Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images
Prince Memorial at Paisley Park
Fans gather outside Paisley Park two days after Prince’s death.
We’re still not over it. Minnesotans are supposedly known for our Scandinavian stoicism—mourning a celebrity would seem to be fairly low on our list of priorities. But more than seven months and countless tributes later (including that sloppy five-hour group hug at the X in October), the pain is still palpable. It was most intense right after he died—this insatiable appetite for anything Prince roused in so many of us. We subscribed to Tidal just so we could comb through his entire back catalog. We stayed up late tracking down a Russian download of the 1987 Sign ’O’ the Times concert movie. We found every rare Japanese tour video we could on an obscure Prince Facebook group. We listened to former First Avenue DJ Kevin Cole’s encyclopedic 63-song retrospective on Seattle’s KEXP FM ad nauseam. We re-watched Under the Cherry Moon. We ordered Touré’s book-length pop exegesis on Amazon, I Would Die 4 U. Some of us got tattoos (mine says “Erotic City” in Prince’s handwriting; it’s on my left arm). We attended memorials and block parties and dedications in his honor.
Some of this can be attributed to a condition uniquely endemic to our time: the performative aspect of grief in the age of social media. The other factor driving our obsessive quest to authenticate is Prince fans’ survivor’s guilt. In the weeks that followed his death, I clung to my own private, personal version of Prince. In I Would Die 4 U, Touré makes the point that Prince bounced around 16 residences when he was growing up in Minneapolis between the ages of 10 and 18. Turns out, Prince was the quintessential latchkey kid. Touré argues that even though Prince was technically a baby boomer, psychographically he belongs to generation X. This was my Prince, the Batman Prince, who, along with Neil Young, acted as prototype for the grunge-era alternative artists that my generation loved—constantly trolling authority in a messianic pursuit of sex and love and controversy. Prince was an alternative to the white, straight, suburban reality that I grew up in.
But throughout the summer, in conversation after conversation, I realized that so many of us have our own personal versions of Prince. The boomers also claim him. They’re the generation that grew up with him as he went multi-platinum during Reagan’s ’80s. Anybody who visited the Paisley Park wailing fence this summer, anybody who read plastered handwritten note after plastered handwritten note, realized that here was a generation that was not only mourning him, they were mourning the loss of their own youth.
I talked to Robyne Robinson, and she extolled the power of Prince’s falsetto. She talked about the tradition of the falsetto in black music and how she felt that Prince’s falsetto gave him a vulnerability that brings the listener into an intimate relationship. She believes his falsetto is what draws so many women into such a fanatical connection to him.
And yes, there’s also a provincial component to thinking about Prince—the idea that Prince was from our own hometown, that his ideal cosmopolitan metropolis, his “Erotic City,” wasn’t New York or Los Angeles but cold, Midwestern Minneapolis. The day he died, I listened to “Sometimes It Snows in April” on repeat, almost reveling in the fact that you had to be from Minnesota to truly understand the tragedy of an April snowfall.
But regardless of which Prince fan identity you claim, you have to admit there were times you took him for granted. Maybe it was because he blew us off one too many times, teasing us with the promise of a performance. (I’ve always felt that Prince truly belongs to the people who were willing to wait for him.) There was always this sense that Prince would be back, that there would be another show, another pajama party. We Minnesotans were aware that Prince was a genius living among us, the only global-scale genius Minneapolis has produced in our lifetime. But we had taken him for granted for so long that when he passed, our regret was all consuming. There was a sense that we had just lost the guy who put us on the map.
After the initial shock, we rededicated ourselves to his memory with the fervor of someone granted an illusory last chance. It started with the euphoric three-night-till-7 am dance party at First Avenue after his death and continued with a performance by the New Power Generation at the Parkway. By late August, we had mourned so much that we started to feel exhausted by it. There was something devastatingly sad about The Revolution shows at First Avenue in September, and something final within that sadness.
Personally, it was after these shows that I wondered if I was coming to the end of my grief cycle. And then in late September I saw an ad for an African movie festival that was screening Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, a 2015 Nigerien movie. Its title is a Tuareg phrase that when translated means “rain the color of blue with a little red in it.” The Tuareg, a nomadic Berber group in the northwestern Saharan desert, don’t have a word for “purple” in their language. The movie is set in the dusty Saharan city of Agadez and stars Mdou Moctar, a mysterious purple-robed guitarist who rides into town on a motorcycle with his axe slung across his back looking to make a name for himself. There are no Prince songs in the movie—instead Moctar and his Morris Day-esque rival Kader Tanoutanoute mesmerize with a style of desert blues guitar music known as ishumar.
Sitting there in the back of St. Anthony Main, this charming little movie finally put the universal nature of Prince in perspective for me. This was different than seeing the Eiffel Tower glowing purple in the days after his death. Looking back, when the tributes poured in from all over the world—all the commemorative issues of Entertainment Weekly and Time and Rolling Stone—I had felt defensive about being from Minneapolis. Like, who were these interlopers? They couldn’t possibly get it the way I did.
But this little movie made me feel more generous about Prince. Seeing the Prince story set in the Sahara signified that he had transcended the sex freak gestures of his early days—even transcended the synth-driven whap of the “Minneapolis sound” that made him one of the two most famous musicians in the world in the ’80s. This weird Tuareg movie helped me to consider “Prince” as a creation of his own art.
Watching the Prince myth displaced to Niger made me think about how Prince will be remembered deep into the future, decades and maybe even centuries from now. When Prince made Purple Rain, he became legendary in the historic sense of the word. Purple Rain remixes and embellishes his own biographical details. In the movie, he comes from mixed parentage; in real life, he does not. In the movie, The Time is The Revolution’s biggest rival; in real life, Prince wrote all of the The Time’s songs. Prince basically created his own take on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth: Here was our hero, a rock star who made the journey into the supernatural (maybe somewhere beyond Lake Minnetonka?) only to return with a boon to his fellow man: the greatest, most redemptive power ballad ever recorded.
In Chuck Klosterman’s new book, But What If We’re Wrong?, he investigates how history gets made. He theorizes that the entire idiom of marching band music is defined by one person: John Philip Sousa. “I have no data on this,” Klosterman writes, “but I’d confidently assert that if we were to spontaneously ask the entire U.S. population to name every composer of marching music they could think of, over 98 percent of the populace would name either one person (Sousa) or no one at all.” He goes on to speculate that hundreds of years from now, rock music could be remembered by one band, or one musician, and he offers up the likely suspects—The Beatles, Elvis, and Bob Dylan—for the reasons you might suspect. They were the most commercially popular, the most emblematic of what “rock” means, and they made monomythical music that resonates universally, even with toddlers.
Most importantly, over time, critics and historians determine what gets remembered. Prince has already been written about nearly as much as The Beatles and Bob Dylan, but in some ways, it feels like the critical appreciation of his music is only just beginning. The definitive biography of Prince has yet to be written, but in April 2017, at the one-year anniversary of his death, a whole slate of Prince books is set to be published. But when I asked Klosterman how long Prince would be remembered, he texted back: “It feels like an all-or-nothing situation to me; Sydney or the bush.” Klosterman believes Prince might have the same problem as Hendrix—that is, “He was too inventive to represent anyone but himself.”
There are a scant few historical models for how we remember venerated figures from the past. Maybe it’s because I grew up Catholic, but the model I keep returning to is the model of the saints. Hagiography comes from the Greek “hagios,” meaning “holy,” and the word literally means writing down how a saint became divine. Before the year 993, when Pope John XV canonized Ulrich of Augsburg, the Pope wasn’t involved in the process of approving anybody’s sainthood. A saint became a saint when his or her sainthood was proclaimed by the cult loyal to that saint in the local communities among whom the saint lived and died. There was always a larger message—an example of how to live—and sometimes there was a chamber of commerce aspect. If the town knew what was good for it, it had a skull or a body part of a famous saint that drew people from far and wide. And if a saint was strongly associated to a city, it was in the best interest of that city to keep that saint’s memory alive.
Now, there is zero chance the Catholic church would ever consider Prince for actual sainthood. I mean, if the Minnesota Wild had to deal with blowback from less-than-compassionate hockey fans when the team made “Let’s Go Crazy” the official goal-scoring song at Wild games, there is little chance that the Holy See will ever venerate a guitar player who died from an opioid overdose. But there are so many virtues that Prince stood for, so many ways in which he really could stand as an example for how to live: the joy he took in sexuality and dancing and living life; his insistence on an inclusive spirituality that connects us and transcends the isolating pain we feel; and his belief that Minneapolis was capable of being as cool as any place else in the world.
In this way, Prince’s strong ties to his hometown—his position as the secular saint of Minneapolis—could be the deciding factor in helping him transcend time. It could be in our interest to preserve his memory. So after months of serious contemplation (if not prayer), I’m all for the cult of Prince. We have the most Prince stories. We benefited the most from his charity while he was alive. We have the monument to his greatest achievement in Purple Rain. And we now have a Graceland-esque mausoleum out in Paisley Park (complete with a Paisley-shaped urn holding his relics!). So through the power of Prince Rogers Nelson, patron saint of Minneapolis, may we live 2 see the dawn.
