“Ahhhh, Prince! C’est enorme!” shouted Jean-Baptiste as I handed him a burned copy of the pop god’s most recent release, Musicology. He was a French college student from a small town in Normandy, a goateed guitar player, a major in business or accounting or logistics or something else boring and secure at the Université de Lyon, and my neighbor across the hall at L’Escale Lyonnaise in Lyon, France, a dorm for “young workers.” Some of these workers actually worked, while others went to school; others did both; others seemingly did nothing. But Jean-Baptiste was both busy and bohemian, gearing up to get married in the next couple of years, as long as he passed his terrifying final exams, which would determine whether he received a degree, a job, a life.
He had invited me into his room one afternoon a few weeks prior, asked me about myself (in French), pulled on his pipe, bored his intense stare into me, his 6’3″ rail-thin frame slouching in his ancient leather chair. Our conversation, as well as subsequent ones, revealed him to be intelligent, serious but with a good sense of humor, hospitable, curious, and an irredeemable Francophile. Nearly every conversation reached a point where he asserted the supremacy of the French in cooking, or winemaking, or sport, or music, or film, or literature, or whichever other cultural arena was the topic of our conversation that meandered between French and English. But when I gave him the Prince disc, he had no choice but to bow before, perhaps, the greatest songwriter/guitarist/producer/singer that has ever been recorded.
I saw Jean-Baptiste grow excited about many things in our afternoon and late-night talks, or on our walks through the city with a motley group of residents from l’escalier, ranging from American study abroaders in their late teens, to Moroccan engineering trainees in their mid to late 30s. I heard him praise the pungent glory of camembert, though, he warned, I should know that I wouldn’t be able to kiss my girlfriend for about twelve hours after eating it. I didn’t have a girlfriend, so I tried it. He introduced me to the sugar rush of dipping butter cookies in a big jar of Bonne Maman confiture de lait, which I’ve never been able to find in the States. Victor Hugo, French guitarists whose names I can’t remember, soccer teams, the pursuit of theological truth—all of these things brightened his blue eyes and made him wave his pipe around and speak entirely too quickly for me to understand everything he was saying in French. But he never grew as excited as when I gave him that Prince disc, and he played it immediately.
I’m not the most patriotic person, by far, but it was enjoyable to watch the power of Prince’s gifts demolish all Jean-Baptiste’s pretensions to universal French cultural supremacy. I loved to toy with him, tell him that Spain’s wine regions like La Rioja were producing higher quality wines than France, that the Spanish chefs were doing more innovative things and were thus being watched by the world the way the French used to be. He took all these jabs pretty seriously, and coolly defended his countrymen in every case. But as he played the title track “Musicology” and bounced around like a child, and we moved through the different moods and time warps inhabited by the songs on that album, it seems we transcended the petty thoughts that live through flimsy constructs like nation and culture, and shared a slice of the sublime.
I hadn’t realized how much I had missed funk that summer, submerged as I was under the Camarón that remained in my headphones, the salsa and bachata blasted by Ariel, a Venezuelan who lived in the room next to me and left his door open whenever he was in, so that all of us on the floor could enjoy the latest Aventura remixes he picked up from the sidewalk bootleggers. But I had missed the funk, and Jean-Baptiste’s enthusiasm helped me tap back into my own, in a circuit of international exchange, where the foreigner plays my own culture back to me, and transcendence occurs because the artist is so great that the universal and particular merge. The nastiness, the swing, the funk of the rhythms show themselves to be not a laying back or bending or a swinging of natural rhythm at all. Rather, Prince, like Louis Armstrong before him, showed us that the rhythm of the universe is not at all straight ahead, that beyond the divisions of race, of history, of culture, beyond all matter, space-time is funky.