All my heroes seem to be dead or dying.
This is nothing new or profound, of course - we're
all dying - but there's just been so god-damned much of it lately. It's just left me kind of numb, but still wanting to offer up some words to the universe of what this man meant to me, to bear witness to what he made of worth in the time he was here. Today. On the day he died.
So here goes. Here's what Prince Rogers Nelson meant to me.
Between 1980 to 1987, Prince was simply a god, a mysterious, divine being creating impossible and unfathomably great music that I've only ever been able to describe as
"a spaceship coming into land atop the great pyramid in ancient Egypt carrying James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Bootsy Collins jamming away on alien technology while everyone below peaks on Ayahuasca". I'll stand by that.
And, of course, it goes without saying, he did almost all of it completely by himself. He played almost every instrument, sang almost every harmony, produced arranged composed and performed the lot. This is long before laptops and ProTools: no other rock star was doing this in the 1980s. No other rock star
ever did that before.
Prince in later years would fitfully make some very nice pop songs here and there but he was never truly
great like that ever again. And I've spent a lot of hours over the years trying to figure out why that was, at what precise point he lost hold of the holy grail. I once even begun writing a
short story about it, about that moment, which I placed sometime in 1988, when walking around his mansion looking out at the snow falling around his perimeter fence he
just said
'fuck it, I've done enough'. I doubt very much I'll ever
finish it now. It was going to be called
'Winter In Minneapolis'.
Part of me wishes he'd just walked away at that point, and lived a silent recluse like
Garbo. It's too much to ask, of course, but it would have been so
perfect, and left so little explaining to do. Life is perfect only in brief moments, it seems. Never lifetimes.
After a long dark night of the soul, never explained, between 'The Black Album' and 'Lovesexy' he lost
the dark, chilling obsession that drove his greatest work. He could never do confessional - too vain and calculating - and the lyrics of his songs were seldom as profound as he wanted to think they were, but in songs like 'Something In The Water', 'Automatic', 'If I Was Your Girlfriend', 'Darling Nikki' and 'The Beautiful Ones', he went so deep into the physical, into lust, into the maniacal excesses of our secret hearts, that he reached something shocking in its purity and truth and eternal in its revelation. And it's those glimpses of something beyond ordinary human articulation the people who truly know are talking about when they call him a genius. Because that's exactly what he was. Back then, anyway. Not an entertainer. Not a pop star. A genius.
But Prince
was also
the greatest pop star of the 1980s - what Bowie was to the 70s and, I would say, Bjork was to the 90s: a genius at the peak of their powers making their very best work while the world was paying most attention. His greatest artistic achievement was 'Sign O The Times', and 'Purple
Rain' sold the most, but his most perfect album in my estimation was 'Parade' - the breathtaking audacity of that non-stop stream of glorious songs woven together like the finest tapestry constructed out of light and sound. It hasn't aged a day. Like the best of his work, it still sounds as rapturous and intoxicating and indefinable as the day it first appeared.
My first thought when beginning writing this was simply to add a big stack of youtube clips of his greatest works and let them speak for him instead, but this sadly proved impossible: Prince is practically unique amongst pop stars in that there is just about none of his music anywhere on youtube or elsewhere on the internet. It's another one of those maddening control-freak parts of his later years, him setting his lawyers on any fan who uploaded his music to the net.
But here's what I would have played you, if I could have - my one-stop best-of Prince & The Revolution:
Sign 'O' The Times
Around The World In A Day
Condition Of The Heart
Raspberry Beret
Kiss (single version)
I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man
If I Was Your Girlfriend
Strange Relationship
The Beautiful Ones
Mountains
When Doves Cry
Girls & Boys/ Life Could Be So Nice
Purple Rain
But then that leaves out so much, I know, and I pity anyone who could make it to the grave without ever hearing
17 Days, Love or Money, When You Were Mine, Erotic City, La La La Hee Hee Hee, When We're Dancing Close and Slow, Feel U Up, Take Me With U, Adore, Automatic, Something In The Water (Does Not Compute), Let's Pretend We're Married, Controversy, Dirty Mind, I Wanna Be Your Lover, Little Red Corvette, Do Me Baby, Temptation, 1999, Alphabet Street, When 2R In Love, and Sometimes It Snows In April.
Then there are the lovely lesser songs like
Cream, Sexy MF, It, The Other Side Of The Pillow, Willing and Able, Don't Play Me, The Truth, Can't Stop This Feeling I've Got, Still Would Stand All Time, Pussy Control, I Wanna Melt With U, Letitgo, The Holy River...
And all the songs he gave to others, like
Nothing Compares 2U, The Screams of Passion, Manic Monday, everything by The Time and Sheila E. So many songs, in so short a time. It suddenly seems so obvious now how impossible it is to imagine him old. He was never
meant to grow old, to wither and wrinkle and fade away.
But I'm glad I lived in his age and alone out of everyone I knew growing up, had that secret knowledge of a world of fantasy and imagination and bottomless desire. This has been me saying thank you for that. Thank you Prince.
Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad
Sometimes I wish that life was never ending,
But all good things, they say, never last.
Prince Rogers Nelson,
June 7, 1958 –
April 21, 2016
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