Photo via Getty/Toronto Star Archives
She preferred to be called Denise Katrina Matthews since her overdose in 1994, the near-death experience that propelled her into both sobriety and evangelical Christianity. She’d suffered almost complete renal failure, and her kidneys would never recover. She’d have a kidney transplant a few years later, and eventually, her daily battle with sclerosing encapsulating peritonitis, a complex kidney disease for which she received daily dialysis, took her life yesterday.
We, of course, knew her as Vanity: flashy It-girl, action-movie babe, leader of the girl-group Vanity 6, Prince’s protégé before Apollonia (Apollonia’s role in Purple Rain had originally been written for Vanity). Since her turn to Christianity, she’d disavowed her entire previous life in pop and Hollywood, refusing to take royalties she was due.
Vanity was one of the first people I remember seeing on television and immediately wanting to be, though at the time, I had no idea why and how much I would end up relating to her (more on that later). There’s a reason beyond her obvious and striking physical beauty that Prince chose her among so many other models, singers and dancers—he saw in her such charisma and talent that he wanted to make her, and fully believed she could be a star on par with himself. Though songs like “Nasty Girl” seem tame by today’s standards, they were raunchy as hell in 1982, and seeing a woman with such confidence, charm and poise get so gritty—she seemed so in control of herself—captured my young imagination to the point where I’d choreograph my own dances in the basement, sliding around in my socks, strutting, and shooting what I imagined were sizzling Vanity-style looks to an imaginary audience.
To understand Vanity's rise and subsequent fall, you must start with Prince, who produced Vanity 6’s sole album (self-titled, 1982) and whose trademarks are all over it (and Vanity’s subsequent solo career). There are those slinky synths, rubbery bass lines, that heavy percussion, and those minimal but gently provocative (and surprisingly difficult to nail) vocals. (The exception is “He’s So Dull,” a proto-”No Scrubs” that sounds like Prince’s interpretation of The Shangri-Las or The Crystals.)
“Make-Up,” a cool ode to performative femininity, is the Vanity 6 track I most often find myself dropping on the dance floor, in the throes of a DJ set. Even now, it sounds incredibly contemporary, and in 1982, it sounded like it was from a future nobody had quite envisioned yet. The beat and synth lines are unexpected, to the point where people will stop dancing long enough to ask me what this song is. It’s hard to fill a dance floor with an unfamiliar song, and yet this one will do it.
The “6” in Vanity 6 referred to the number of breasts in the group, a positively demure reference considering that, according to a People interview Vanity did shortly after her split from Prince, he had apparently wanted to name her “Vagina,” to which she had put her foot down: “He said people would know me nationwide. I said, ‘No kidding.’” It was that strength that was part of what made Vanity such a compelling performer, and would ultimately cause her split with the notoriously controlling Prince. After a contentious 1999 Tour with Prince and the Time—in which the Time was forced to perform behind a curtain, and the obviously attractive Vanity 6 in front of it—Prince and Vanity called it quits romantically, and she took off on her solo flight.
Out on her own, Vanity wrote much of the material on her two solo records. The first, 1984's Wild Animal, seamlessly continued the image and sound she and Prince had cultivated together. If “He’s So Dull” presaged “No Scrubs,” Wild Animal lead single “Pretty Mess" is a precursor to Beyonce’s “Partition.”
By the mid-’80s, the influence of club music—particularly freestyle—on mainstream R&B was undeniable; 1986's Skin on Skin, Vanity’s second and and last album, had that imprint all over it. It is the album of hers that sounds least like her original work, and yet it produced “Under The Influence,” a Certified Bop that, much like “Make Up,” will get a dance floor going no questions asked, thanks to its wiggly little synth melody.
The late ‘80s saw Vanity shifting to, of all things, a full-fledged action star, though she also often contributed music to her movies' soundtracks. The Last Dragon's soundtrack, from 1985, might be most well-known for launching DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” but Vanity’s own “7th Heaven” is cheeky, futuristic and fun.
And “Faraway Eyes,” from 1988's Carl Weathers cop-flick Action Jackson, which she wrote and produced with Jesse Johnson of the Time, is perhaps her best-known ballad (I remember it fondly from the roller rinks, arcades, and pizza joints of my late childhood).
Here’s where the most personal connection lies, though: Vanity and I were both party girls, and we both let that partying get severe and destructive. She was briefly engaged to Nikki Sixx in the late ‘80s, and there are some intense tales both in his autobiography, The Heroin Diaries, and hers, Blame It On Vanity, about their drug use together. It was her documented crack addiction that would cause her overdose. I found my own bottom a few times over my teen years and early adulthood, though I was lucky enough to narrowly escape an OD. While the salvation narrative and the community of the church worked for Vanity—now Denise again—to find her sobriety, I found mine in steady, day-by-day practicality. Though there are those who claim they’ve found the magical formula, the truth of sobriety is that there are a lot of different ways to get there, and as long as you’re not doing harm to yourself or anyone else, all of them are valid.
So I remember her fondly, as Denise and as Vanity—as the rising star who captured my imagination (and Prince’s), as the songwriter who would only perform sexuality on her own terms, as the woman who had control of her career until she suddenly didn’t have control of her life, and above all, as my comrade in the reckoning that is addiction. We both figured out how to regain control, to make of our lives what we wanted. By all reports, Denise ended her life well-loved, in the company and community of those who cared for her.
And there's no doubt she'll live on, ideally outside the shadow of Prince. I, for one, promise to do my part: Here's to dropping her jams on an unsuspecting dance floor and reveling in second chances.