Michael Jackson and Prince Were Never Meant to Be Compared.

Michael Jackson and Prince Were Never Meant to Be Compared.

(ThyBlackMan.com) June is almost gone. Black Music Month goes out the door with it, and honestly there’s no better company to see it off than these two. People love to stand them back to back and make it a fight. Always have. It sells, I guess. Gives a morning show something to argue about between traffic and weather. But I’ll tell you, the longer you live with the records, the dumber that fight starts to sound. They weren’t fighting. They were just two boys who left the same kind of block by two different doors, and both doors opened onto something you’d have to call sacred if you’re being straight about it.

Both of them came up in a country that had a small box drawn for the Black entertainer, and a label on the box, and a shelf it was supposed to stay on. Neither one stayed on the shelf. They went through the wall. Different hammers, same wall.

Michael first, because Michael was the show. Nobody understood a crowd the way he did. He knew, somewhere bone deep, that people come to a performance hungry to leave their own skin for a few minutes, and he fed that hunger every time. Put on “Billie Jean” and find me one wasted second. The bass walks in, the drums knock, he hits the floor, and you’re gone. “Beat It” had Eddie Van Halen tearing a hole in a song built for the R&B station, and somehow it worked on both. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” had church folk mumbling words they couldn’t define and loving every syllable. Folks call it dancing. It was. It was also engineering. Every move was load bearing.

I was small the first time the moonwalk hit our television. Felt like a holiday in the house. Grandmother’s living room, plastic still snapped over the good couch, everybody crammed in because the phone tree had gone off, turn it on, turn it on. Motown 25. 1983. He slid backward and the whole room made the same sound at once, this gasp, and my uncle came up out of his seat like the man scored on a Hail Mary. We wore the tape down rewinding it. Here’s the thing though. That wasn’t him catching the spirit and floating. He’d run that walk in a mirror till his feet swelled, learned from street dancers and friends, then took it apart piece by piece like a deacon working a single verse. By the time it got to grandmother’s couch it played like a miracle. That’s the con of precision, the beautiful con. Hide the sweat well enough and people swear they watched magic.

Same thing all over the catalog. Thriller wasn’t an album so much as a takeover, planned out cold. Quincy in the next chair, the two of them clipping syllables, nudging grooves, and polishing records past the point most people would quit, from Off the Wall into Thriller and Bad. Then “Smooth Criminal,” that lean that still doesn’t make sense. “Man in the Mirror” when he felt like preaching. “Black or White” when he wanted everybody in one room at once. And he got everybody. He walked up on MTV when it was a closed door for our people and put his foot clean through it. Some kid in Tokyo, some grandmother in Lagos, they knew that silhouette cold. The whole planet was the goal. Not a slice of it. All of it.

Prince now. Whole other creature, and that’s where this gets good.

Michael made the perfect thing look easy from the front of the stage. Prince was the back room where you watched the thing get hammered together out of raw board. He played all of it himself. Guitar, bass, keys, the drums, a full band stuffed into one wiry frame from Minneapolis of all places. He’d vanish into a studio and come out days later with something nobody on a payroll had touched or smoothed or focus grouped. You hear it in the mix. Listen to “When Doves Cry,” a record so stubborn it yanked the bass line out entirely and double dared you to notice the hole. Who does that. He did that, and strolled off pleased with himself.

My Prince lesson showed up late and crooked, the way the real ones do. Sixteen, summertime, parked on an older cousin’s porch while she did her nails and ran a whole radio station off a milk crate of tapes. She gave me this look, like boy how do you not already know, and pressed play on “Purple Rain.” I’d heard it around. Never sat in it. Not until that porch, the heat sitting on us, the speaker buzzing cheap, and that guitar at the end climbing up out of the song and just refusing to come down. She watched my face do something and nodded real slow, like she’d handed me a key. Been chasing that high since.

Roll through the rest of it. “1999” is a man dancing on the lip of the end of the world. “Little Red Corvette” is rock and soul slow dancing in the kitchen. “Kiss” is barely anything, a scratch of guitar, that falsetto hanging in open air, and it floors you anyway. “Raspberry Beret” packs a whole short story into three minutes. He made all of it out of nearly nothing, since that cold city handed him no Motown-sized machine to plug into, so he helped build a sound of his own. Funk leaning on rock. The church right up against the bedroom. Holy and filthy, fingers laced, neither one letting go. He’d put God and sin in the same line and look you dead in the eye, daring you to tell him those were two different things.

The realest rebellion, the one that cost him cash and comfort both, came when he stared down the men holding his masters and said no. Wrote a word on his face no Black man tosses around. Swapped his name for a symbol you couldn’t even say out loud. Walked off a machine that wanted to keep stamping him out like money. They laughed. Stunt, they said. Difficult, they said. Gone off the deep end. Then a decade rolls by and every artist scrapping to own their own voice is standing on dirt he tilled with his hands. He saw the corner before the business knew there was one.

The live shows, man. Those live shows. Michael gave you the same flawless thing every single night, shined to a mirror, and the gift was knowing exactly what was coming and watching it land perfect anyway. Prince gave you a thing that would never exist again. He’d take a song past twenty minutes because the room asked for it, drag somebody up out of the crowd, ball up the set list mid set because something told him to. You showed up to catch a moment being born in front of you, a man writing on his feet while you forgot to breathe. Two different promises. Both paid in full.

Here’s what gets stomped flat when we turn it into a scoreboard. Neither of them came from nowhere. Same well, both of them. James Brown’s in their hips, that grind, that hard work made physical. Sly’s in the colors and the nerve. The Black church is sitting right in both their throats, where you first figure out how to bend a note till it hurts. The chitlin circuit, the talent shows, every Black performer who had to be twice as good to get half as far, all of that runs straight down into these two. Brothers off one tree. Not enemies across a line. Worth shouting during this month in particular, because that’s the entire point of the month, reminding us how tangled and shared the whole bloodline is.

What actually sets them apart is temperament, and temperament doesn’t rank anybody. It’s just a fingerprint. Michael needed control. He wanted the moment immaculate and he’d erase himself into the work to get there, gave up a regular life, a childhood, maybe his own quiet, so that the second you hit play it came out clean. Prince needed loose. Perfect made him itch, because perfect meant done, and done was a kind of death to him. He’d rather pass you something raw and still breathing than something flawless laid out in a casket. One man hunted the shine. The other ran the opposite way on purpose, grinning.

You don’t have to pick. I never have. Some mornings it’s got to be Michael, that lift, that feeling the floor might drop out under a beat that big. Other nights only Prince does it, when I want music that feels like a sweating human being and not a statue, something with a pulse I can actually hear. Different hungers. A grown man’s allowed more than one.

What ties them, and I’ll only touch it once, is they both went too early and too strange, two of the most stared at people alive who somehow reached the end far from the crowds, behind doors most of us could never see. That should put a chill on anybody who ever wanted the spotlight bad. The brightest lights drag the longest dark behind them, and both of these men lived way back in shadows we never got to see. But that’s a sermon for some other night. Tonight I’d rather sit with what they gave than count up what it took.

So no. I’m not crowning one and burying the other. That’s a small little game for folks who never really listened in the first place. We got lucky is the truth of it. One stretch of time, one struggle, one long inheritance, and out of it came two men who took the gift two opposite directions and both landed somewhere nobody had ever stood. Michael showed how high a perfect thing can fly. Prince showed how far a man gets when he flat refuses to be owned. We never had to choose between them, and I’m not about to start now.

Now talk to me. When Michael comes on, what does it pull up in you? What room does he drop you back into. And Prince, when that guitar bites down, where does he take you that nobody else can reach. Tell me which one sits closer to your heart, and tell me why, because the why is the real answer. I’m not after a winner. I’m after the reason these two still got a hold on you. Pull up a chair. Still a few days of June left.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother has a passion for poetry and music. One may contact him at; JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.