I have long held that Prince and David Bowie were the glue holding our reality together. It seems it all started going to hell after their departure from this plane…
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life.
And getting through is a heartbreaking slog right now.
Now, I can’t quantify it, but I’m a firm believer that things really went to hell here after Prince died. A decade ago, losing both him and David Bowie within a couple of months was a collective gut punch I don’t think we’ve ever fully recovered from. I know I haven’t.
Over the past year, watching this fascist regime’s relentless assaults on his beloved Minneapolis, I’ve often thought to myself, “Prince wouldn’t have stood for this shit.” I wonder how he would be using his platform right now, and pulling his community together, and singing truth to power. He damn sure wouldn’t be silent.
A year before his passing, the Purple One released ‘Baltimore,’ a song lamenting the murders of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown by police, and the escalating violence and unrest in America, writing:
Nobody got in nobody’s way
So eye guess u could say
It was a good day
At least a little better than the day in Baltimore
Does anybody hear us pray?
4 Michael Brown or Freddie Gray?
While it’s been a beautiful thing seeing Bruce Springsteen, U2, Florence and the Machine, The Strokes, and so many others making art and launching tours to confront corrupt power, oppose violent bigotry, and call Americans to a higher level, Prince would have hit different. He always did.
I had the good fortune of seeing Prince close to a dozen times. These were, for me, spiritual experiences in the truest sense of the word: joy, liberation, unity, love, euphoria. It was baptism in blistering guitar, heavenly choirs of strangers, holy ground as a dance floor.
As he sang, Strangely beautiful, beautiful strange.
The first time I saw Prince at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater, I can remember standing wedged inside a sweaty, pulsing, kaleidoscopic mass of humanity, thinking: “These are my people!” I’d found my place.
Among a myriad of gifts, this was the solitary magic of Prince. He brought completely disparate groups of people together and made them feel they fit. He transcended musical genres, broke through color lines, and challenged gender roles. He boldly declared the dance floor big enough for all of us. And in that free and joyful place, we all danced.
When you were at a Prince show, you belonged. You were the right color, the right shape, the right religion, the right you. And in that space, you felt at home in your own skin and connected to those around you in ways that defy explanation. As much as anything right now, America could use those joyous nightly reminders of how many good people are still here and what we can still do together.
Prince gave me much more than hundreds of songs that altered my path and lifted my spirits.
He showed me that masculinity and femininity could inhabit the same space and be embodied in people simultaneously.
He made me realize that I could love God while being a complete contradiction.
He showed me that spirituality and sexuality weren’t divergent endeavors, but equally beautiful experiences of the Divine.
He taught me that friends don’t let friends clap on the two and four.
He showed me that humanity’s differences are where the glorious stuff is.
And he showed me that sometimes all you need is a funky beat and some friends who set you free.
Ten years after his passing, Prince’s artistic absence is palpable. As a singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and dancer, he will forever be without peer; an artistic force of nature, the likes of which we had never seen, and will never see again. The talent, creativity, passion, and light that he left this planet with cannot be measured.
Prince gave me more joy than I can properly express. His music provided me with a place that felt like mine, but never made me feel alone. His shows gave me an occasional three-hour experience of Heaven coming down. As he sang in Uptown: “Black, White, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin’…good times were rollin’.” I miss standing in that space; that one where the world could sing one beautiful song together.
Yeah, the threats we’re facing are more complicated than a pop song, and no, life isn’t like a Prince concert, though maybe it should be. There is something defiantly subversive about collective joy. Prince reminded us that we need to fight hatred, but we couldn’t stop dancing.
To all my fellow freaks who are grieving the place we call home and feeling devoid of joy; to all the misfits, outcasts, and weirdos out there who find solidarity in their oddness and who want to make sure everybody gets to join the party:
May all your berets be raspberry.
May all your corvettes be red.
May all your rain be purple.
And if De-elevator tries to bring you down,
go crazy, punch a higher floor.