“Microchip in Yo' Neck”: Prince's Afrofuturism

• In Event: Prince Rogers Nelson and the Black Past, Place, and Future

Abstract

This presentation will center around the little known track, “The War,” Prince’s 1998 meditation on race and technology in a world on the verge of the apocalypse. To date, it stands as his longest song (clocking in at over 25 minutes), and by far one of his strangest. With its Gil Scott-Heron-inspired refrain of “1, 2, the evolution will be colorized,” lyrics warning of microchip implantation technology, production evolving organically out of a jam session, and its mode of distribution—first as a RealAudio stream, and then as an analog cassette sent via postal service to fans for free—“The War” is an excellent artifact of Prince's complex relationship to technology. For Prince, technology could be both liberating and forward-looking, but also restrictive and replicate older structures of inequality.

Author

• Zaheer Ali, Brooklyn Historical Society