Sure, I’m biased. I’ll admit this. I’ve lived my entire life inside a sixty mile radius of Minneapolis. I was never a Prince fanatic but was always a fan, at least since first hearing songs from his 1999 album on the radio. I’ve driven past Paisley Park a few times over the years when I had reason to be in the southwestern suburbs, and I know my way to the real Lake Minnetonka. When I saw “Purple Rain” in the theaters, my friends and I had to go to our local run-down cinema to see it, since we were confident the people working there would be less careful about letting sixteen-year-olds (who probably looked fourteen) into an R-rated movie. By the time I was in college and still living in Minnesota, it was almost a requirement for people to have a copy of Purple Rain and at least one other Prince album in their music collection, even if every other album they had was country, or metal, or hip-hop Gregorian chants (and yeah, for a short time there, that really was a thing).
I still have Purple Rain and 1999 in my music library today. Along with those staples, I have the album Sign O’ the Times, which was one of my college standards (between the back-to-back tracks of “Play in the Sunshine” and “Housequake” it’s virtually impossible to insert a brief dance break into your day). I added one of his more recent albums, Plectrumelectrum, just a couple years ago, after seeing him and his band 3rdeyegirl absolutely destroy on SNL.
As I learned about some of the more prominent musician deaths earlier this year, like Bowie or Glen Frey or Merle Haggard, I was always surprised. When I learned about Prince, I was shocked. He was a living landmark that took up so much territory on the cultural landscape that even if you weren’t a fan, his influence and reach were impossible to deny. After all, how many other artists can you name who had people making New Year’s Eve plans to usher in the new millennium more than a decade in advance?
I felt deflated the rest of the day after I heard the news, then spent that evening watching footage of other artists paying their respects, and crowds drawn to Paisley Park and First Ave., as well as several other gatherings and tributes from around the world. It made me wonder — where does such a widespread sense of collective loss come from? How is it millions of people can take this so personally? Is it mourning the future art that won’t be produced, or the severing of an attachment to someone who helped people interpret the world through what he created? How was this so much more than another reminder of our own human frailty?
There’s something in the art that our heroes create that resonates with us. For some people, it could be just a catchy tune or a meme-worthy lyrical moment, or even a greatest hits album full of them. For others it’s a body of expression and a career of performance that enhanced our lives on a visceral level, and has done nothing less than made life easier to understand.
I completely get why people drawn to downtown Minneapolis have become spontaneous block partiers, and why millions more (when you include the audience around the world streaming online) are listening to The Current alphabetically play through Prince’s library, and will continue to for at least this weekend. They’ve all lost someone who maybe wasn’t a personal friend, but in some ways became more than that; he provided them with a voice, holding up a mirror of self-examination and challenged people to use it while they struggled to figure out who they were. That’s what we want from our heroes. And they became our heroes in the first place because that’s what they were able to give us.
As for Prince, I’m not one to speculate how he would feel about being mourned. But I think anyone who knows his music, and knows the kind of artist he was, would probably agree that he couldn’t be given a better or more appropriate farewell than a three-day dance party too large and exuberant to be confined by any club.
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