Got To Make A Move To A Town That's Right For Me

Got to be Something Here: The Rise of the Minneapolis Sound
By Andrea Swensson

"Then here's another thing to consider. His lyrics. It's not Leonard Cohen, but think about... he's talking about an "us." I would die for you. Let's go crazy. Take me with you. It's a generous record. He's happy to be alive. He's happy to be 24. He clearly loves people. He's not a sexual predator. He's not talking about "I will conquer you," with that braggadocio of young men. There's us, and we're having fun. That's pretty great. Especially when you consider that he's one guy from north Minneapolis, all alone. He was so alone that he created his own competition. He created The Time and Vanity 6, and it was still all him. He played all the instruments, wrote all their songs, did the whole thing, and then had them come in and do the vocals."

This quote comes from a Tape Op interview with Prince's longtime engineer, Susan Rogers, talking about the songs on the "Purple Rain" album. I love it. It was probably my favorite paragraph in all the tributes I read about Prince after his untimely death last year.

That said, there's a problem with it. Prince wasn't alone.

When Prince appeared on "American Bandstand" in 1979, Dick Clark said, "This isn't the kind of music that comes out Minneapolis!" That was the common belief at the time, in the rest of the world, and in Minneapolis, too. In 1980, Minneapolis act Lipps, Inc., had a worldwide hit with "Funkytown," which was all about wanting to move to some new city that was funkier than home.

But, as Andrea Swensson points out in "Got to be Something Here," her invaluable history of Twin Cities funk and soul, Prince did not come from out of nowhere. He had a special genius, but that genius was shaped and sharpened by the influence of, and competition with, other musicians in a vibrant musical community. It's just that no one outside of Minnesota cared about any of them until Prince got successful. And worse, powerful people in Minnesota conspired to keep them from greater success.

Got To Be Something Everywhere

No doubt every city and college town in America has some kind of music history that would make for a pretty good book in the hands of the right writer. And in a sense, Swensson's book is provincial, meant for locals and Prince fanatics only. But even without Prince as a hook for readers, Swensson thoughtfully ties the Twin Cities music story into our national conversation about race.

A big theme in "Got to be Something Here" involves African American musicians and their audiences looking for a sense of community in the face of neglect and open hostility from the white authorities. As in many American cities in the postwar years, African American neighborhoods in St. Paul and Minneapolis were destroyed  to make room for highways. Their residents were often then forced by formal and informal discrimination into isolated neighborhoods where they were more or less ignored. When African American artists or mixed bands tried to play in other parts of town, they found they were often shut down by police.

This conflict came to a head with riots in 1966 and 1967. Minneapolis was hardly the only American city where African American neighborhoods rioted in those summers, but it may have done a better job than most in responding to them. One response was to provide resources for schools and community centers that included musical instruments and places for young people to learn how to play them.

In an epilogue, Swensson recounts meeting with Prince at Paisley Park after he had read one of her columns about the roots of the Minneapolis Sound on the blog for radio station the Current. Though Prince always paid respect to his influences, was generous with his friends and was a big booster of his hometown, he was also famously reluctant to talk about the past. Still, in an interview shortly before his death, Swensson eventually gets him to open up a little about how his early exposure to music in community centers and schools inspired him to develop as an artist. He talks about how hip-hop was developed by kids who only had access to turntables, but he had access to guitars, keyboards and drums.

Every once in a long while, the universe gives us a musical genius, and sadly, the universe takes them away from us as well. But as Swensson points out here, when we repeat the myth that Prince came from out of nowhere, we dismiss all the people who taught him his craft, and we fail to see the ways he could have come from only one place. Is there a budding young genius near you? Are you giving that genius the support he or she needs?