Chinisha Scott
Chinisha Scott
Vanity 6 Roundtable Moderator
Chinisha Scott is an Emmy-nominated, award-winning, multi-hyphenate creator with nearly 20 years of experience in film, TV, and media production. She is passionate about music, science, environmental and social justice, and learning – they find their way into all that she creates.
She began her musical training at the age of nine and continued through grad school, with a brief stint as an engineering major in her freshman year of college. (She had Mae Jemison dreams of becoming an astronaut – here’s hoping they need filmmakers in space). Currently, her handiwork can be seen as a Segment Director at The Daily Show (Comedy Central).
Chinisha is a certified Prince super-fam, nerdy geek-girl, and cheerful nihilist with a penchant for witty, sometimes self-deprecating humor. She attended The New School, where she received her MA in Media Studies and a BA in Cinema Studies with a minor in African-American Studies from the CUNY Macaulay Honors College, cum laude.
Rhonda Nicole
Rhonda Nicole
Vanity 6 Roundtable Panelist
Rhonda Nicole is a Los Angeles-based independent singer/songwriter, music journalist, and social and digital marketing executive whose life officially turned purple in 1984. As the managing editor for the now-defunct SoulTrain.com, she interviewed a number of Prince-related artists including Jill Jones, Taja Sevelle, fDeluxe, Liv Warfield, and Andy Allo. Blending her passion for music and expertise in digital marketing, Rhonda Nicole developed and led social media strategy for the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville. She’s a proud member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Recording Academy, SONA (Songwriters of North America), and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. Rhonda Nicole’s 2010 debut EP, Nuda Veritas, self-produced 2020 releases, Radical Ecstasy and Home, and her latest EP, LOVER, are available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms.
Casci Ritchie
Casci Ritchie
Sunday's 1999 Presentation Panel Presenter
Welcome to Satisfaction
Fashioning the Love God
Adopted by the counterculture in the 1960s, the frilly shirt found its way onto the sweat-glistening chest of Prince in the early 1980s. The frilly shirt, in its many guises, evokes images of romantic historicism dating back to the seventeenth century and holds connotations of performative seductive and desire to this day. This talk will focus on two disruptive embodiments – the ruffled tuxedo shirt and the poet blouse worn by Prince during the 1999 era and ask how these garments played a role in honing Prince’s provocative yet accessible image to fans and beyond.
As Prince’s stardom rose in 1983, there is a move away from thrift-store finds to a custom wardrobe. A focus will also be placed on the role of costume designers Louis Wells and Vaughn Terry Jelks, highlighting their influence on Prince’s burgeoning style and fashion’s corresponding role in Prince’s increasing popularity on the run-up to 1984.
Drawing on existing research on men’s fashion, the paper will explore the origins of the ruffled tuxedo and poet shirt and trace the garments’ ties with eroticism, nostalgia, and theatricality. Using the V&A collections, live performances, advertisements, and close textual analysis, I will discuss the ‘frilly shirt’ as a sartorial vehicle for desire and analyse the relationships between Prince, audience, and star image.
Casci Ritchie is a PhD candidate studying Prince, fashion, and fandom at Northumbria University. She has published widely about Prince’s sartorial legacy in peer-reviewed academic journals including Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and most recently, the Sign O’ the Times Special Issue of Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture. Her book, On His Royal Badness: The Life and Legacy of Prince’s Fashion, was published in 2021 as part of 404 Ink’s Inkling series.
Adam Rudegeair
Adam Rudegeair
SUNDAY'S 1999 PRESENTATION PANEL PRESENTER
Party’s Over
The death and rebirth of the Minneapolis Sound
1999 marks the final album of a triptych that firmly established the blueprint for what is known as the “Minneapolis Sound.” A sparse and distinctive fusion of new wave, funk, and pop, it was the foundation upon which Prince created his masterwork Purple Rain. But Purple Rain represented a far more maximalist version of the aesthetic, adding many more layers of overdubs, strings, and effects. As time went on, Prince’s solo work would move further and further away from the formula he had created early in his career, returning to it only periodically. The Minneapolis Sound would continue through his side projects the Time, the Family, and Apollonia 6, and find new evolutions, such as in the work of former Time members Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
In this presentation, musician and bandleader Adam Rudegeair will define some of the distinctive characteristics of the style, analyse their use on the 1999 album, and explore its domination of the pop music world for the rest of the 80s.
Adam Rudegeair is a prolific composer, performer, filmmaker, and educator based in Melbourne, Australia. His music is rooted in jazz and funk, with significant influences from the sounds of New Orleans and Minneapolis. His current projects as a leader include Lake Minnetonka, The Bowie Project, and Retconned Bond.
In 2021 Adam completed his Masters studies at Box Hill Institute with the thesis, ‘Strange Changes: Re-imagining Jazz Structures for Improvisation Utilising the Compositions of David Bowie’.
Since 2008 Adam has presented the weekly jazz radio program Black Wax on PBS 106.7FM.
Robin Shumays
Robin Shumays
Vanity 6 Presentation Panel Presenter
Like a (Nasty) Girl’s Group?
How Prince Refashioned & Reimagined the Archetype of the All-Girl Singing Group
The beginning of the video for Vanity 6’s biggest hit “Nasty Girl” starts with 3 beautiful women emerging from what appears to be the ladies’ lounge of a nightclub. They are wearing matching form-fitting sheath dresses in different colors; not dissimilar to what many girl groups wore in previous years. Halfway through the song, they go back behind the doors and return wearing lingerie in styles revealing who they are underneath; Susan: the lolita, Brenda: the punk rocker, and Vanity: the sexy badass vamp. If the lyrics hadn’t already enlightened you, this wardrobe change was a definitive statement that this wasn’t going to be just another girl group.
This presentation will first examine the history of the “girl group” and the effect those performers had on fashion and style in their respective eras. Then, we will take a deeper dive to explore female sexual liberation of the 1960s, and the blaxploitation female action stars of the 1970s; what impact did they have on young Prince, and how was that conveyed through his vision for an 80s girl group? How did the lingerie-clad Vanity 6 make a statement of female empowerment for the modern 80s woman? Next, I will define the “characters” portrayed by Vanity, Susan, and Brenda. Finally, I will take a look at groups like TLC and Destiny’s Child and delve into the clear influence Vanity 6 had on them.
Robin Shumays is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Queens, N.Y. Her fashion line, hennaflower, has been featured in various shows in New York City, including Harlem Fashion Week, Africa Fashion Week, and Fashion Envie. She has also worked professionally as a web developer, graphic designer, social media consultant, and model. In June 2021, she presented a paper entitled “Punk, Paisleys and Polkadots” on Prince’s influence on fashion through the 1980s at the 78-88: Prince, The First Decade: Interdisciplinary Conference. In March 2022, she presented “Bedlah Bedlam: An Exploration of Orientalist Fantasy and Fashion Via the Lens of Prince Rogers Nelson” at the @polishedsolid #SexyMF30 virtual symposium. She is also co-director and dance performer with Zikrayat, an Arabic Music and Dance Ensemble that has performed at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Museum, William and Mary College, and throughout the Northeast. Once upon a time, Robin held a short-lived dream job as an administrative assistant at Paisley Park Music (Paisley’s short-lived music publishing wing). From 2020-2021, she produced and co-hosted a webinar podcast on Prince called The Purple Paradigm. Currently, she works full-time as a User Experience Engineer with a life insurance firm and is a mom to a very precocious tween daughter.
Laura Tiebert
Laura Tiebert
Vanity 6 Roundtable Panelist
Laura Tiebert is co-author, along with Alex Hahn, of the 2017 biography, The Rise of Prince: 1958-1988. Her experience delving into Prince’s extraordinary life inspired her to live like him for an entire year. She chronicled her journey at lauratiebert.com and went on to create an online course that guides students step-by-high-heeled-step through the process, from dressing up for everything you do, to being a spiritual seeker and yes, even adopting a symbol as your name. She’s currently at work on a new book tentatively titled Lessons from This Thing Called Life: A Princely Guide to Self-Empowerment. The book is a spirited homage to the Purple One that makes the case that we could all learn a few lessons from Prince. Laura, formerly of Chanhassen, Minnesota, now lives in Phoenix with her husband and two sons, where she writes from her home office, surrounded by way too much Prince memorabilia.
Karen Turman
Karen Turman
What Time Is It? Presentation Panel Presenter
Creating an image
Morris Day’s Autonomy in the Prince Universe
The narrative of Prince as “creator” of The Time and acts such as The Family, Vanity 6, Apollonia 6, Carmen Electra, and others evokes Ovid’s “Pygmalion” myth from Metamorphoses. The artist, Pygmalion, sculpts his version of the ideal woman in ivory, falls in love, and she in turn comes to life thanks to Aphrodite’s divine intervention. This myth of creating and curating the object of one’s desires exists solely on the erasure of the “creation’s” autonomy. Prince put The Time together for myriad reasons, including the desire to have musical peers, an additional outlet for his artistic production, and some healthy competition, but this narrative ignores Morris Day’s agency. This presentation will explore the iconic style of Morris Day and the Time in the 1980s while deconstructing the myth of Prince as Pygmalion-creator of musical groups and pop stars in the purple universe.
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.”
Arthur Turnbull
Arthur Turnbull
Saturday's 1999 Presentation Panel Presenter
Dez Dickerson and Prince's Purple Rock
Arthur Turnbull began a career in technology as Technical Wizard for Jellyvision, makers of the video game series You Don’t Know Jack. He continued on as Technology Manager for Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, a leader in third stream. In 2018, he started Arturo Solo LLC, a managed services consultancy. Arthur is also a co-founder of Wildflower LLC, home to The Music Snobs, Mad Unreal, Snobs On Film, and Entry Points podcasts.
The Violet Reality
The Violet Reality
1999 Super Deluxe Roundtable Panelist
The Violet Reality are a collective of musicians, artists, YouTubers, bloggers and content creators led by Casey Rain and Kim Camilia. Through their website and YouTube channel they are amongst the leading commentators on the life and career of Prince Rogers Nelson. Having been profiled in The New York Times, BBC and Consequence Of Sound amongst others, they have to date been the leading channel covering the posthumous releases from The Prince Estate, including working with Penguin Random House to promote Prince’s memoir, The Beautiful Ones, and being granted media passes to officially cover the Celebration events at Paisley Park.
Zaheer Ali
Zaheer Ali
What Time Is It? Core 4 Roundtable Panelist
Saturday's 1999 Presentation Panel Presenter
Zaheer Ali is a historian and scholar of 20th century United States and African-American history. He is currently the inaugural executive director of the Lawrenceville School’s Hutchins Institute for Social Justice. As an adjunct lecturer at New York University, he taught a Spring 2017 course titled, “Prince: Sign of the Times,” an examination of Prince’s life and legacy in American history and culture. He’s presented his scholarship on Prince at conferences at Yale, Salford University in Manchester, England, and the University of Minnesota.