The Unique Pop Perfection of Prince's "Kiss"

Prince is, in spite of famously being a perfectionist, not actually a musical artist whose appeal generally centers around his perfection. Most of his best songs--pretty much anything off of Purple Rain is a good example of this--center around Prince warping a relatively basic song around his own personal eccentricities and tastes. 

Take, for instance, "Let's Go Crazy"--it's a great song, but it's not perfect. No pop-rock song needs to have a spoken-word intro meditating on the meaning of life and the afterlife, and no song tailored towards Top 40 radio is supposed to conclude with a blistering, unapologetically pretentious guitar solo of sheer "I'm the best damn guitar player on the planet and if you disagree because I'm a 5'2" scrawny black guy wearing purple stilettos I'm going to prove you so damn wrong right now" audacity. Don't get me wrong--"Let's Go Crazy" is awesome, but it's not perfect. Arguably, it's its lack of perfection that makes me love it. Similarly, look at "When Doves Cry", a song which, if your only exposure to it is through the radio, you may not be aware is nearly six minutes long. It has really cool pop hooks, even if it's done in a minimalist way, but the second half of it gets weird. The album version of "When Doves Cry" is a fine song from the beginning but it takes so many twists and turns that it won't be until a dozen times or so that it really hits you just how dense it is.

"Kiss", however, may be the single most perfect pop song in the rock and roll era.

In 1987, Michael Jackson released Bad, in which Michael Jackson does, for all intents and purposes, an impersonation of Prince. As somebody who prefers Prince to MJ, I'm perfectly okay with this--as immense of a talent as Michael Jackson was, I tend to prefer the rougher edges of Prince, so to see Michael Jackson move a bit more in that direction is fine by me. But in 1986, Prince made a bit of a move towards Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, after years of being the dictator of his own, weird little musical municipality known as the Minneapolis Sound. That move was "Kiss".

"Kiss" opens with nine chiming guitar notes before any other instrumentation or vocals are to be heard. It sets the stage for the frequently overlooked guitar work on the song--it doesn't have a long guitar solo like "Purple Rain" or "Little Red Corvette" but it holds the entire song together. And it draws inspiration from some of the seminal guitar stylists of the era--Johnny Marr, Peter Buck, Bernard Sumner--men on the fringe of the musical mainstream whose chiming, eccentric guitar playing allowed them to be more influential than popular. Of course, Prince was already a megastar by 1986, so he was allowed to do this sort of thing while being massively popular.

Once the intro is over and the vocals kick in, two things are immediately noticeable--Prince's karaoke staple falsetto vocals, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the understated and sparse guitar riff buried low in the mix. The vocals, as an extension of Prince's voice in general, are often mimicked. It's so common to hear a 21st century singer go for the highest notes that it's easy to forget that this wasn't always a pop staple. Prince didn't invent this extreme nature of high-pitching singing--he certainly drew from Stevie Wonder, who drew from Little Richard, and so it goes to the beginning of music as an institution. But the next time you hear "Blurred Lines", listen to the first verse, and come back and try to convince me that Marvin Gaye was the vocal legend that Robin Thicke was mimicking. And as far as the guitar: it manages to somehow, inexplicably be both dense and minimal. The riff is so simple and there's so little else going on in the song and yet it still manages to find the background. It's less a part of pop music and more a staple of most experimental forms of rock--I'll take this moment to interject how Trent Reznor has cited Prince as one of his main inspirations when he was recording the first Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine. 

Bet you didn't think I was going to simultaneously call a Prince song his attempt to write a true pop song as well as Prince inspiring one of the weirdest, darkest alternative rock icons of the 1990s, did you?

The chorus, sung in three unique styles by Prince--first, in a relatively straightforward manner; second, venturing into falsetto; and the third, with Prince going full-fledged James Brown and screaming his ass off. Lyrically, the song isn't poetry, but that doesn't mean the song is imperfect; the song isn't meant to be a poem. Critics tend to fall into the trap of construing complex, meaningful words as an asset when often times, they're a distraction. To use another Nine Inch Nails analogy, take the song "Hurt" (or the Johnny Cash version--both excel for the exact same reason). The musical is small and understated because the lyrics are dark and brooding and if "Hurt" had a three minute guitar solo, it wouldn't make any sense. At the same time, "Closer" lacks introspection but instead is built upon stark drum machine and keyboard sounds. Without the music to compliment its often vulgar and uncomfortable lyrics, "Closer" would have been inclined to scare off listeners. With the music, it works. And likewise, "Kiss" isn't a sonnet but it isn't supposed to be. And its music matches its lyrics. Even a clever quip like "Act your age, not your shoe size" isn't overbearing: It settles in so nicely with the music that you can probably hear the song and most of the time, not consider how dated its reference to the TV series Dynasty is.

"Kiss" is pop perfection because it is everything. Every style, every sentiment, everything that can be great about pop music is incorporated. It's a song that would've been worthy of any of the great rock and roll showmen in history but was best placed in the worthy hands of one Prince Rogers Nelson.

A Birthday Present: Age Differences in Twentysomething Dating

Note: Because today, May 20, is his birthday, I promised my friend Nick (@grobot05 on Twitter) that I would write a blog post about the topic of his choosing. This is the topic of his choosing.

My name is John and I am 26 years old. The inspiration for this post, Nick, is 25 years old. We both live in a society in which an enormous amount of attention is given to the age of women. It's weird, because nobody cares how old I am. Most people don't, at least. As far as most people are concerned, I might as well be 21 or I might as well be 38. That is, of course, unless my age has to be given consideration in relation to a woman.

Being in our mid-twenties, people such as myself and Nick are put in a unique scenario when it comes to dating. We're old enough that it is no longer considered scandalous to date somebody who is slightly younger (when I was a junior in high school, I had a friend of mine who dated a freshman, and you'd have thought this was worse than Watergate) but we're also young enough that it's considered somewhat strange, if not outright taboo, to date somebody more than a year older than we are. But the question I ask, to ironically borrow a phrase from one of the world's most famous asexuals, "What difference does it make?"

Now, don't get me wrong--there should be age boundaries on dating. Here is the boundary: I, as an adult man, should not date somebody who is under the age of consent. It is illegal and it is illegal for good reason. But that's it.

Aside from somebody who is underage, context is critical is determining whether or not a relationship with a great age disparity is legitimate. For instance, although I am 26, in many ways I feel that I am younger: I have far more friends who are younger than I am than who are older than I am; it took me a couple years and a few jobs after college to feel like I was truly past the 22 year-old phase of my life, even though I was in reality probably 24; I *feel* much closer to 24 or 25 than 26. This is a subtle difference, and it's neither an inherently good nor bad thing, but it does change the equation a little bit. In theory, a 24 or 25 year old would be the ideal age for me to date, but this works under the faulty assumption that all people other than me are created equal. Some 21 or 22 year olds are culturally closer to 24 or 25. Some 28 or 29 year olds are culturally closer to 24 or 25. Particularly for those in their twenties, there is a wide range of people with a wide range of lifestyles and attitudes.

But a stigma exists, and its basis is actually surprisingly sexist. Towards both genders, really, but more disturbingly towards women. The notion is that if I were to date, say, a 19 year old girl (I don't think I even know any 19 year old girls, but I assume they still exist), it's solely because of physical attraction and not for any sort of intellectual stimulation. It feeds into a "men are pigs" narrative I don't particularly like, but I guess I can live with it. Men can be pretty terrible, after all. But what does this imply for 19 year old women? It seems to imply a few things: One, that 19 year old women lack agency and are incapable of making educated decisions about whom to date; two, that 19 year old women are incapable of being particularly smart; three, that 19 year old women have some kind of obligation to only date 19 year old men. This final implication disturbs me the most. The world is full of stupid adolescent men who believe that women owe them--that because they're "nice guys", they deserve women as some kind of prize. Screw that. As a former 19 year old male, I can assure you that 19 year old males are, generally speaking, shitheads. Some are okay, and if 19 year old women decide to date 19 year old men, that's their choice. But the idea that they are beholden to dating 19 year old men, or 26 year old men, or men in general, or ANYBODY, is despicable.

In general, I think the "half your age plus seven" rule is a good baseline. This means that I can date anybody who is twenty or older. But while this is a good baseline, it's not a good rule. There's a lot of twenty-something year old women who are emotionally and intellectually vapid and there are also a lot of women who are under twenty who are smart, funny, and good people.

Bonus Blog: Nick has asked me to objectively rate the attractiveness of several famous people. I will then follow this with a comment on the exercise as a whole.

Ariana Grande: She has a very nice smile. I find her hair oddly distracting and 5'0" is probably a little bit too short for me (I don't really care about height in evaluating female attractiveness, but the idea of being a full foot taller than a woman is a bit much for me; if you're shorter than Prince, you're pushing it). She has a nice singing voice, too, even though her music isn't really my cup of tea. Overall, if I knew a girl who looked like Ariana Grande, I'd probably think she was a nice looking girl--maybe not jaw-dropping, but attractive.

Sarah Hyland: She's not bad looking, but I don't really see her as some kind of jaw-dropping celebrity. You could go to a department store on a Saturday afternoon and see a dozen women who are more attractive than Sarah Hyland.

Selena Gomez: Like Ariana Grande, she looks very young, though I think I find Gomez more attractive. She has pretty eyes and seems to be more attractive as time goes on.

Shailene Woodley: She was really good in The Descendents and she looks really good with short hair. And I, for one, prefer female celebrities who have something somewhat different to their look. I tend to find a lot of women attractive but don't find a lot of women that attractive, so something about a uniqueness like Shailene Woodley's short hair is a nice feature.

One of the stupidest things that we as people (and I'm absolutely every bit as guilty as ANYBODY on this) do is mock people (particularly men) for being attracted to young-looking girls. It doesn't make sense at all. For instance, Ariana Grande looks really young. Like, she looks like she's in high school. And people (me) make fun of guys who think she's hot. But the key thing is she ISN'T a high schooler--she's 21, almost 22, years old. She's an adult and it's perfectly healthy and normal to be attracted to somebody who is an adult. And the reason that an age of consent exists isn't so that people don't engage in sexual relations with people who look young--it's so that people don't engage in sexual relations with people who are young. Like, emotionally. Like, intellectually. It's illegal for a damn good reason for an adult to be with a 15 year old even if he or she looks 30--that person is deemed unable to make good enough decisions about that sort of thing. If the person looks 15 but is 30, it means they are deemed able to make good decisions. People are weird, man.