How Prince’s ‘Kiss,’ ‘Cream’ Videos Created the Sex God of Erotic City
Like the king of music videos, Michael Jackson, Prince used the MTV era to imprint an image on a generation of music fans. Now that he’s died and we continue to analyze his impact on culture, it’s essential to recall that Prince’s mission to immortalize himself peaked with the 1986 music video “Kiss” – an event in the history of pop music sexuality.
While the record itself offered the ultimate flirty seduction song, the music video was a sexual fantasy direct from Prince’s Erotic City – the libidinal center of his imagination. It introduced music video watchers to voyeuristic pleasures similar to the swanky smut of that period’s soft-core porn and glossy men’s magazines.
Appearing as an imp (that’s what you get when you take the P off “pimp” and reserve it for your career moniker), Prince rises, erection-like, from the bottom of the screen– a black phallic silhouette penetrating the labial pink setting. He then thrusts, jabs, wriggles and struts across the empty, aroused space in movements that combine isolated solos (pop star ego-stroking) and choreographed duos involving a mysterious female partner – a bare-legged spank-bank figure whose identity is obscured in shadowy veils.
Yes, the video turns conventional, often mechanical, rock-and-roll innuendo of the sort Prince popularized with “Little Red Corvette” into a visible, sensual fact. Behind the smoochy subject of the song’s title “Kiss,” the concept here has one private and singular goal: to establish Prince as a modern sex god.
“Kiss” is perfection. Self-imagination and self-realization in one. It’s where Prince was always headed, starting with the half-naked (nude-born) image of him against a baby blue background on the cover of his debut album; the black-and-white blatancy of the mattress spring iconography on the Dirty Mind album cover; and the nearly homemade, overdressed glitz of the “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” music videos that introduced Prince to the broadcast world. In those clips, he wore a spangly purple slicker that almost seemed to get in the way of his quick steps and his aphrodisiacal career aspirations.
By streamlining Prince’s horny-pony playfulness, “Kiss” helps to elucidate his one-man sexual revolution. In “Little Red Corvette,” he batted his eyelashes more coquettishly than even the brazen avatar of rock androgyny Little Richard. Prince had borrowed Little Richard’s pompadour and made it curly but his decades-on daring also borrowed the audacity of glam rock role-reversal. Traditionally, women flirt while men seduce, but Prince did both – deviously – in that on-stage performance video. The brazenly profane lyrics and imagery in songs like “Lady Cab Driver” were the first open expression of porn-consciousness. He presented the life-force of sexuality with adolescent abandon. That accounted for much of the kick in the movie Purple Rain which classically raised teenage hormones to the level of electrifying opera. Yet, with “Kiss,” pop’s master flirt pulls back – like an assured seducer – before plunging ahead with the consummating assault.