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Prince's Musical Legacy Essay

Decent Essays

Prince’s Musical Legacy

Simon Reynold’s article, “How Prince’s Androgynous Genius Changed the Way We Think About Music and Gender”, portrays Prince’s actions and style as homosexual. I think Reynold misinterpreted Prince in his article. Prince’s actions changed the way we think about music because of his openness to be himself and his musical talent. His ability to take an open stage and captivate the audience through his one of a kind stage performance is what makes him categorized among the best. Prince’s stage presence characterized him as a daring, confident, and rebellious performer. Prince wasn’t focused on other’s opinions on himself. On stage he would wear things like lip gloss and tight pink/purple pants. Prince walked on stage with clothing like a G-string or other inappropriate clothing and it didn’t bother him. He opened up the doorway for other artists to be daring and open to expressing themselves. Reynolds took this in a different direction. Reynolds said, “Even the color Prince fetishized so flamboyantly had gay overtones. Purple represents gay pride” (Reynolds 2). He assumed since Prince wore purple and often exotic outfits that he was hinting to the community about being homosexual. …show more content…

Prince’s high voice was his alter ego he called Camille. In his article, Reynold introduces Camille by saying Prince got the name from “a 19 century French intersex person generally known by the name Alexina Barbin, but who later called them self-Camille” (Reynolds 6). The origin of the name Camille was never proven to be true by Prince, but he did plan to release a whole album sung as “Camille”. Prince’s name would not have been on the record. Unfortunately, that album didn’t pan out and was canceled. A few songs were transferred into other albums. Having an alter ego, Camille, was believed to be another way Prince expressed himself on

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