Karen Turman Ph.D. is a Preceptor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She earned her B.A. (2001) at the University of Minnesota, and her M.A. (2008) and Ph.D. (2013) in French Literature with an emphasis in Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interdisciplinary research interests include 19th-century Bohemian Paris, music, and dance during the Jazz Age, fashion and popular culture studies, community engagement scholarship, and topics of social justice and sustainability in the language classroom. Dr. Turman’s publications on Prince include an essay on Josephine Baker, Claude McKay, and Prince entitled “Banana Skirts and Cherry Moons: Utopic French Myths in Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon,” and “Prettyman in the Mirror: Dandyism in Prince’s Minneapolis.”

The playful riff between Prince and his Game Boyz and the New Power Generation musicians in the “Sexy MF” (1992) music video personifies the various sonic and visual contradictions throughout the video. At this moment in his career, popular media and critics interpreted Prince as attempting and failing to partake in and compete with the dominating gangsta rap aesthetic in hip-hop culture. With his gun-shaped microphone, multiple BMWs, and chains of gold around his neck, on the surface Prince gives the audience reason to subscribe to this theory. Prince at once exemplifies male dominance while objectifying the women in the video to the backdrop of a hypersexual chorus as he and the all-male NPG members chant repeatedly “Sexy motherfucker shaking that ass.” But upon closer analysis of the video’s aesthetics, “Sexy MF” remains in line with Prince’s unique brand of Black masculinity, eschewing societally-imposed boundaries of hegemonic masculinity and gender subordination. From a sociocultural analysis of the legendary stylings of Stacia Lang, head of costume design at Paisley Park, to a close reading of the song’s lyrics, this presentation aims to shed light on the coherent contradictions inherent in Prince’s image by revealing his consistency in message and tone despite ostensible genre influences and aesthetic innovations.