Photo by EPA/PAUL BUCK/alamy
Prince in Las Vegas Feb 2007
Prince watches the NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas, February 2007.
He was human. This is easy to forget because all we ever did was treat him like a unicorn (how else to fathom his unknowable genius?). But go back to the music. At its best, it sizzles with earthly tension. Picture the center of a Venn diagram made of love, lust, solitude, and fellowship. This is where his most visceral songs live—from “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” to “The Beautiful Ones.” “Can you make me happy till my pain is gone?” he once sang. “Can you get me excited? Excited enough to thank the God above for the human body?”
He was human. A lifelong trickster. Years ago, while taking a break from his first big-time recording session in Minneapolis, he stopped by an area Perkins restaurant for a milkshake. When it got to the table, he began adding all sorts of stuff to it—coffee, steak sauce, syrup, ketchup. Eventually, he summoned the waitress. It tastes funny, he said, with a hint of a smirk. The manager rushed over, apologized, and comped the milkshake.
He was human. As sure as he spent his money—and man, did he spend some money—he gave it away. To school music programs. To a recording studio for underserved youth. To Black Lives Matter. His generosity was malleable. While cutting a solo album at Paisley Park in the early ’90s, Paul Westerberg learned that a friend of his had died. The next time Westerberg showed up at the studio, it was filled with balloons.
He was human. He pushed his musicians to the point of exhaustion, sometimes calling rehearsals at two in the morning to keep everyone sharp. Control was his thing. During his symbol days, his first wife, Mayte, wasn’t even allowed to call him by name. It became a game. She usually just referred to him as “husband.” Oh, and he could hold a grudge. Just ask local gossip queen C.J., one of the few in the media to call him on his BS. He referred to her as his “biggest enemy” and even allegedly penned the song “Billy Jack Bitch” about her. “I fared much better than ‘Darling Nikki,’” C.J. wrote of the dubious honor.
He was human. He loved basketball and Ping-Pong, pancakes and popcorn. Sweets, too. His personal chefs often brought out dessert first—chocolate mousse, sour cream apple coffee cake, whatever his sweet tooth craved at that moment. His entire life was on demand. Days before he passed, he was whisked to his favorite record store, Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, where he bought six CDs: Talking Book by Stevie Wonder; The Time Has Come by The Chambers Brothers; Hejira by Joni Mitchell; Inspirational Gospel Classics by Swan Silvertones; The Best of Missing Persons; and Santana IV by Santana. Afterward, he tweeted about his visit in all caps, like an excited teenager: “FETUS, THANX 4 THE TUNES! ROCKED STEVIE’S TALKING BOOK ALL THE WAY HOME! #RecordStoreDay.”
He was human. Of course, that doesn’t mean he was normal. There’s the story of the Paisley Park employee who showed up on her first day of work and found a note taped to the front door that read, “Come find me.” She did, eventually, in a walk-in fridge in the kitchen. We love his next-level weirdness because deep down, beneath that bedrock of Midwestern reserve, we’re just as weird. We like freaky sex, too. And silly hats (the kind you find in a secondhand store). By advertising his fetishes through the lens of pop music, he made our own kinks seem okay.
He was human. When he no longer found all he needed through physical love, he doubled down on the world of ideas. He joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, surprising his Chanhassen neighbors by knocking on their doors to talk about “being in the truth.” Later, he shaded his Christian beliefs with Afro-centrism, New Age mysticism, and the futurist anxieties of The Matrix. He went on talk shows and riffed on chemtrails and the Illuminati. Though messy, his ever-changing worldview proved he was a seeker ’til the end—even if from the beginning he realized that there are no easy answers. “I am something that you’ll never comprehend,” he sang on the overtly Christian “I Would Die 4 You.”
He was human, a fact he often tried to reject. From the start, he fashioned himself as a superhero who could play every instrument better than everyone else. Next came the costume changes—the fur, the frills, the lace, the tunics—which made him seem even more like an “other.” By the time he ditched his birth name in the early ’90s, we wondered if maybe he really was an alien. But then his body started to break down. His hips and ankles failed him, which is what happens when you spend your career jumping into the splits while wearing high heels. In the end, he tried to outrun his mortality by numbing it, and that’s when they found him slumped inside the elevator at Paisley Park. He weighed just 112 pounds when he died.
He was human. Sadly, it took his death for us to remember this. But go back to the music. The next time you throw on “Purple Rain” or “Kiss” or any of his other timeless jams, think of it as more than just playing a song. Imagine that it’s a conjuring or, better yet, a reincarnation. And in that sense, at least one of his lyrical fantasies came true: “I’m not a human, I am a dove.”
