New book tells Prince's story in the context of the city that formed him: Minneapolis

A new book tells the story of music legend Prince in the context of the city that formed him: Minneapolis.

Written by Rashad Shabazz, an associate professor of Geography and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, the book situates Prince’s earliest musical inspirations in a city where, between 1950 and 1970, the Black population grew by 436%.

As the city’s Black population began filling music clubs and radio airwaves with blues and R&B, many of its white residents began to discover the earliest forms of prog rock, new wave and punk.

Minneapolis was, by and large, a segregated place. But Prince, whose parents were both musicians, was unique in his inclination and ability to move through the various neighborhoods of the city.

As Shabazz told The Show, it’s those twin phenomena — the person and the place — that form the roots of Prince’s signature sound.

Full conversation

RASHAD SHABAZZ: He was living in this fractured musical world in Minneapolis, and he was able to synthesize the various sounds that existed in different geographies around the city, all of which were organized around race lines, and to use that to create an innovative, genre bending sound that continues to have resonance to this day.

SAM DINGMAN: And in highlighting that experience that he had, one of the other things you do in the book that I think is really wonderful is you also highlight these other key figures, not just musicians, but radio hosts, music venues that became havens for, in particular, R&B in the '50s and '60s. And in a lot of cases, these were environments that burned really brightly for a very short period of time.

I wanted to highlight just one of them, if we could. There's a venue that you write about called King Solomon's Mines.

SHABAZZ: It was a nightclub and music venue in downtown Minneapolis, which for decades had a kind of musical apartheid system where white musicians were the only ones who were able to play down there. And this was a Black club that opened up in the latter part of the 1950s and early '60s. And it brought Black sound and Black people downtown.

And it was wildly successful. People loved it. And it also garnered so much controversy because there's Black people in downtown, which they had been kept out of. And so over time, you know, the club folded because of the pressure that the city put on it. And it was not able to sustain the city's discriminatory response to it.

Nevertheless, it helped to anchor a new sound in downtown. It began to demonstrate to the broader public that Black music is thriving and inventive and deeply creative. And all of these kinds of places Prince was privy to, he had access to or he knew about it. And they all really create the musical landscape that he drew upon.

DINGMAN: That part was so interesting to read about because I think, if memory serves, it was only open for about a year and a half or something like that?

SHABAZZ: Yeah, just a couple of years.

DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. And there ends up being this column written that you quote by a journalist named Jim Klobuchar — which, side note, any relation to Amy Klobuchar?

SHABAZZ: Yes.

DINGMAN: OK.

SHABAZZ: Yes, yes, yes. So there was a couple of things that he had mentioned, but one of them was that the club was bringing Black and white people. And it was. And this was sort of a source of contention, that it's an interracial space. But there was also this fear that Black men who were in the club and white women who were in the club were going to begin to interact and date.

He quotes this guy who says the average white man from Bemidji (Minnesota) sees a Black man and a white woman interacting and gets upset. And the anxiety that produced around sex, particularly between Black men and white women, was just, it was palpable. And as a result of that, the Mines was closed.

DINGMAN: One of the reasons I think the focus on the venues is particularly interesting is because, if I'm not mistaken, there's a connection there between the story of the music that was starting to happen in Minneapolis and the arc of, in particular, Prince's father's musical career. He was a frustrated jazz musician, was a composer of these kind of very far out, innovative, Sun Ra type jazz architectures; and was kind of forced, it seems, into playing these more like funk and R&B styles at venues where he didn't really feel like he was being appreciated.

SHABAZZ: Yeah, yeah. In a lot of ways, Prince's birth represented the end of John Nelson, his father's career. Even though jazz was still a deep and profound part of American popular culture and they were still thriving musicians — you know, during the '60s, Miles Davis releases kind of blew. But the new sound of funk and rhythm and blues and indie rock and punk that Prince was a part of, they move Prince's father's generation aside.

And so Prince really begins to ascend as his father, and the music that he represented, begins to fall toward the background. And there's this sort of little Oedipal struggle between the father and the son.

DINGMAN: And it almost seems like John, on some level, was aware that this might happen. You quote him in the book as saying, speaking of his son, "I named him Prince because I wanted him to do everything that I really intended to do."

SHABAZZ: What foresight. What foresight, you know, to be able to say this is why I named him Prince, because I wanted him to do everything. And the reason he named him Prince is that Prince is the name of his father's band, Prince Rogers. The Prince Rogers Trio is the name of the band. And he names Prince that.

And Prince goes on to do so much more than his father could have ever imagined. And so it's with foresight, but it also is the death knell in his musical career. It's an interesting way to think about Prince because generally the way in which people, writers, talk about someone like Prince is to talk about him as an individual divorced from the context in which he came.

And this book is really placing him in Minneapolis.

DINGMAN: And is it fair to say that this book places him in that context and also places him within the broader scope of your scholarship? Because so much of your work is about the ways that places make people, the these things don't happen in a vacuum. Can't happen in a vacuum.

SHABAZZ: We are spatial creatures. And by we, I mean humans. What we eat, how we speak, how we dress — all of those things are deeply shaped by place on vast scales. We can talk about the nation, we can talk about the state, we can talk about the neighborhood, we can talk about the block. All of these things shape us as human beings, and we in turn, shape those places.

How people sound musically, rhythmically, the instrumentations they use, the vocal range, all of those things are really shaped by geography. And Prince's music, I think the reason that we love it and appreciate it so much is because of the various kind of sonic geographies in the city and his ability to draw on them.

And they speak to generations of people, and they are diverse. In this moment, when the word diversity is being trampled upon and people are pushing back against it, they're saying that somehow it's exclusionary.

What made Prince a genius was the diversity of his sound. End of story. Without the funk, without the blues, without rock, without punk, without indie rock, without all of those ingredients, we don't get the four and a half decades of genius music making.