7
Rare Bird
Prince, Gender, and Music Production
Kirsty Fairclough
Long before his passing in 2016, Prince’s artistic boldness and refusal to
be typecast within generic, cultural, or political boundaries had helped
establish his legendary status. Although his frequent changes of direction
unsettled critics and some audiences, he maintained a high degree of com-
mercial success within and beyond his first decade as a recording artist. In
the immediate aftermath of Prince’s death, the recognition of his work and
the extent of his posthumous presence were clearly both critical and com-
mercial. This ability to confound critics and make music for himself rather
than pandering to momentary musical fads made him at once impossible
to understand as well as deeply intriguing.
Prince was lauded critically and commercially for his live shows. Any-
one who saw a Prince live show was in no doubt that they were in the
presence of musical greatness. He was a performer who channeled talent
and performance prowess as well as racial and gender subversion in often
kinetic ways in the spaces he occupied. Prince often combined an overt
expression of sexuality in his performances, an often perceived flamboy-
ance in his costuming, and moreover, he challenged notions of hegemonic
masculinity, especially Black masculinity perpetuated within American
society and by his male contemporaries. Prince’s styling has left a subver-
sive mark upon popular culture, one that expands expressions of gender
and eroticism for both musical performers and the consumers of his image
and music.
As Nancy Holland has argued in her paper, “Prince: Postmodern Icon”:
His music provides the basis for deconstructing the obvious hierar-
chies of race, gender, and sexuality, but also those of the sacred and
the profane, the writer/composer/producer and the performer, and
even Self and the Other. He touched the hearts and lives of a far wider
audience than any theorist and helped create a new cultural climate
without any apparent awareness of academic postmodernism. This
opens the possibility for a deconstruction on the meta-level of another
traditional hierarchy, the one between reason and intuition, or put dif-
ferently, between words and music.
(Holland, 2017)
120
121 Rare Bird
Unusually, given the overtly regressive aspects of the music industry at
the time Prince emerged and in subsequent years, he achieved huge global
commercial and critical success throughout his lifetime, despite his rejec-
tion of conventional notions of masculinity present in the music industry
throughout his career. One of the primary reasons for this was his unique
use of stage presentation, including costuming and other aesthetic mark-
ers, such as his dance style, which subverted traditional understandings of
masculinity. Prince emerged as what appeared to be a fully fledged artist in
the 1970s and rapidly achieved global recognition through the late 1980s
until his death.
Prince is one of the few American artists whose career as an established,
respected act spans the conservatism of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s
through to the unexpected ascent and progressive perspectives of Barack
Obama in the 2000s. Prince lived long enough to witness the materializa-
tion of presidential political polar opposites, representing ideals which he
either spoke against or supported. One can only theorize as to the likely
nature of his social commentary if he had also witnessed the dawn of the
anachronistic and prejudice-tainted Trump administration.
One of the most consistent elements of Prince’s entire career was that
he championed female creatives. Throughout the decades he supported a
series of acts including Vanity6, the girl group formed in the early 1980s;
Jill Jones, the soul-based former backing singer, whose 1987 album was
written and produced by Prince; and Wendy & Lisa, Wendy Melvoin and
Lisa Coleman, who played with Prince as part of the Revolution during
his particularly prolific period in the first half of the 1980s. Up until his
death in 2016, his last significant collaborators were 3RDEYEGIRL, the
three-piece all-female band who worked on the PLECTRUMELECTRUM
album and a number of his live shows. He also gave hit songs to Sinead
O’Connor (Nothing Compares 2 U), Martika (Love Thy Will Be Done),
and Sheena Easton (Sugar Walls). He also supported female session musi-
cians, most notably Sheila E, who played percussion with Prince from
1984 to 1989 and again from 2010 to 2011.
Not only did he consistently support female musicians and artists, but he
also embraced a female perspective in the studio. Sound engineer Susan
Rogers began working with Prince in 1983, a time when female engineers
were an anomaly in a male-dominated arena. Rogers’ studio work with
Prince spanned some of his most successful and commercial output during
the 1980s, and she was afforded both responsibility and power in the stu-
dio at this time, which the few female engineers in a contemporary context
were rarely given.
Issues of gender representation within the production workplace did not
feature in Prince’s musical landscape. His approach to supporting female
engineers in a traditionally masculinized space was a rare viewpoint
in a largely male-dominated and driven industry. Rogers held a unique
position in Prince’s musical legacy, and his apparent subversion of the
long-held concept of the studio as the domain of the alpha male was one
that has permeated much popular discourse on his legacy. Prince’s fluid
performances of gender as a performer seeped into the studio, creating
122 Kirsty Fairclough
an environment that fostered inclusivity and equality in a traditionally
masculine arena.
Susan Rogers has become known in Prince fan and critic circles for her
years working as Prince’s staff engineer in Minneapolis from 1983–1987,
a period in which she not only encountered Prince’s own unique approach
to his work but also created his now-infamous music vault. Rogers is a
particularly important figure, not only for her work with Prince, but as
one of a handful of female sound engineers working in a male-dominated
arena. She began her career as an audio technician working at Audio
Industries Corporation in Los Angeles, where she trained as a maintenance
technician, and studied recording technology outside of her working life.
In 1980, Rogers went to work at Graham Nash’s Rudy Records again as a
technician, and this led to occasional assistant engineer positions. In 1983
she began work with Prince as his staff engineer until 1988 when Paisley
Park opened, and she left to work with other musicians including the Jack-
son family and David Byrne.
In addition to capturing countless recordings of Prince’s material,
including his own recording of Nothing Compares 2 U, which he recorded
alone with only Rogers at the desk, she was also present for his wildly
prolific period of recording artist projects including The Time, Apollo-
nia 6, the Family, Sheila E, Mazarati, and Madhouse. Rogers was aware
that she was an anomaly in a male-dominated industry, and her move to
work with Prince made her one of the rare examples of global success in
the field.
In gendered spaces and presentational contexts, Prince achieved huge
global commercial and critical success throughout his lifetime, despite his
rejection of conventional notions of masculinity on a number of levels that
were present in the music industry throughout his career.
Hegemonic notions of masculinity in the 1970s, the decade in which
Prince began his musical career with his debut album in 1978, were largely
conservative and centered on characteristics such as domination and often
an oppression of women as exemplified in popular culture. Prince spent
much of his career undermining these understandings of masculinity by
his approach to supporting female artists and creatives and via his mode of
expression. In the now iconic 1980 live performance on American Band-
stand where he sang I Wanna Be Your Lover and Why You Wanna Treat Me
So Bad, with blown-out hair and a skintight costume, Prince performed in
a sexually suggestive manner and made no apologies for it. Later in the
performance, he gyrated against one of his male bandmates, turning his
back to the audience and flipping his hair as he plucked the strings on the
shaft of his guitar. His was not a version of masculinity that subscribed to
dominant norms in any aspect of his career.
Prince’s career officially began in 1978 with the release of For You. The
album showcases Prince’s abilities to play a host of instruments, including
guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and more, and to produce, compose, and
arrange an album independently. Despite the modest commercial success
of For You, the producer, Warner Bros, was interested in the long-term
123 Rare Bird
development of their artists, thus Prince continued to hone his musical
style and image that had developed from his years prior to his signing with
the mainstream label. Prince as we recognize him today fully appeared on
the scene in 1979 with the release of his second album, Prince. This album
marked the beginning of his legacy in global popular culture. His eclecti-
cism in musical taste is a way to understand Prince’s desire to be an artist
undefined by musical genre and also by sociological categorizations such
as race and gender. Prince’s sense of non-conformity was clearly evident.
As Sarah Niblock and Stan Hawkins state, this position has ultimately
“enabled him to avoid categorisation”, and fostered his interest in gender
deconstructive performances.
Coupling his disavowal of societal norms in songs with the stage
antics he delivered during the live promotion of his second album,
Prince showcased not only his vast capabilities as a musician, but also
his ability to captivate an audience with his expressive performance
style that displayed both conventional femininity and masculinity.
(Hawkins and Niblock, 2011)
The explicit eroticism of Prince’s performance and costuming also
played into his defiance of convention and categorization. Specifically, he
used choreography to aid his rebellious aesthetic. Prince’s choreography
was thrilling: he traversed a stage both with grace and style and combined
it with unambiguous sexuality. He essentially created his own artistic pre-
sentation and began to reimagine the possibilities of gender and perfor-
mance in music and popular culture more broadly.
Prince renounced familiar notions of gender by undermining the con-
cept of hegemonic masculinity. The term is understood as the perpetua-
tion of practices that allow the dominance of men to continue without any
boundaries and has been used to identify the behaviors and practices of
men that subjugate femininity and subordinate other forms of masculini-
ties. Prince did not subscribe to these ideals and instead invited women
into all spaces in his musical universe in order to support them, but also
because he recognized that men would routinely challenge him for domi-
nance, whereas he believed women would not.
Rogers explains,
He liked working with women. One of the reasons he liked it was we
would not challenge him for that alpha dominant position. The man just
didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with that; with anyone competing
with him. Women were less inclined to compete for dominance in a
professional situation.
(Stamp)
Prince worked at a pace that most individuals could not replicate. Rogers
could, and she possessed the musical knowledge that Prince recognized as
similar to his own.
124 Kirsty Fairclough
I had the skillset he needed and then some. I had the stamina to stay up
all night. And then two other things: I’d been a Prince fan since the very
beginning and had all his music. And I knew his frame of reference –
I listened to the same music he did. So he could reference any R&B or
soul band, and I knew those references.
(Stamp)
Prince was known to work extremely quickly and worked fastest in the
studio. Often Rogers would record him with an entire band, but those
times were generally in rehearsal. She was able to maintain the prolific
pace that he demanded. If he had written a new song and they were also
in tour rehearsal, Prince and Rogers would work out all parts of the full
arrangement in the rehearsal. They would record the basic track, with each
band member contributing his or her original part, and then take the tape
and complete the track in the home studio in Minneapolis. Throughout all
of the interviews that Rogers has given, it is evident that she was afforded
a voice in the studio, and this was not only rare, but indicative of Prince’s
approach to working. He respected those with the required skills and
knowledge regardless of gender.
Since his passing, Prince has been eulogized as a stellar performer, a
musical innovator, but less so as a champion of women artists and cre-
atives. These three factors intersect on a point of gender subversion. Prince
defined his persona as something that many could not comprehend, a posi-
tion which he strived for throughout his career. He challenged and suc-
ceeded in breaking through the constructed boundaries of race, gender,
and the many ways in which they intersect. He provided his audience with
in-between spaces and worked toward dissolving accepted and oppressive
notions of identity. His support of Rogers and other women who worked
with him have provided a view of a musical icon who not only had a deep
and nuanced knowledge of musical language, but also was fully cognizant
of the push and pull of the complexities of the industry; his refusal to buy
into dominant tropes and industry practices made him a true innovator.
REFERENCES
Hawkins, Stan. & Niblock, Sarah. (2011). Prince: The making of a pop music
phenomenon. Farnham: Ashgate.
Holland, Nancy. (2017). Prince: Postmodern Icon. Journal of African American
Studies. 21. 1–17. Doi: 10.1007/s12111-017-9363-7.
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