Adore I:
I’ve been coming to your house–I need you to come to mine. Can I tell you about my house? In my house, there are no ‘crazy’ people. Well, maybe just one. We take care of one another. If you come to my house, I need you to take care of it, alright? Would you do that for me? When you come to our house, the next time we see each other, it’s gonna be in Paisley Park.
Prince, Live in Amsterdam, 2014
It’s -10* and hailing outside the Chanhassen Country Inn. That’s Minnesota cold, as a neighboring bartender warned me last night, complimenting my Welcome 2 America tour tee and picking up on my bee line to the wool blankets. This is no climate for showing off subcultural cred. Having learned my lesson the hard way, I’d layered as heavily as I could before pausing in the entryway to tie up the loose ends of my scarves. I cover everything but my eyes and stare out into the pitch white. I’m retracing what compelled me to make my pilgrimage in early January. It’s hard to know where to start.
Conditions are unserviceable for the local cab service, the rest of the day is booked up, and I’m one mile and fifteen minutes out from my “VIP Experience.” The museum is notoriously strict about timing, so suddenly, I could fly home tomorrow without the experience or the possibility of a refund. Without a second thought, I book it out to the icy curbside and skate until I’m snowblind. At the sight of a gleaming white edifice jutting from the slush, I pause to slip and spill my coffee. Before rounding the corner to see the Love Symbol monument out front, I bump into a pair of couples pacing along the fence with my same frozen gaze. This, then, must be the deceptively stark exterior that Amanda Petrusich described as “a big-box store that has recently gone out of business” and Touré related to “a Mercedes dealership without windows.” It’s smaller than I’d imagined.
Prince introduced the world to Paisley Park in 1985 with a single of the same name. From a kaleidoscopic dreamscape of wailing cloud guitars and whimsically vamping synths, he extended an invitation to utopia–a place that imparts the color of love without rules, where colorful people smile coyly for having found peace. Brimming with infectious delight, he described a place “where [we] can go when [we’re] alone,” where we could “discover ourselves,” and in so doing, “discover God.” He told us we could find paradise not only in this life, but in ourselves. Two years later, Prince made this idyll a reality with the genesis of Paisley Park Studios–a $10 million compound complete with two recording studios, a club, a soundstage, and a vast array of earthly pleasures. Through the ‘90s, Paisley Park served as a home base for Prince and his inner circle. Here, the purple one and his revolving entourage could live, rehearse, record, and perform together, facilitating a work-life-continuum and the artist’s notoriously clandestine lifestyle. In 2005–following widely publicized struggles in his personal life and his commitment to the Jehovah’s Witnesses four years earlier–Prince took up full-time residence at the park, seizing total control over his image by sequestering himself from the public eye. On the morning of April 21, 2016, Prince fell unconscious in the Paisley Park elevator, succumbing to a fatal fentanyl overdose after ingesting counterfeit Vicodin to treat debilitating pain in his hands. He left behind legions of mourning fans, an unfinished memoir, and no will.
Amid tersely negotiated estate valuations, stewardship of the property was transferred to Graceland Holdings, who offered to meet the facility’s outstanding taxes and hefty maintenance fees by converting it into a shrine comparable to Elvis’ in Memphis. Sheila E–Prince’s longtime collaborator and former fiance–recalled that it had long been the artist’s intention to convert his compound into a museum, and that he had begun selecting artifacts for display in the months leading up to his passing. With the family’s blessing, Paisley Park was opened for the public on October 28, 2016. Six years later, it continues to welcome hundreds of thousands of fans annually, with over 2,000 guests passing through on its busiest days. Making the trip out to visit Prince’s house is a rite of passage in the fam* community. After nearly a decade of mounting curiosity, I’ve finally arrived.
I introduce myself to the group and we shuffle over to a curbside booth at the rear of the compound; here, we are greeted by the first of three security checkpoints, where we gesture to our soaked winterwear when offered parking passes. A few steps more–still out of sight of the symbol–and we produce confirmation of our tickets. Finally, a pair of guards walk us through Paisley Park’s security measures. Prince’s aversion to cell phones was well documented–so much so that Dan Piepenbring, editor of The Beautiful Ones, reconstructed his experience with the artist from frantically scrawled notes of late-night meetings. As such, we’re instructed to deposit our devices in locking pouches, to be returned by our guide at the end of the tour. When I finally step in from the cold, the first thing I notice is “She’s Always in My Hair” playing faintly from the atrium. I’ve been waiting for this moment for six years, and it hits me like a ton of bricks. I fish my notebook out from my jacket pocket and take a beat to remind myself what I’m looking for. Swaying to the pulse of an all-time favorite and jotting down first impressions, I take note of the inseparability of my discerning, scholarly voice from my inner wide-eyed adolescent fanboy–if they were distinct to begin with.
My “VIP Experience” is the second of a three-tier program offered by Paisley Park. For my $85, I’m guaranteed access to recording studios and select materials from the sacralized “Archive” beyond the scope of the “Paisley Experience” ($48), but without the playback session of unreleased recordings and expanded archival offerings of the “Ultimate Experience” ($160). The possibility of an archival view into Prince’s life was the decisive factor in my choice to finally fly out to Minnesota. Well known as a meticulous collector, Prince carefully documented his rise to superstardom through notebook scrawlings, early photographs, and other odds and ends swept from the cutting room floor into the Paisley Park vault. Today, the museum touts over 7,000 items cataloged, with more than 95% of their holdings still unaccounted for; these artifacts promise a unique view of the artist’s life as he lived it for any fan devoted enough to decode them. In my conversations with tourmates, nearly everyone made it clear that their decision to shell out for the V.I.P package was based on speculation about Prince’s private collection, and the otherwise unattainable knowledge of his authentic interiority that it could impart.
Archive fever has charged the Prince fan community for some time. As in comparable dead-celebrity fandoms, an intimate familiarity with the rarities of P’s back-catalog and the stories that surround them is the quintessential demonstration of subcultural capital. In this economy of niche expertise, the Paisley Park archive has come to symbolize the closely-guarded secrets Prince took with him to the afterworld; every uncatalogued test-pressing and lyric scrap is a stone yet unturned, promising deeper communion with the icon upon its disclosure. Forums on Prince.org dating back to 2002 speculate about the contents of the vault and their relation to Prince’s psychology, synthesizing evidence of the artist’s interiority from decades of meticulously culled interviews and press releases. Discussions of his intentions for the preserved materials and what secrets abide within have only escalated in recent years, erupting with the estate’s continued release of compilation albums and widespread discussions about the ethics of posthumous art. Paisley Park maintains the alluring mystery of its contents through the absolute dearth of descriptions or images of the facility online; indeed, my narrow understanding of what I’m walking into was formed entirely from the accounts of fellow fans who shared and compared their experiences of pilgrimage with others online.
Against the silence that chokes the atrium as we wait for our guide with bated breath, a comparably younger tourmate confesses to the group that he’s come seeking a greater understanding of the life that the Prince lived “off the record.” I follow his gaze to a mural of Prince’s eyes, peering down from the skylights through a sea of wispy clouds parted by the Love Symbol. For a moment, I lose myself in the scintillating glare that sets a tense love-triangle between us, staring deep into his irises for some trace of the man behind them. When I return to my body–blinking stiffly as though I’d looked directly at the sun–I’m sure that I feel the same.
Rain is wet, and sugar is sweet.
Clap your hands and stomp your feet.
Everybody, everybody knows,
When love calls, U got 2 go…
The opening chords of “ No” flutter down from the rafters, recalling the seductive, cherubic emergence of the androgynous icon from the orchids of the Lovesexy sleeve. As the drums strike–Hundalasiliah!–our guide enters to orient us in this bewildering mansion of heaven. We circle around a Love Symbol embedded in the marble floor and she introduces Paisley Park as Prince’s “sanctuary for art, activism, and advocacy.” This is a place where “his spirit lives on,” where we can “feel him, commune with him, and welcome him back into our lives.” Before we embark, we’re encouraged to pick up signs of the artist’s presence and attuned to his possible incarnations. Gesturing to the Paisley Park doves, our guide echoes P’s charge to take care of his house, making it clear that this is as much a responsibility as an opportunity. Prince wants us to open our hearts and find him here, so we can assume his mission and keep his message alive in the world.
The atrium is framed by seven doorways–arteries from the heart of the maze-like facility. Four of these gates are dead-ends. Along the eastern wall, these complimentary rooms commemorate some of Prince’s landmark albums and eras–Dirty Mind, Controversy, Lovesexy, and Diamonds and Pearls–through blown-up wall decals, costumes and instruments encased in glass, looping guitar solos, and the like. Across the hall, a fifth door carries on this labeling convention–with a wink. A room for The Black Album is sealed behind an imposing purple door, toying with the affections of fans familiar with this notorious chapter of Prince’s career. Originally slated for release in 1987 as a follow-up to Sign o’ the Times, Prince pulled the album a week before its unveiling, explaining that a spiritual revelation had shown him that the distinctively murky, gritty album was “evil.” In the “Lovesexy ‘88” tourbook, the artist recounts his reasoning behind the eleventh-hour cancellation, conveying thinly-veiled allusions to his personal crises of the late ‘80s through a pseudo-mythology of alter-egos. Camille–the pitched-up female alter of a similarly aborted 1986 album–had been tricked by his malevolent, pitched-down Spooky Electric persona to corrupt the project, turning his effort “2 silence the critics” that bemoaned his neglect of his Black audience into an instrument for “the dark side of him.” It was a divine vision of the letters “G-O-D” drifting among the strati that moved Prince to intervene in his personal and musical lives, giving rise to the blindingly honest and zealously spiritual Lovesexy. Self-proclaimed “Princeologists” regard this album as a turning point from the artist’s more profane persona towards his concentrated efforts to announce the sacred truth of the world. Standing before the conspicuous door, I feel self-satisfied at having received the message and a burning desire to understand what lies behind it. I pull our guide aside to inquire further and she smirks, informing me that it’s used, on occasion, as storage for surplus janitorial supplies. Our smug eye-contact betrays a shared understanding that the actual contents of the interior are not what’s important about this sign. It’s the locked door itself, the furtive provocation to further investigation, that is ultimately emblematic of what makes Prince’s music so special to me and so many others.
Opening his loving postscript for the artist–one of over twenty issued by The New Yorker alone in the collective outcry following his untimely passing–Vinson Cunningham cuts directly to the heart of the experience of the Prince fan. He recalls, “To think of him was to ask a series of questions; Why purple? Whence the glyph? Did he really love spaghetti and orange juice? [...] Vis-à-vis sex and sexuality and gender: what, if anything, was he trying to say?” Prince clothed himself in enticing mystique, delighting in his evasion of easy categorization and pressing his listeners to grapple with the elisions of his iconicity. The questions that still ring out in digital space echo the challenges issued by the artist, who fashioned himself as an object unknowable through unprecedented genre-defiance, subversively eclectic self-styling, and androgynous gender performance. Prince’s life and music are not simply mired in questions–he is the question incarnate.
Prince’s performance of identity on and off the record dramatized the dynamics of obsessive consumption that constitute the pop icon, shattering the periphery of the stage to slither and grind across the total apparatus of the pop cultural circuit. Courting controversy, he became the site of voracious speculation, relishing in the erotics of voluntary objectification and returning his audience’s gaze by commanding exegesis. He asks us to derive the meaning of his gospel through endless decoding, eliciting individualized theological interpretations in which his symbolically-drenched lyrics become evidence for his public performance–and vice-versa. Our answers to the question of Prince are never complete, but always provisional and personal, supporting the private joys of an imagined relationship with the artist. Once we’ve arrived at them, he stares at us through the screen with his rapturous gaze and asks–
Was it good for U?
Was what U wanted me 2 be?
By declaring himself something that you’ll never understand, Prince charges the insatiable lust for more that transfigures an artist into a pop icon. His cagey play of identity guarantees the existence of a deeper truth, a more complete understanding that we might attain by living by his word. We can become the morally-aligned subjects of his queer utopia only by further self-work through spiritualized consumption. The satisfaction I experience through the fifth door’s homage to The Black Album–like the negotiated insights of the online forum, or the revelation of a secret message backmasked in the outro of “Darling Nikki”–provides little more than kindling for my inextinguishable desire for an answer to Prince. Paisley Park is strewn with these kinds of clues, with the artifice of their placement trading on the obsessive pursuit for answers that lured us here.
The sixth door from the atrium leads through Prince’s office to the eventual route of the tour. Inside, personal effects like a well-loved LP of Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet and an open King James Bible amount to a meticulous clutter, betraying some intention behind the objects piled askew on his desk. We’re asked to incorporate these things into our understanding of the icon–to glean some semblance of his identity through his worldly possessions. If not for the unctuous sheen of every surface and the whiff of vinegar-based cleaning solutions that cuts through still-burning incense, a visitor might assume that the compound is just as he’d left it–still teeming with the auratic power of his touch. Instead, the wide-brimmed hat atop the purple piano in Studio B imparts the sense that Prince is still here, watching us from the rafters and flirting through the steady hands of a team of curators. I’m responding with every ounce of sincerity I can muster. I “ooh” and “aah” when I’m supposed to in a room enshrining the production and legacy of Purple Rain, losing my reservations in the bold curves of his penmanship. I gawk at the boot-prints on the lid of his electric harpsichord and the smudges of his original handwritten treatment of the script. Immersed in these traces of his movement, I’m hesitant to admit that something is conspicuously missing.
In Paisley Park, we see next to nothing of Prince Rogers Nelson. Our guide diverts our attention from the seventh doorway in the atrium, which leads to a mini-kitchen cordoned off by a purple velvet rope. From the side, I catch the corner of a microwave, and struggle to reconcile the thought of Prince zapping some leftovers while kicking back on the sofa. This is the only glimpse we get of the way that he lived here following his move full-time. Confined to the first floor, our “VIP Experience” evades the bedspreads and baths Prince promised us by dwelling on a pool of wax in the plush carpet, supposedly left by a candle unattended during one of his 48-hour studio sessions. In lieu of his walk-in closet, an exhibit of Prince’s shoe collection imitates the place where he composed himself before stepping onstage. My tourmates and I examine the shoes closely, studying the friction burn on their ornate fabrics as evidence of the ferocity of his performance style. Observing the custom-fitted heel braces that allowed him to kick and flail in three-inch pumps, we trade murmurs about how demanding his inimitable performance style was on his heavenly body. I can’t help but pick up on a certain solemnity in this room, as I’m reminded of the toll that his wild dancing took not only on his wardrobe, but on his legs, his hips, and his hands. He gave everything to us, sacrificing his physical body to become the icon we consume so zealously.
In the months following his sudden passing, the headlines Prince made gradually shifted from heart-wrenching tribute to scandalizing taboo. As toxicology results, reports from the inner circle, and an ongoing homicide investigation came to surface, new evidence was made to fit familiar narrative: “Investigation Shows Prince Was Isolated, Addicted, and in Pain”; “How Prince Concealed His Addiction: Aspirin Bottles of Opiates”; “Haunting Video Shows Prince Dead at Home in Paisley Park.” Tabloid-esque articles fed our collective fascination with celebrity death, gawking at the contrast between the artist’s sober lifestyle as a devout Jehovah’s Witness and his struggles with self-medication and casting him as “the lonely millionaire in his ivory tower.” Morbid descriptions of the artist “looking a little frail” before lying “on his back, head on the floor, eyes closed” followed a peculiar script of investigative journalism purporting to “describe [...] malady, not merely profit from [...] maudlin decline” that Lofton relates to a ritual of sacrifice that “centralizes communication with, and thinking about, the legitimate social order.” Remarking on his intensely private lifestyle and recalling a familiar lust for his interiority, friends and fans alike asked, “how did he hide this so well?” In death, Prince was cast into the tragic lineage of other superhuman icons lost to the grips of dependency, from Elvis to James Brown.
Shuffling from the shoe room to the tour’s final stop in the Paisley Park soundstage, we walk down a corridor lined with memorable newspaper clippings and dedicated to the Emancipation era. Headlines like “Prince Talks: The Silence is Broken” cry out an arc of tribulation, descent, and redemption as “WAY BACK HOME” wafts overhead:
There’s so many reasons why / don’t belong here.
But now that am / Without fear am
Gonna conquer them with no fear…
Until find my way back home