Introduction Judson L. Jeffries and Shannon M. Cochran We can think of no American music icon in recent memory that has generated more scholarly interest in death than most musical artists have in life.1 Already, Prince has been the subject of three major academic conferences, one in Manchester, England, in 2017, another in his hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2018, as well as a two-day symposium at Historically Black Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2019. These conventions have attracted people from all over the world. Journal editors have also featured Prince in special issues with the Journal of African American Studies (JAAS) leading the way. Similar projects are slated within the next few years. Dare we say, with Prince's transition, a new fan base has emerged—one that includes individuals who were not yet born when Prince was at his zenith. For 40 years, Prince piqued our curiosity and kept our interest. He shocked us, stretched our imaginations, educated us, titillated us, and, in so doing, enlightened us. Anyone who has studied his music knows there are layers to Prince, layers that cannot be peeled back by just one person. The more layers that are peeled back, the more mutations, one discovers. The study of Prince requires an interdisciplinarity that no one writer or scholar possesses. Writers who embark on single-authored book-length manuscripts about Prince have their work cut out for them. Prince was a multi-instrumentalist whose tastes were wide-ranging and far-reaching. Most people, writers, and scholars alike go their entire lives and never hone their craft, never master their supposed specialty, never step outside of themselves, and never exhibit the kind of intellectual, metaphysical, emotional, or spiritual adventurism that leads to new discoveries not only about their work, but about the world and themselves. Prince, an adventurer, scaled all of these mountains. Because he was a multi-instrumentalist, naturally, his work is, both, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Shannon M. Cochran, whose academic training intersects Africana Studies, English Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies, and Judson L. Jeffries, a political scientist by trade with specializations in Africana Studies, media, and political communication, film, and 1960s revolutionary movements, have set out, first in 2017 in the JAAS and now in 2020 with this publication, to create a body of work that can [End Page 1] be most aptly characterized as PrincEnlighteNmenT: a counterculture, a different way of being, thinking, learning and living. Prince's music encourages us to question the conventional, redefine the firmly established, scoff at the widely accepted, and be unafraid to ignore, if not downright break the rules, as rules are made to be broken. The canon? Rewrite it, but in your own image. Politicians? Stop looking to them for inspiration. The media? Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. Way back in 1981 Prince crooned, "I just can't believe all the things people say . . . Controversy . . . am I black or white? . . . am I straight or gay? . . . Controversy . . . do I believe in God? . . . do I believe in me? . . . yeah . . . Controversy." In a world where the majority of us are miseducated and destined to be, in the words of Pink Floyd, "just another brick in the wall," Prince, the oracle, pulled back the veil of ignorance, raised the venetian blinds, and convinced us that there were no such things as dead-ends, blind alleys, or cul-de-sacs. Therefore, when Funkadelic sang "So wiiide, you can't get around iiit, Sooo loow, you can't get under iiit, Get Up, So high, you can't get over iiit," there was a young artist in Minneapolis who, just a few short years later, came at it from a different angle. As far as Prince was concerned, there weren't any obstacles that couldn't be overcome; we are only limited by our imagination. For all of Prince's complexity and depth, for him, it was simple—artistry and life are inextricably linked. His genius was in coaxing his listeners (from the shrinking violet to the tone deaf to the know-it-all) to tap into reservoirs of creativity they never knew they had, to think and...

None Jeffries

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Category	Quartile
ETHNIC STUDIES	4