Prince: A Thief in the Temple
by Brian Morton
Book Summary Information
Author: Brian MortonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-10
ISBN: 1841959162
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Book Reviews of Prince: A Thief in the Temple
Book Review: A take so anemic as to be insulting to Prince or his fans
Summary: 1 Stars
Prince's career has had so many ups, downs, left turns and triumphs that no one book could contain the story of his career. Authors (be they biographers, musicologists or in this case, suggestive theorists trying to prove a point by balancing both biography and musical output) have largely had to content themselves with capturing the eras through which he passes, or only key developments of his career.
Prince traditionally produces so quickly and through so many avenues that most books about him or his music are dated almost upon publication. There are a few classic books (classic in the sense that they're great and in the sense that they are, yes, dated, but were great for their time) that really give what people who might be interested enough in the artist to read a few hundred pages devoted to his life and work: studio insight, musical inspirations, band drama, hard-to-acquire interview revelations, etc. This book, however, doesn't come close.
In all fairness to Morton, this book does not strive for comprehensiveness. The author is well aware that even a meager internet search would glean just about everything presented in this book; to a stalwart fan even less. Despite being a former academic, Morton's goal here is only to draw enough conclusive evidence to make a point, not to illuminate corners of Prince's world that audiences may not have seen or heard about before. So it is a slim book - a treatise, really, and under 200 pages very large-formatted - and it is extremely light on details...so light as to be offensively cursory.
But what is the point of the book, the premise? Be clear that it is not what its dust jacket suggests:
"[The work] alleging that all along Prince has been aiming for a biracial music...[Morton] dissects the man behind the artist and shows emphatically why [Prince] still matters in the twenty-first century."
I'm not saying he wasn't shooting for this; I'm saying the book doesn't accomplish this.
Looking for the answer in the preface seemed more prudent. Here is as close as we get to a point for this ill-conceived tome;
"The myth of America is all about successive rebirth, and seeming to grow younger rather than older...
Prince has followed [Miles Davis and Bob Dylan] in treating his own astonishing body of songs...as if they were counters on an improvisational game-field, part of an open flow of `work' rather than canonical `works'. he hard thing for any student of Prince, but an endless source of delight and discovery for his admirers, is that the real work does not come through to us as settled `product' but as a tricksterish chase after bootlegs, reworked ideas, willful suppressions and mere rumour. It has kept him, depending on how you look at it, either ahead of everyone else, or in sole charge of his own enigmatic game."
So the author thinks not only that Prince is a big calculator of a huge endgame of mind tricks, but that his book will be the one to show you just how cunning Prince's plan really is. What the author does not allow for is the most likely scenario of all: that Prince had a stunningly great start, peeked out a little, freaked out a little, despaired a little, hit a musical bottom aided in no small part by the fact that he surrounds himself with people 24 hours a day that wouldn't tell him he had a bad idea if their lives depended on it, and only within the last few years released some music people beyond only a slavish fanbase could appreciate. I think that a far more reasonable theory than suggesting that Prince is a puckish genius pulling our collective legs with tripe like "Chaos and Disorder" or "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic".
Morton seeks to prove all of this with a cursory take on his early years, a jaw-droppingly short take on his high-powered 80s success, and a practically non-existent take on the genuine turnaround of Prince's career post 2003. Even if I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, he doesn't give me enough room on the ledge to stand on next to him. And the constant desire by most Prince biographers to draw race into the equation hurts their cases more than it has ever helped.
In the end you could skip this book entirely and you would not have gleaned one thing about Prince you couldn't have gotten off of a fan site or in five minutes with a genuine, bootleg-collecting fan.
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