With its grim, monochromatic cover photo, one-word song titles, and dark, enigmatic lyrical content, 1994’s Come represented a stark aesthetic departure from Prince’s earlier output of that decade, betraying the influence of the then-ascendant alternative rock movement. This influence went both ways, as high-profile alternative artists like Nine Inch Nails, R.E.M., and Ween all at one point or another cited Prince as an inspiration. Yet, in contrast to his successful leveraging of new wave aesthetics to lay the groundwork for critical and commercial crossover a decade earlier, the artist then-“formerly known as” Prince remained pointedly kept at arm’s length of the “Alternative Nation”–even as other veteran recording artists, such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Neil Young, were embraced with open arms as “godfathers” of the genre. By recontextualizing Come–along with concurrent projects from 1993-95, such as The Undertaker video album–as a noble failure by the Artist to write himself into the alternative music canon, we can more clearly perceive the limitations of “alternative” as a countercultural ethos, while belatedly recognizing his contemporaneous battle with Warner Bros. as one of the era’s few successful stands for a truly “alternative” musical culture.

Zachary Hoskins is the author of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, a song-by-song blog examining the music of Prince in chronological order. His essay, “Rude Boy: Prince as Black New Waver,” was published in a special issue of Spectrum, A Journal on Black Men (2020), and his presentation from the Prince #1plus1plus1is3 virtual symposium (2021), “I Wish We All Were Nude: Controversy ‘Shower Poster’ as Aesthetic Linchpin and Artifact,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He has also presented and appeared on roundtables at other @polishedsolid symposia, #TripleThreat40 (2023), #SexyMF30 (2022), and #DM40GB30 (2020), as well as the University of Minnesota’s Prince from Minneapolis symposium (2018). He holds an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Arizona and B.A.’s in Film & Video Studies and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan.