Anjali Vats J.D., Ph.D., virtually discussed her new book about late music artist Prince on Wednesday, Feb. 24. Tentatively titled “Creating Wild Purple: Prince, Intellectual Property and Black Capitalism,” Vats outlined Prince’s cult of personality and his methods towards controlling the perception of his celebrity status.
“Prince was a social justice advocate, and I think that didn’t used to be how people thought about Prince.” Vats said. “Now, posthumously, people have started to say Prince really did care about race. People say a lot of nonsense about Prince like he didn’t care that he was black. Prince is somebody that was deeply invested in racial justice.”
Prince was very much aware and invested in the history of the exploitation of black artists, Vats explained. “He is not the only artist to do so, but I think he’s a really important artist in advocating for rights for black musicians.”
In the modern day, Taylor Swift has sparked discussion about musicians fully owning the rights to the master recordings of their music. It may be cool when Swift does it, Vats explained, but Prince was criticized for doing so in the 1990s.
The right of publicity is an intellectual property right that protects people against the misappropriation of their name, likeness, or other marker of personal identity, Vats explained. She used Vanna White, the hostess of Wheel of Fortune, as an example.
“Rights of publicity really developed as a way to protect people’s personas,” Vats said. “They’re not in the three major categories of intellectual property, being copyrights, patents and trademarks, but they are an extension of the rights of privacy. Rights of publicity are used to protect these unique aspects of a celebrity that perhaps intellectual property rights otherwise would not protect.”
Prince was well aware that the law was not on his side in the context of privacy and publicity, so he developed performative ways of protecting his persona and his privacy, Vats explained. “This is where I come up with this idea of ‘conjectural celebrity’ as a kind of persona management.”
He also took advantage of an idea referred to as “sensory anticipation.” Seemingly otherworldly, many stories about him revolve around the artist appearing and disappearing out of thin air.
Rumor-making was also vital to Prince’s image and legend. Vats recalled a story of traveling to Prince’s home city of Minneapolis, becoming taken aback by the amount of personal stories of the artist the city’s members seemed to have.
“There’s a real sense of community around [the rumors] of Prince,” Vats said. “He never moved from Chanhassen. He never really gave up his Minnesota roots, so I think people in that town were really invested in him as an individual and as a person who really cared about his privacy. They were co-conspirators in cultivating a kind of gossip around Prince. You didn’t take pictures of Prince. You told tall tales about Prince, but those tall tales are always respectful.”
Prince was excellent at protecting his identity. He often deconstructed generalized ideas of gender, combining femininity with masculinity. Vats provided a Prince lyric to exemplify this concept, as well as showed a Chappelle Show sketch of Prince competing in basketball while wearing a blouse-type outfit.
“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, I am something that you’ll never understand,” Vats recalled of the Prince lyric. “I think that sums up Prince in a nutshell. He’s doing this, for the time, really queer performance and then he’s great at basketball. The gender politics of Prince are really complicated and no one really knows what his story is. For Prince, it cultivates an extra performative way of being able to negotiate his celebrity.”
IMAGE TAKEN from Pexels.com
