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January 30, 1982. Prince begins his concert at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, with two minutes of a cappella gospel. In total darkness.
The crowd cheers and applauds as Prince’s voice soars over layers of impeccable harmonies. The song rises and falls, and the sonic climax consumes the space before coming back down to a beautiful, quiet resolution.
This is Prince. In 1982. He is touring under For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, and Controversy. But he opens with “The Second Coming,” a gospel song the world would never hear on record. It’s a song about holding on, and having love for each other. And gun control.
Because even when Prince is presenting his most spiritual, centered self, he has a message for us. (Granted, he was working on a film project called The Second Coming, so inserting the song into various performances on this tour was part of that.)
On October 23, 2015, I was having a Prince moment. Even though my presence is a tiny blip on the radar of the Twittersphere, I needed to share that moment.
Yes, the rest of the concert is AMAZING. But it was the first two minutes that captivated me. I must have listened 50 times that day. Each time I heard something new, something that made me think about and appreciate this moment that Prince so artfully created.
People bought tickets to this show to see Prince be PRINCE and destroy his guitar and sing his face off about sex and…Here they were, getting a beautiful, somber gospel song to start the show. Not a single person could be heard protesting, even while they were in total darkness.
Audience members interacted with the song as if they were in church. (Weren’t they in church?)
It’s like Prince was saying, “You’ll get your face melting show in a minute or two, but first, let me give you something. And in case you forgot, I am a spiritual, black man in America and my music represents me and what I stand for.”
In this moment—and throughout his body of work, of course—he is simultaneously continuing in and rerouting the trajectory of African American music-making.
So on April 21, 2016 I came back to those two minutes. Again and again, I listened to The Second Coming with a completely new lens through which to experience that moment. And that’s what I’ve been focusing on since — the moments.
The moments when Prince gave us something we didn’t know we needed until it became something we could not imagine living without.
Whether a recorded song, live performance, or statement about the importance of albums and Black lives, Prince’s moments with us were always meaningful; always rooted in sonic and cultural complexities of the past.
Prince’s present became our future. The moments he created will never exist only in the past.
