prince was demanding something that had been denied to countless others before him — ownership and control of his art. He refused to let America take the art and discard the artist. Prince defiantly demanded respect of his Blackness and his humanity as the price of access to his genius.

In addition to advocating for himself, Prince relentlessly encouraged other Black creatives to do the same. According to the rapper Nas, when he asked Prince to collaborate on a song, Prince’s response was “Do you own your masters?” Nas responded that he did not. “When you own your masters, give me a ring,” Prince replied. Following Prince’s passing, reporter Shaun Robinson recounted how she had asked Prince to participate in a project she was developing. Prince made her ownership of the project a condition of his participation.

Prince’s calls for ownership and control of his art still echo throughout today’s music industry. It has become increasingly common for up-and-coming Black artists to forgo deals with record labels completely, choosing instead to self-produce and distribute their work directly to fans. Chance the Rapper, Immortal Technique, and Noname are just a few examples. But up-and-comers are not the only ones following Prince’s gospel — you can trace the ideological lineage of Jay-Z’s Tidal, a streaming platform that was initially promoted as being “artist-owned,” back to Prince. It is interesting to note that white artists are also heeding Prince’s advice regarding ownership of their work. The most famous of these is Taylor Swift, who was in a very public dispute with music manager Scooter Braun in 2019 regarding his ownership of the masters of her first six albums. She has spoken at length regarding her plans to re-record these albums and retain ownership of the new set of masters — something that Prince talked about doing with his back catalogue in 1999 (the year….not the song). Thus far, Swift has released re-recordings of two of her first six albums: 2008’s Fearless was re-released in April 2021 and 2012’s Red was re-released in November 2021.

I am writing this over two years after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds on a street in Minneapolis, Minnesota — Prince’s hometown. I am writing this a little more than seven weeks after an 18-year-old white supremacist entered a grocery store in Buffalo, New York and murdered ten Black people, ranging from ages 20 to 86, who were doing nothing but going about their day. I am writing this exactly a week after Jayland Walker, a 25-year old unarmed Black man, was shot at least 60 times by eight police officers in Akron, Ohio. I write this as we, Black people in America, contend minute to minute with the reality that we may become victims of racist physical violence — that we are victims of the psychological and spiritual violence begotten by white supremacy. I write this as we, Black artists and creatives in America, regularly see our genius stolen, exploited, and unyoked from our Blackness. What Prince taught us about owning ourselves, owning our art, and refusing to let America decouple these two remains as critical now as it was during his own very public crusade. Prince taught us that the battle over our art — our genius — is a vital one in the war waged against us by white supremacy. And it is ground we cannot cede. So today and every day, I celebrate him not only as a musical virtuoso, an actor, a fashion icon, a boundary breaker, and a creator of culture. I also celebrate him as a teacher and a revolutionary. Happy belated birthday, Mr. Nelson.