Robert Loss

This presentation will examine Prince’s critiques of the music industry and racial capitalism in the context of Come and the early-mid 1990s. Warner Bros. released Come in August 1994, squarely in the middle of Prince’s very public protest against and contract dispute with the record label. More than a year earlier, Prince had supposedly retired from studio recording, informed Warner Bros. that he would fulfill the terms of his contract only with songs from his Vault, and changed his name to the unpronounceable Love Symbol. Behind the scenes, he’d battled with Warners primarily over two issues: its ownership of his master recordings and the label’s willingness to match Prince’s prolific creativity. By my count, between January 1993 and August 1994 Prince completed at least 42 songs that he wanted to release in some form.

For a musician, such an abundance of material might create an artistic problem, a puzzle to solve, i.e., how do the works go together, how to group them for release. But in the logic of racial capitalism, the problem of abundance is that a surplus of product lowers the economic value which can be extracted from it. This is why Warner Bros. wanted to limit Prince to one release per year. However, this logic depends on wide profit margins and contractual arrangements that benefit corporations, not musicians. As personally important as these issues were for Prince, he also understood them as systemic issues—and not only did he offer a critique, he was already experimenting with innovative solutions. None of this is as overtly evident on Come as it would be a year later on The Gold Experience, but it does help explain the album’s track list, the demarcation of Prince v. Love Symbol as a tactic to thwart racial capitalism, and even the album’s cover photo and its subtitle: 1958 – 1993.

Robert Loss is an associate professor and the Director of Liberal Arts at the Columbus College of Art and Design. He is the author of Nothing Has Been Done Before: Seeking the New in 21st-Century American Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic), which includes a chapter on Prince’s later work. His essay “How the Exodus Began: Prince and the Black Working Class Imagination” appeared in a recent special Prince issue of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. He has presented on Prince at numerous conferences, including Prince From Minneapolis (2018), #DM40GB30 (2020), #1plus1plus1is3 (2021), Prince: 78-88 (2021), #SexyMF30 (2022), and #TripleThreat40. His talk from #1plus1plus1is3, “Deconstruction: Work & Racial Capitalism in The Rainbow Children,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and their pets.