Prince on Spirit, Self-Creation, and Freedom in His Memoir, The Beautiful Ones
Prince with Apollonia Kotero in his iconic film, Purple Rain (1984). Photograph via Rolling Stone.
When Prince suddenly passed back to spirit in 2016, he took many of his spiritual beliefs and the inward life of his perpetual creation powers with him. So much about the extraordinarily prolific artist remains shrouded in mystique and intrigue, which he of course cultivated and championed throughout his life.
Yet Prince was midstream in his memoir-writing when he crossed over, and he left many traces in the work. The Beautiful Ones, published in 2019 (NPG Music / Random House), is interlaced with many moving reflections on his visions, dreams, symbols, beliefs, and spiritual philosophies. For Prince, life is an unending journey of self-creation, and freedom is a ceaseless process of movement, struggle, and elevation – not a static state to be achieved.
“If I want this book to be about one overarching thing, it’s freedom. And the freedom to create autonomously. Without anyone telling you what to do or how or why. Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age—we’re programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 118, fn 5.)
After Prince’s transition, the editor who had been working with him, Dan Piepenbring, worked with the artist’s estate to publish Prince’s unfinished writings in the book. Prince’s words appear alongside a powerful assemblage of photographs, handwritten lyrics, scrapbook entries, and other moving artifacts of a life so expansively lived. Prince’s spirit suffuses the pages, in my view.
As a child, Prince would have visions and actively create his life through visualization. He loved when his parents would leave to go out, as what he calls the “Imagined Life” would take over (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 83). He would experience things through “hyper-realities” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 94).
“I used to stare and stare at everything in the house until I was fried. Maybe a lot of kids do it. I’d see faces in everything. Faces talking to faces. I’d stare at the marble until I saw faces in it. I thought, This house is coded for me. I’d lose myself in every object. Good thing there was music. You can compare it to the Bible, where everything seems coded. Place names, especially. There’s something there, something sacred being guarded. Levels of meaning. And once you get down deep, you can’t read them any other way.” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 99, fn 6)
He was epileptic as a child and would endure seizures. After one particularly acute instance, Prince told his mother:
“an angel came and told me that I’m not gonna be sick anymore. I never had another seizure” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 94).
As a young teenager, he started to emerge as the unstoppable musician the world came to know. As he did so, he continued to envision his life and to self-create his lived reality to come evermore into alignment with his visualized reality, which involved detailed lists and near-unwavering faith in the eventual fruition of their contents.
“I couldn’t be the quarterback at school, so I quarterbacked my band ... I was thirteen years old and I could see everything, literally. Everything is self-creation. I am my father. I am the leader of the band” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 118, fn 2).
“Another shot of Prince at work in the studio at Sound 80 in Minneapolis, making demos of the songs from For You, September 1977.” In The Beautiful Ones. Description, p. 266.
“Prince standing before the hills of the Bay Area, October 1977.” In The Beautiful Ones. Description, p. 265.
Prince found that the energy, vitality, or power of his voice was most pronounced in his falsetto. That is why he kept it as he grew.
“[I sing in falsetto] because when my voice changed it went down, and I couldn’t get any power out of it. I couldn’t get any life, so to speak. The energy—I couldn’t get it from that voice. With the higher voice, it was easier to hit the higher notes. There’s something about the word high that I like. There’s something about the word. And it also hurts in my lower voice to sing, when I sing too hard. It doesn’t hurt in my falsetto.” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 148-49; originally published in The Minneapolis Star, 1979)
The strong energy of his self-creation was not always met with broader cultural resonance or acceptance, even when his music was breaking records. For example, in “Let’s Go Crazy,” one of Prince’s best-known songs on his storied Purple Rain album (released in 1984), the soundtrack for his movie by the same name, he was forced to use symbolic code in place of words about evil and the divine, or God. Such words, apparently, were not allowed to travel on respectable radio waves then.
“My original draft of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ was much different from the version that wound up being released. As I wrote it, “Let’s Go Crazy” was about God and the deelevation of sin. But the problem was that religion as a subject is taboo in pop music. People think that the records they release have got to be hip, but what I need to do is to tell the truth” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 222; originally published in Musician, 1997).
Undeterred, Prince code switched, used metaphors, and moved on.
Some of Prince’s songs would come to him in dreams, lending literality to one of his iconic opening lines, the one in “1999”:
“I was dreamin’ when I wrote this / forgive me if it goes astray” (from the 1999 album, released in 1982).
“If you dream something and go back to sleep, you forget it. But if you wake right up and stay up with it, you’ll remember it and maybe get something out of it” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 246; first published in The Minneapolis Star, 1979).
The book ends with a powerful quote in which Prince spoke about his transports or journeys that occurred while he performed.
“When I’m onstage, I’m out of body. That’s what the rehearsals, the practicing, the playing is for. You work to a place where you’re all out of body. And that’s when something happens. You reach a plane of creativity and inspiration. A plane where every song that has ever existed and every song that will exist in the future is right there in front of you. And you just go with it for as long as it takes” (Prince, The Beautiful Ones, 250-51; first published in Essence, 2014).
In the creation of his partial memoir before he transcended, Prince was laying stepping stones for readers and creators, as well as, possibly, for his continuing work in spirit. Or at least, that’s how I read it. In any case, Piepenbring’s ending the book with this passage is a fitting tribute to a spirit whose creative freedom knows no bounds.
“Prince, resplendent in the spotlight during the Purple Rain tour in 1984. (Photo: Nancy Bundt).” In The Beautiful Ones. Description, pp. 275-76.
Cover of The Beautiful Ones, by Prince. Edited by Dan Piepenbring. NPG Music / Random House, 2019.
About the Author
Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and writer who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani Di Franco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as six volumes of poetry. Lauren served on the faculty in anthropology at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
