| This dissertation takes Prince's music as a sign of broader cultural changes that occurred from the late 1970s to 2010. The analysis of each of his official albums within that timeframe provides a new and comprehensive account of the artist's musical language. His use of funk is foregrounded, generating a detailed description of the genre's evolution post-1980. Prince's musical practices are not taken as culturally isolated, but rather are found to be congruent with developing economic and social patterns. Specifically, his earlier music is shown to uphold a wide range of socio-musical conventions, despite its veneer of "revolution" or historical discontinuity. Its aesthetic characteristics align closely with prevailing descriptions of modernism. Following this musical period, a new aesthetic emerges (within and beyond Prince's work) that inverts modernist characteristics, holding both liberating and ominous implications. Chaotic and incoherent iterations of music and of the self support a reading of this period as postmodernist. Recent years present an abandonment of postmodernist practices, as it seems that Prince and others attempt to recoup some of the "losses" incurred through the postmodern without reaffirming the modern. This emerging aesthetic, with commensurate social patterns, is tentatively theorized as a union or resolution of a post/modernist dialectic. Broad implications of these nascent socio-musical practices, including bearings upon musicological research methods, are considered. |
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