Jason Webber's Purple Bananas Is a Painfully Relatable, Insanely Entertaining Tribute to the Life-Affirming Power of Music and Fandom
Every once in a while you meet someone fascinating and unexpected and think, What is this person’s deal? Where did they come from? What makes them tick? Who are they on an existential level? How did they become whoever they turned out to be?
Jason Webber, to me, is one of those people. I met him about five years ago through his job as a publicist for Insane Clown Posse’s Psychopathic Records but he was unlike any publicist I had ever known.
Most of the publicists I’ve worked with in my decades in the business have been slick, ambitious, attractive women in their twenties who saw publicity primarily, if not exclusively, as a springboard to better gigs and bigger paydays.
That didn’t describe Jason at all. He was intense and earnest and more than a little awkward and self-conscious. He was anything but slick, anything but an insider. Every time I interacted with Jason, primarily at various Gatherings and the Juggalo March on Washington, which he helped put together, I found myself thinking that I couldn’t even imagine how much stress he must have been experiencing and how many balls he must have been juggling.
It turns out I identified with Jason for a very good reason: our curious paths through life are almost uncannily similar, in no small part because Jason has been kind enough to write Purple Bananas, a memoir explaining, candidly and engagingly, exactly what his deal is.
It turns out that his deal is decidedly similar to my own! We’re both irrevocably scarred by a sort of double maternal abandonment. My mother abandoned me when I was a baby and then again when I tried to have a relationship with her as an adult but her intertwined mental illness and selfishness made that impossible.
Jason’s birth mother gave him up for adoption when he was just a baby, then rejected him a second time when he sought her out as an adult seeking answers and a connection to his past and she made it achingly clear that she wanted nothing to do with him.
We both used pop culture as a means to survive hardscrabble childhoods full of alienation and depression, where we felt like outsiders everywhere we went but in our own movie and music mad imaginations.
As adults we each had an opportunity to work with our creative heroes, me with “Weird Al” Yankovic, a towering icon of my childhood, and Jason with Insane Clown Posse, who hired him to do publicity but also to be a jack of all trades willing, ready and eager to do whatever it took to ensure that the show would go on. And if there’s one sacrosanct commandment in the world of Insane Clown Posse, it’s that no matter how crazy or seemingly impossible things get, the show must go on.
Jason’s unlikely pop culture savior was a tiny, magical genius from Minneapolis whose music, aesthetic, persona and world electrified, challenged and excited him in a way he wouldn’t be able to understand or appreciate until he was older.
If the Christianity of Jason’s scowling, abusive adoptive father was harsh and forbidding, an endless series of rules and restrictions, Prince’s Christianity was hopeful and joyous, about the bliss and ecstasy of heaven and being saved rather than fire and brimstone and the fiery specter of hell.
In Jason’s household, sex was something to be ashamed of. In Prince’s music it was something to be celebrated as the sacred essence of life. Like David Bowie, Prince was so heroically, completely, unmistakably himself that he empowered generations of acolytes to embrace their inner freaks as their best, truest selves.
Reading Jason’s memoir allowed me to have more compassion for what I went through as a child. At the risk of over-simplifying things, it allowed me to see that I’m still fucked up as an adult from my fucked up childhood.
The scars lessen with time, but they never completely go away. When life is a never-ending series of emotional crucibles, the trauma and damage of childhood has a way of coming back at the worst possible time.
As hard as things got, the author had Prince. That had to be enough. For Jason, Prince wasn’t just an unusually gifted performer. He was so much more than that. He was spirituality in its purest, most accessible and appealing form. He was community. He was acceptance. He was transcendence. He was everything, a friend, a mentor, a spiritual guide, someone who could help him get his fuck on and set him on the path to salvation.
I could not have more respect for Prince as an artist and a man, to the point where I am totally, one hundred percent cool with him forbidding “Weird Al” Yankovic to parody any of his work. I love Prince but like most folks, I checked out at a certain point a while back and only checked back in sporadically.
Part of it was sheer volume: Prince was so insanely prolific that it could be overwhelming for non-obsessives. So part of the fascination of Jason’s book comes from catching back up on everything Prince did during the many years when my attention was directed elsewhere and he was releasing jazz-fusion concept albums and three-disc monstrosities.
Jason’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of Prince obsessives who gravitated to the chat boards on his website to trade wild conjecture about the complicated life and career of their shared hero.
There’s a morbidly fascinating chapter about Jason’s online love affair with a fellow super-fan who was successfully able to impersonate someone semi-functional on the internet but turned out to be something much different in person.
For this lost soul, Prince was literally all she had. Her life otherwise was utterly devoid of pleasure and meaning. For her, Prince fandom was compulsive, a pathology rather than an organic enthusiasm. The world of Prince fandom, like most, if not all fandoms, has more than its share of dark and sad and lonely places.
Prince helps get our all too relatable author through a nightmare gig working for a famously mercurial and explosive politician, a job that leaves him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and an unfortunate reliance on Xanax.
Though it touches upon his experiences during his five years working for Psychopathic Records, this is anything but an Insane Clown Posse tell-all. I did not mind. Decades into its existence as a legendary, infamous small business, Psychopathic Records remains an ingratiatingly homemade, mom and pop operation perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos without ever quite falling over.
If nothing else, Purple Bananas: How Prince Saved Me and Other Selections from the Soundtrack 2 My Life has inspired me to forcefully command Alexa, “Play Prince” as often as possible. Alexa has never steered me wrong on that front.
I may be ready to graduate to more expensive, intense forms of fandom, like buying that 8400 disc Sign o’ the Times re-issue that just came out.
So if you enjoy books of mine such as The Big Rewind and You Don’t Know But You Don’t Like Me, I very much recommend Jason’s book. Hell, even if you didn’t like those books, I still recommend it.
It helped get me through election night and the uncertain morning after, with more than a little help from a certain Midwestern musician who left us far too early but who will nevertheless always be with us when we need him most.
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