Minnesota, to me.

When I was barhopping after the Ronnie Spector concert a few months ago, I was talking with the (black) bartender at a nearby upscale (black) bar in this (white) yuppie neighborhood, and she was telling me how Prince had had a surprise concert a few months earlier at the same small venue that I had just been at.

We then started talking about Prince as an artist, and I confessed that in my head, I couldn’t see him and Bob Dylan as being from the same state, that them and Minnesota fit together in odd but important ways, especially Prince, since he seemed like a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit in with it.

Ever since my time getting-out-the-vote in Wisconsin, I have been realizing how much (black) people are a stepchild of northern plain state Democratic electorates, and how this does funny things to their heads; it’s like they’ve been used by the party that should be doing things for them, but have never been thrown a bone, which to me will always be captured by how the one (black) (female) voter in Wisconsin was just resentful when I showed up at her door up in small city Wisconsin, though she had voted as a Democrat in election after election, and practically all other (black) people forever everywhere else had been cordial and even happy when I showed up knocking and identified myself with the Democratic party.

At the end of the day, what is the (black) experience in places like Milwaukee and Minneapolis?

It must be fundamentally different from the (black) experience in places like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, even though somewhere like Milwaukee is also part of the Rust Belt.

I’m not sure that Prince would have been Prince if he had grown up somewhere else, though I really can’t put my finger on why.  His artistic identity seems so much more linked in to Minnesota than Michael Jackson’s to industrial northwest Indiana or Madonna’s to suburban Detroit.