I decided to become a writer not long after I turned thirteen. I came to this decision after noticing that I was consciously taking mental notes on the worst night of my life as it was happening.
It was the night of my first junior high school dance. I had been in seventh grade for a week, and I was flush with sixth-grade arrogance. Misconstruing alpha-dog status in elementary school as meaningful in a junior high context was a foolish mistake. But I did not know this until the dance. I talked a big game heading into the soiree. I bragged to friends about all the girls I was going to dance with. (My slow songs of choice included Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love” and Queensrÿche’s “Silent Lucidity.”) I confidently assumed that at least one of the lovely ladies at my school would totally be into “going with me” after a romantic spin on the dance floor. I pictured myself as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing—a guy with all the moves, a handsome lothario whose hips could sexually enchant any female.
Honestly, I don’t know what in the hell I was thinking. My bravado was shockingly ill-advised. I had bad acne. I had braces. My glasses were so bulky I’m surprised I wasn’t arrested on suspicion of mugging a shortsighted grandmother and stealing them off her face. My hair resembled a wig left over from a Broadway revival of Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
I was not a good-looking young man is what I’m saying.
But even if I had resembled 1978-era Scott Baio, my lack of smooth talk would’ve crippled me. I was painfully shy and awkward around the opposite sex. Putting my hand in a garbage disposal was less frightening to me than chatting up some adolescent minx. Oh, and have I mentioned that I was (and always will be) a terrible dancer? Thank God my wife finds my pitiful attempts at rhythmic movement adorable. Otherwise I’d be sentenced to a life of living like Travolta in Battlefield Earth.
I was basically set up to fail horribly at this dance. And fail horribly is precisely what I did. Here’s what I did not anticipate during my initial attempts to charm women into liking me: flirting is a competitive sport when you’re in the seventh grade. Boys and girls travel in packs, so four or five guys are always trying to hit on the same two or three girls simultaneously. This was not an environment conducive to being witty. My quips kept pulling a hammy. I froze as my friends swept up all the available women. When I finally did summon enough courage to ask a girl to dance, it did not go well, to put it mildly.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation, which was instantly burned into my memory for the eventual enjoyment of the people reading this book:
Me: Would you like to dance?
Her: [Disgusted face]
Me: Oh come on, I’m not that bad.
Her: Are you sure?
Are you sure?!
Let me make a confession: if this anecdote seems a little precious or overly rehearsed, it’s probably because it is. I have told this story many times. I have used it as an adult to endear myself to countless women. And it almost always works. I’m a very sympathetic character in this story. But while everything I’ve told you is true, I feel like a phony.
Did you notice that pointing out how not great I used to be illustrates how great I’ve become? Look at where I was and where I am now! I’m trying to be funny in a self-deprecating way, but I suspect my constant retellings of this story really represent the height of vanity. I can see this more clearly when I hear pathetic geek stories told by other people. There are a lot of these stories, and everybody tells them, even celebrities. God, especially celebrities.
If you do an Internet search for “nerdy celebrity childhood,” a plethora of click bait instantly unfolds before you like a bountiful garden of flowers made out of fast-food wrappers. At random I pulled out a BuzzFeed article with the headline 20 CELEBRITIES THAT WEREN’T COOL IN SCHOOL. This fascinating and culturally vital work of journalism informed me that supernaturally sexy Mad Men star Christina Hendricks “had the worst high school experience ever” because her friends were “all weird theatre people and everyone just hated us.” Also, perfect Aryan goddess Charlize Theron “didn’t have any boyfriends in high school,” l’ange de Charlie Cameron Diaz was “a total goon,” and Batman himself, Christian Bale, “took a beating from several boys for years.”
Why stop at twenty celebrities? Having a nerdy childhood is an essential part of any celebrity’s origin story. If you want to be a superhero, your parents need to be murdered when you are at a young, impressionable age; if you want to be a celebrity, your parents merely need to dress you in unfashionable, ill-fitting clothes during your teen years.
Nobody wants to believe that rich, famous, and fabulously attractive people have always had it all. You must demonstrate that you earned your privileged status by enduring constant humiliation and heartbreak as a kid. Otherwise you barely register as human.
I think we can all agree that Prince is one of the five coolest people on the planet. (The others are LeBron James, Beyoncé, Bill Clinton, and Jennifer Lawrence. If you don’t like this list, I’m sorry, but these are the people that everybody else on earth signed off on.) And yet even Prince isn’t immune to mythologizing his pathetic geek heritage.
“He was the obnoxious, nerdy guy in school,” former Prince associate Alan Leeds tells Touré, author of I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon. “Nobody liked him. He was ostracized. Guys picked on him because his mama left him and his dad wasn’t capable of being a serious father. He was an excellent basketball player but nobody took him seriously because he was too short. He was constantly in the shadow of everybody and everything.”
Leeds’s point isn’t just that Prince was driven to be great by his childhood hardships, it’s also that he was already great in high school: other people just wouldn’t give him the proper respect. And this is what drove him. Prince had to make Purple Rain because the world failed to recognize his superior baller skills.
In the early part of his career, back when he would still grant interviews on a semiregular basis, Prince cultivated the impression that he had a hard, lonely upbringing. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1981, he claimed that he ran away from home at age twelve and that he had lived at thirty-two different addresses in Minneapolis by the time he was in his early twenties. In a cover story for the same magazine in 1985, Prince pointed out a phone booth where as a teenager he had tearfully called his father and asked to move back home, only to have his father refuse. Prince told the Rolling Stone reporter that he never cried again after that day. A less believable (but more famous) story involves Prince’s stepfather, who allegedly locked Prince up in his room for six weeks, during which time he learned to play piano. In his book, Touré concludes that Prince was “a functional orphan.”
What these stories did was help set Prince apart from his chief competition on the pop charts in the ’80s, Michael Jackson. There are some superficial similarities between the two superstars: They were born two months apart in the summer of 1958. They were both ambitious enough to create a bridge between black R & B and white rock-and-roll audiences. They were both criticized by critic Nelson George in his book The Death of Rhythm and Blues for “[running] fast and far from both blackness and conventional images of male sexuality.” Where they diverged was their backgrounds, which seemed to inform their art and their respective approaches to their careers.
“Prince was totally a self-made man and the Jacksons, especially Michael, [were] born, bred, groomed, prepared, honed, shaped and molded to become what [they] became,” Susan Rogers, another Prince associate, told Touré. “Prince did his by a singular force of will coupled with his talent.”
This is a reductive but otherwise illustrative summation of the Michael Jackson–Prince dynamic, which was at its peak in the ’80s. By any other measure, Prince is a pop institution who takes a backseat to nobody in terms of popularity, talent, and ego. Only when compared with Michael Jackson—particularly ’80s Michael Jackson—can Prince be credibly cast as a scrappy upstart. That’s what he was back when Thriller and Purple Rain were dueling on the Billboard album charts and the videos for “Beat It” and “Little Red Corvette” were vying for airtime on MTV. Michael Jackson was the mainstream behemoth; Prince was the hardworking middle-American alternative.
Our collective perception of Michael Jackson was thrown out of whack after he died at the age of fifty in 2009. History was rewritten to indicate that Jackson was always a beloved figure. But even in his ’80s prime, MJ was hated by millions because of his merciless cultural dominance. Anyone who felt alienated from the mainstream could curse Jackson as the mainstream’s most overbearing figurehead. Few pop stars have ever been ubiquitous the way Michael Jackson was in the mid-’80s, and cultural commentators lined up to take him down like film critics at an Adam Sandler screening.
One of MJ’s most virulent critics was Village Voice writer Greg Tate, who, in his review of 1987’s Bad, accused Jackson of achieving “a singular infamy in the annals of tomming.” That’s an incredibly unfair and vicious criticism, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon to argue that Jackson shamelessly pandered his way to the top. In terms of targets, Michael Jackson was so big he was amorphous. Complaining about MJ was like bitching about the media or “those politicians in Washington.”
Prince only briefly achieved the level of fame that triggers that sort of abuse. After the massive success of the Purple Rain film and sound track, Prince was popular enough to be put in the same sentence as Jackson—though in the case of LL Cool J’s 1985 track “Rock the Bells,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment. (“You hated Michael and Prince all the way, ever sense / If their beats were made of meat, then they would have to be mince.”) But on his next two albums, Around the World in a Day and Parade, Prince subsequently seemed determined to confound the public.
I love Around the World in a Day and Parade. My favorite Prince music is puckish and psychedelic and derives from unwatchable screwball comedies. But there’s no question that those albums fucked up the trajectory of Prince’s career. Even if there was nowhere to go but down after the stratospheric high of Purple Rain—not even Michael Jackson could pull off a movie that required so much motorcycle riding and finger licking—Around the World in a Day and Parade represented a nosedive into the side of a mountain commercially. Not even Sign o’ the Times, arguably Prince’s most brilliant album, could fully pull him out of the wreckage.
(Carrying over the metaphor, I suppose Lovesexy is Prince’s “resorting to cannibalism by dining on his naked travel companions” record, while the Batman sound track is his “unexpectedly airlifted out of hell by a coked-out Jack Nicholson” album.)
While Prince produced some of his best-ever singles during this period—“Raspberry Beret,” “Pop Life,” “Kiss”—his albums were perceived as perverse at best and willfully self-destructive at worst. Instead of trying to replicate the blockbuster example of Purple Rain, as Jackson followed Thriller with Bad, Prince responded to superstardom by making the least commercial music of his career up to that point. Right when he had finally grabbed the world’s attention, Prince reverted back to his odd, alienated, nerdy self. Bad, meanwhile, became the first album ever to spin off five consecutive number one singles. The proper order—MJ as unstoppable capitalist, Prince as mercurial artiste—had been restored.
Michael Jackson and Prince always denied being rivals, but there are four instances in which they clashed.
On the Internet you can easily track down video of a James Brown concert from 1983 at the Beverly Theater in Los Angeles. The video is noteworthy because Brown invites Jackson to appear onstage and blow Brown’s crazy-ass mind with his perfectly executed James Brown dance moves. After that, MJ whispers in JB’s ear, and all of a sudden Prince magically materializes onstage and does his James Brown moves and shreds a little on a guitar. The footage is fuzzy, but its awesomeness can’t be denied: it’s like watching three faces on America’s funky Mount Rushmore come to life and duel it out.
What’s interesting about the video is that members of Prince’s entourage were convinced that MJ intended to humiliate Prince, and (in their view) he succeeded. “He played a few licks, did some dancing and knocked over a prop by accident,” Alan Leeds told Vibe. “[Prince’s drummer] Bobby Z called and said, ‘Oh boy…he made an ass of himself tonight.’” But as a mortal watching the video, I don’t think Prince looks like an ass; he looks like a god showing off for two other gods. (Advantage: tie.)
In retrospect, backing out of recording “We Are the World,” a maudlin exercise in instantly dated limousine liberalism, seems like a wise decision. When Prince dies, at least there will be no embarrassing footage of him singing between Kenny Rogers and Kim Carnes. But at the time, not doing “We Are the World” was a major PR disaster. Prince was viewed as a conceited jerk, whereas Michael Jackson was depicted as selfless for spearheading the project. Reports that Prince didn’t show up because he was waylaid by an altercation between a photographer and his bodyguards outside a Mexican restaurant on the Sunset Strip led to the bizarre, only-in-’85 indignity of Billy Crystal impersonating Prince on a Saturday Night Live parody called “I Am the World.” That’s right: Prince was so reviled over “We Are the World” that Billy Crystal in blackface was considered an appropriate corrective. (Advantage: MJ.)
Jackson famously paid Prince a visit while Prince worked on Under the Cherry Moon, his ill-fated cinematic follow-up to Purple Rain. Always a hospitable host, Prince invited Jackson to play Ping-Pong. “I don’t know how to play but I’ll try,” Jackson replied.
Naturally, all the bystanders stopped what they were doing and watched the game, as this surely was the single most electrifying Ping-Pong match ever. As eyewitnesses later recounted, it started with some soft hits back and forth. Then Prince said, “Come on, Michael, get into it.” Then Prince taunted MJ again: “You want me to slam it?”
What happened next represents the most iconic moment in the history of sporting events between ’80s musical icons: Jackson dropped his paddle, and Prince slammed the Ping-Pong ball into MJ’s crotch. After Jackson left, Prince was justifiably feeling himself. “Did you see that?” he declared, according to Ronin Ro’s Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks. “He played like Helen Keller!” (Advantage: Prince.)
MJ envisioned it as a can’t-miss publicity stunt, with both singers’ camps hurling fake insults at each other in the media until the single dropped. Prince supposedly considered going along with it, but he balked at the song itself: he didn’t want to be the one who says “Your butt is mine” to Michael Jackson, and he didn’t want Michael Jackson singing the lyric to him. I’m very upset that this duet didn’t happen, but I can’t argue with Prince’s reasoning. (Advantage: tie.)
Something unexpected happened to Michael Jackson and Prince by the dawn of the twenty-first century: Jackson was so weird that he was only barely a pop star, whereas Prince was relatively less weird, which allowed him to stage a comeback. In the familiar “pathetic geek” celebrity narrative, it was as if Prince had finally matured into “normal” adulthood. On his 2004 Musicology tour, his first tour in six years, Prince satisfied millions of fans by playing his hits relatively straight, save for a misplaced curse word or two. (Prince’s religious beliefs prompted him to tone down the songs.) Meanwhile, on Chappelle’s Show, Dave Chappelle made Prince’s ’80s weirdness appear cuddly and endearing, a full 180 from the way those attributes were perceived two decades earlier, when Prince was in his mocked-by-blackface-Billy-Crystal doldrums.
Now Jackson was the one who suffered in comparison. His story was the flip side of the pathetic geek narrative—the former prom king who grows up to be a weirdo loser. For the average popular kid, this process typically involves getting fat, bald, and working a dead-end job; for an extraordinarily popular person like Jackson, it was manifested by the media depicting him as a Kabuki pederast. Even Prince took shots at MJ in the mid-aughts: “My voice is gettin’ higher / And I ain’t never had my nose done / That’s the other guy,” he sings on “Life o’ the Party” from Musicology.
Again, Jackson’s marginalization in our culture has been obscured by his death, but Jackson’s status was diminished significantly before he passed. “I was a fan my whole life. [But] I’m fucking done,” Chris Rock said in his 2004 stand-up special, Never Scared. I almost typed “joked,” but Rock seemed honestly pissed. “Another kid? That’s like another dead white girl showing up at O.J.’s house,” he says. Then Rock really goes for the jugular: “Remember when everybody used to have those arguments about who’s better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won.”
But why exactly did Prince win?
As a commonly held belief, “Individuals who were unpopular as children will grow up to be successful, while people who were popular as children will grow up to have disappointing lives” is practically intuitive. Like everything else that seems intuitive, this idea has been codified and perpetuated by a bestselling author. For her 2011 book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, Alexandra Robbins followed seven real-life students whom she pigeonholed into convenient archetypes: the Loner, the Popular Bitch, the Nerd, the New Girl, the Gamer, the Weird Girl, and the Band Geek. Robbins’s intention was to “explain the fascinating psychology and science behind popularity and ‘outcasthood.’” At the core of this explanation is “quirk theory,” which posits that characteristics that cause young people to feel rejected in school will later help them in adulthood.
“Many of the successful and appreciated adults I know were not part of the mainstream popular crowd at school,” Robbins writes. “The artsy girl is now a beloved art teacher who has made additional money and a wide circle of friends with her creative freelance ventures. The Goth, whom Midwestern classmates picked on because her intense curiosity diverted her interests from parties and sports to museums, classical music, and books, now prospers in Manhattan, where friends and colleagues can relate. The freak, rejected partly for her willingness to be confrontational, used her place on the margins to become a shrewd people observer.”
Setting aside the ways these supposed “real” people are described—Robbins could be writing about the extras taking up space behind Zack and Screech on Saved by the Bell—I have two issues with quirk theory.
(1) In my experience, very few kids are completely “mainstream” or “on the margins” at school. Yes, there are a small handful of preternaturally good-looking and wealthy students. And there are an equally small handful of outcasts who have been conditioned to live as trench-coat-donning misanthropes. Extremes command an inordinate amount of attention in discussions about teen culture, just as extremes dominate societal discourse everywhere else. But the vast majority of teenagers are somewhere in the middle. They are neither popular nor unpopular. They have at some point been picked on by another student, and they have at some point been the person who picked on somebody else. They might not be known by everybody in the school, but they have at least a couple of friends. (Imagine the “just-right” offspring of cool jock Emilio Estevez and nerdy psychopath Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club.) Status tends to be fluid when you’re growing up: there might be a semester or two when you feel weirdly popular, then it goes away the next semester and you’re suddenly friendless. But in the end it usually evens out.
(2) The net result is that almost everyone remembers being less popular than they really were in school. Because most of us associate this time in our lives with feeling alienated, awkward, and insecure, and there’s a misconception that some kids don’t feel that way, even though I’ve never met a single person for whom that was true. We therefore wrongly assume that these feelings make us special, when in reality they are an inherent part of growing up.
If you’re the sort of person inclined to talk self-deprecatingly about your geeky childhood, I have an experiment for you: dig out your high school yearbook and look up the most attractive people from your class. When I did this, I was shocked to discover that they were gawky, goofy, or flat-out weird-looking. They weren’t the untouchably cool creatures I cast in my pathetic geek stories. They were in fact not much better off in the awkward department than I was.
My adult perspective allowed me to see the truth: the popular kids back then were having their asses kicked by the horrors of puberty, just as I was. I was just too narcissistic at the time to see it. But that’s how school is: you base your self-worth on comparisons made against an extremely small sample size.
One time in high school I was hanging out with my friend Mike and bored out of my mind. I was seventeen, and being bored out of my mind was my job. I decided it would be a good idea to call a local pizza place, order the most expensive pie, and have it delivered to a kid who had bullied me in grade school. Then I decided it would be a great idea to call five or six other pizza places and do the same thing. You can guess what happened next: said pizzas were delivered, the calls were traced to Mike’s house, he got in a lot of trouble the following day, and I got off scot-free. I felt triumphant.
Now, I realize this story makes my childhood sound like an episode of Happy Days. I was lucky to have a pretty wholesome upbringing, all things considered. (I would joke that Mike and I went to the local burger stand to celebrate, but I’m pretty sure we actually did that.) Anyway, looking back on this incident, I feel some shame. At the time, I believed I was striking back against my oppressor. Now it just seems like I acted like a total jerk for no reason against a kid who hadn’t teased me in years. I probably should’ve just gotten over it.
I’m not saying that there aren’t true outsiders in schools who are picked on a disproportionate amount. Nor am I minimizing the hell that it is being a teenager. I have no sentimentality for childhood. I hated being a kid—all I wanted to be was older, and when I was older, I found that I was right all along about adulthood being way better.
It’s just that the older I get, the more I believe that being quirky is sort of common and boring. Everybody has quirks. An intense curiosity about museums, classical music, and books doesn’t make you unique. People have been caring about that shit for literally hundreds of years. What is weird is being really, really popular.
One clique at my high school labeled themselves the Love Posse and wrote “LP” on their arms—purely from a sociological perspective, that’s strange. Even if that sort of thing happens all the time at other schools, I still can’t wrap my head around it. What motivates people to draw letters on their bodies in order to signify their allegiance to a clique with perceived status among minors between the ages of fourteen and eighteen? Did they do it to feel superior to other students? Or were they protecting themselves from those students’ resentment?
It’s one thing to self-identify as a geek—doing so inoculates you against judgment. But if you seem to have it all, people have license to hate you, and if your hormones are already making you hate yourself, being popular must really suck sometimes. In the long run, I’d rather be Prince than Michael Jackson.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the very albums that derailed Prince’s career in the mid-’80s have in many ways proved to be his most influential. The most interesting artists from the past two decades who have attempted a hybrid of classic rock, soul, and hip-hop with psychedelic imagery are biting at least partly from Prince’s “weird” era: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below–era Outkast, The ArchAndroid–era Janelle Monáe, channel ORANGE–era Frank Ocean, Yeezus-era Kanye West, plus the Roots and Common on any number of their albums.
The hits from 1999 and Purple Rain will forever ensure that Prince lives the high life at Paisley Park. But artists don’t emulate Purple Rain: they avoid doing so for the same reason that writers don’t emulate Shakespeare—achieving that level of cultural significance seems inhuman. It would be wrong to describe any incarnation of Prince as his “everyman period,” but holing up and making music that sounds like John Lennon and Sly Stone commiserating over an 808 drum machine seems more attainable than changing the world with another “When Doves Cry.”
Prince’s most profound cultural contribution was creating a blueprint for artists who seek to present aesthetically idiosyncratic music as both art and pop. Prince was a superstar who acted like a cult artist, which afforded him the wealth and status of the former and the license to flout commerciality, as artists in the latter group do. Prince has a huge audience but isn’t beholden to their judgments or expectations. People actually get mad at Prince for not being weird enough.
It was different for Michael Jackson. It’s trite to say that fame killed him. (His habit of taking enough sleep medication to quell a humpback whale is what killed him.) But MJ’s death was awfully convenient for a lot of his fans. It became much easier to say that you liked his music without having to contend with all the baggage of his life once he was no longer a living person. Death also indirectly helped Jackson make better records—his 2014 album, Xscape, is the most enjoyable top-to-bottom MJ release since Dangerous (though I’m a defender of the non-greatest-hits half of HIStory).
Of course, Xscape isn’t really an MJ record—it’s just demos and sketches that other people (most notably Timbaland) completed after his death. But it’s the sort of Michael Jackson record many fans would’ve preferred he had made in his later years. Xscape is a relatively straightforward collection of pleasing love songs with zero traces of the toxic self-pity or turgid balladry inspired by Free Willy 2. It’s also (because of those omissions) likely the kind of album that could only be made over Michael Jackson’s dead body.
So why did Prince win out over Michael Jackson? Well, for one thing, Prince lived, which enabled him to stick around long enough for his weirdness to become acceptable. MJ just got weirder and weirder until he stopped living. Only after dying did he become acceptably normal. If Michael Jackson were still around, I suspect his quirks would have continued to be amplified by his former popularity, which would’ve made him increasingly unpopular. He would still be one of the world’s most recognized men, and one of the strangest—but not the right kind of strange. It was one thing for Prince to sequester himself at Paisley Park after Purple Rain and record songs that mashed up Curtis Mayfield, Sgt. Pepper, and Penthouse magazine. Prince’s weirdness comes with a volume dial—he can turn it up or down as needed. When Prince guest-starred on New Girl in 2014, it seemed perverse for him to show up randomly as Zooey Deschanel’s latest pal, but it proved to be odd only for how banal it was to see Prince be Prince on a network sitcom. Prince seems to understand that “being Prince” is now the most crucial part of his art. Prince can play the role of eccentric artistic genius with the same flair he brings to the guitar or his songwriting—it’s sort of the only thing keeping him culturally significant at this point.
For a while, Jackson existed in the same “charismatic strange guy” zone, but his extreme fame eventually stripped him of the power to control his persona. Over time, the weirdest thing about Jackson was the way every aspect of his life was analyzed, publicized, dissected, and dismissed. Even now, Jackson’s popularity is freakish and sort of terrifying. He will never be banal in any context. Anyway, this is my version of quirk theory, and I’m sticking to it.