Laura Hillenbrand on Prince’s “Kiss”

I have only found this on Laura Hillenbrand’s Facebook page, so I just cut and paste the text because I think it’s important and beautiful. Laura Hillenbrand, of course, is the author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. I had never thought about “Kiss,” really, at least not as specifically as she has, and now I feel silly for having missed the memo. I was a kid in the 80s, and now it seems to me extraordinary that the message in “Kiss” was being blasted out to young women by the biggest male rock star of our age. But I did sense, even though I couldn’t put words to it, that his music included me, celebrated me. (i.e. women/girls) Elvis, in his 1950s heyday, was sexually explosive but one of the things he brought to the table was a joyous inclusive feeling, he made sex look fun and friendly. (That may very well have been the REAL revolution, THE thing that was scary to the powers-that-be. Teenage girls admitting they wanted sex because it was FUN? The sky is falling.) Prince had the same thing going on. What he put out there in his songs, the vision of sex, was not scary at all. I was scared of some of the songs of, say, Aerosmith … also huge at the time … which definitely looked at women as pleasure-receptacles, interchangeable, and disposable. I loved the songs, don’t get me wrong, but at 15, 16, they intimidated me. I didn’t want to live in Aerosmith’s world. If grown-up sex looked like that, then why on earth would I ever want to sign up for it? But then comes happy pleasure-hound Prince. Creating pleasure WITH his ladies. Then a little bit later came “Cream” – which basically reads like an orgasm How-To – and I was a bit older and had some experience, and I thought, “Well. Of course. He gives a shit about what’s going on with whatever lady he is with. Like: that is the whole point of sex – making sure your partner has fun.” (It reminds me of that great macho Troggs song, “Come Now”, another hard-rocking song devoted to and encouraging woman’s pleasure. I mean, why else are you in bed with someone than to give them a good time? Right? Duh. But you don’t realize how rare it is until you try to think of other songs by men that have the same focus.)

But again, I had never quite analyzed the lyrics to “Kiss”, even though I loved the song. I think I got the message by osmosis. So I thank Hillenbrand for putting it into words.

My favorite Prince song is “Kiss.” He released it when I was eighteen and only beginning to learn myself and my place in the world. I had grown up listening to bands that denigrated women in the most revolting manner, bands like the coincidentally named KISS, which performed song after song celebrating the sexual using and cruelest disposal of women. “Love ’em, leave ’em, yeah!” trumpeted Gene Simmons into my nine-year-old ears. I had come to believe men were incapable of truly loving women; their interest began and ended with sex, physical beauty, and the sadistic pleasure of delivering rejection. Even if you succeeded in being beautiful enough to win a man’s interest, something I feared I never would, your fate would be to be used and tossed away like garbage.

Prince’s “Kiss” was a revelation. Here he beckons to a woman, and tells her explicitly she doesn’t have to be beautiful, rich, or cool to draw him. If she is insipidly childish, slavish to fashion, or seeking to win him only with her sexuality, he wants nothing to do with her. She doesn’t have to emulate anyone else. He wants her as she is, *who* she is. It’s her mind and maturity, he sings, that lights him up. “Women, not girls, rule my world, I say they rule my world. Act your age, mama, not your shoe size, maybe we could do the twirl.” He wants the woman he sings to to set herself free of everything she’s been told she has to be, and everything she thinks is expected of her. He desires nothing more than intelligent authenticity.

In my deeply self-doubting eighteen-year-old mind, that first phrase of “Kiss” resonated over and over, an antidote to the words and message of the band of the same name: “You don’t have to be beautiful…” What Prince wrote in that song thirty years ago he wrote into his career, surrounding himself with talented women and creating magnificent music with them. I am grateful to him for knowing that women, in all their complexity, intelligence, and individuality, made him better, and for the little thrill I still feel when I hear him sing that first line of that irresistibly rousing, joyful, sexy, affirming “Kiss.”

I don’t have to be beautiful, he tells me, and by the grace of his words, I feel beautiful.