Nick Hornby - Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

Just Like You

State of the Union

Funny Girl

Juliet, Naked

Slam

A Long Way Down

How to Be Good

About a Boy

High Fidelity

Shakespeare Wrote for Money

Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

The Polysyllabic Spree

Songbook

Fever Pitch

Speaking with the Angel

An Education

There used to be a thing that did the rounds, a meme before memes existed, which pointed out the uncanny similarities between Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy: both were elected to Congress in 46 and became president in 60; both were shot in the head on a Friday; both lost a son while living in the White House; both were succeeded by Southern Democrats called Johnson; both were assassinated by men with three names, each composed of fifteen letters, and so on. Well, thats not what Im going to attempt to do here. Charles John Huffman Dickens (twenty-five letters) was a white nineteenth-century writer, and Prince Nelson Rogers (eighteen letters) was a Black twentieth- and twenty-first-century musician. Dickens never heard anything that Prince recorded, and there is no evidence to suggest that Prince ever read any Dickens. I suppose one could argue feebly that they were and still are known by one name, but actually thats true of most famous artists. Yes, you have to say both Emily and Bront, because of her siblings. And you have to say Michael and Jackson, a man who famously had siblings too, but whose extraordinary fame was never quite enough to stamp ownership on his very common surname. Using both names distinguishes him from Stonewall, and Jesse, and Samuel L., and Shoeless Joe (cf. Will and Maggie Smith, Tom and January Jones, Wilkie and Phil Collins, Jimmy and Rod Stewart). The one-name thing doesnt wash. When I was thinking about linking Prince and Dickens in an extended essay, I had one coincidence to work with: they were both fifty-eight years old when they died. But dying at fifty-eight in 2016, as Prince did, is not the same as dying at fifty-eight in 1870, as Dickens did. In the early nineteenth century your average life expectancy was forty years old on the day you were born, seventyish if you lived until your fortieth birthday. And on closer inspection, Prince wasnt fifty-eight when he died. He was fifty-seven. So I dont even have that.

But heres what started it. In 2020, Princes 1987 album Sign o the Times was given the commemorative special boxed-set treatment. Usually, the rerelease of an iconic album will include anything extra that the record company can drag upsome live tracks, a few demos of the original songs, maybe a rejected song or two. Sign o the Times included sixty-three songs that werent on the original album. Sixty-three! Thats almost four times as many as the original album, three more than Jimi Hendrix released in his lifetime, two more than the Eagles recorded in the twentieth century... and they were nearly all produced around the same time. (They werent all produced for the same record, but well get to that.) The fan site PrinceVault has 102 entries in the category Songs recorded during 1986. And we are beginning to learn that 1986 was not an atypical year. When I read about the boxed set, I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way.

Maybe there were other people who were just as prolific, although I doubt it, especially since Prince did a lot more than just record, and Dickens did a lot more than simply write novels. But I yoked them together in my mind at that moment because they are two of what I shall have to describe, for want of a more exact term, as My Peoplethe people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work. I have scores of people like that, influences and role models and heroes. Galton and Simpson, Donald Fagen, Preston Sturges, Barbra Streisand, Robert Altman, Pauline Kael, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Sondheim, Mavis Staples, Arsne Wenger, Joan Didion, Anne Tyler, Jerry Seinfeld, Rickie Lee Jones, Aretha Franklin, Thierry Henry, Elizabeth Strout, Raymond Carver, Frederick Exley, Joe Henderson, Lorrie Moore, Edward Hopper, Liam Brady, Peter Blake, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Duke Ellington, Elizabeth McCracken, Larry McMurtry, Roddy Doyle, Tom Verlaine, Peter Wolf, Dave Eggers, Al Green, and many, many others. I wont go into detail about what they have all meant to me: sometimes it was their taste, sometimes their thinking, or their soul, or attention to detail, or audacity, or comic timing, or arrogance, or commitment, or bravery, or the way they have lived their lives. Anyone who has spent a lifetime consuming culture in all its forms at a possibly unhealthy rate has a similar list, and if you have spent your adult life creating something during the working day, that list is likely to be even longer, because you need the input (and, lets face it, you have time that someone working on a production line or in a comprehensive school or a bank doesnt have). Prince and Dickens are two among many, but they are perhaps deserving of slightly larger type than some of the others. If anyone else did produce such a staggeringly enormous body of work, then it isnt someone I know much about. Maybe youre reading this and shouting, Wagner! Picasso! If you are, youll have to write your own book.