Music hath charms

The world was shocked last week by the death of Prince Rogers Nelson, the musician formerly, and again more recently, known as “Prince.” I was shocked that the world was so shocked. While I had been aware of the existence of an entertainer by that name, he was only a small speck on the periphery of my field of vision. When I had thought about him at all, it had been with a brief bit of wonder as to why anybody thought what he did was important.

This was not deliberate disdain; it was more a lack of understanding of and appreciation for his kind of music. When I was in college and roughly the same age as the typical aficionado of modern pop/rock music and attendee of modern concerts, the concerts I attended were by drummer Buddy Rich and by Tex Beneke and the former Glenn Miller orchestra. Their performances, of course, were to Prince’s as a spring rain is to a hurricane. Some of the same elements, but a vast difference in energy.

A couple of things have kept me from appreciating the music that younger generations devour. One is that I enjoy music as music, not as part of a visual display of fireworks and acrobatics. Frank Sinatra singing "Softly, As I Leave You" could not, in my opinion, have been improved by anything, least of all fireworks and acrobatics. Second, I can rarely understand the lyrics of modern pop/rock music, and when I can understand the words, they don’t often make much sense to me. That’s just me, I realize, suffering from aging ears and generational distance. I don’t expect others, especially younger others, to follow the same rut I follow.

My taste in music, while untutored, is fairly broad. Depending on my mood, I can actually enjoy anything from the occasional rock piece (really) to pop vocals to a piano concerto to country music to jazz to opera. I can appreciate the singing of Andrea Bocelli or of Merle Haggard, or of any number of others. So my disinterest where Prince was concerned was not a lack of love for music, just ignorance of his particular music and of him as a performer. So I didn’t find fault with those who grieved at his death, but I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of the grief of so many around the world and the depth of the person whose death inspired it. I thought he was of minor significance in the world.

But following his death, I was, like it or not, exposed to masses of information about the man and his talents, plural. Certainly he was flawed, as we all are. By the nature of his calling, his flaws reached more people than those of ordinary folks. But I couldn’t help but be impressed by a performer who somehow affected so many people so deeply. And by a musician who wrote the songs, did the arrangements, planned the shows, supervised the technical details of recording, played all the instruments and sang the lyrics. Some of the lyrics could be criticized for indecency, but the personal life of the artist, by contrast, was generally quiet and even devoutly religious. And while his onstage persona might be flamboyant and his manner of dress, even for the occasional interview, flashy and extreme, his public conversations were generally low key, polite, even subdued.

When I had been virtually forced by volume to learn more about Prince, I came to realize that this was a case where I, in earlier dismissing him as a minor distraction of no consequence, had failed to follow my longstanding rule. I had failed to ask myself the question I routinely, and repeatedly, pose when examining my opinions in politics, religion, culture, etc. This experience has reminded me to apply my question with renewed zeal to all my opinions, and I recommend it to others. The question: Is it possible I could be wrong?

This story was originally published April 30, 2016 at 2:23 PM with the headline "Music hath charms."