I don’t know where to start. It’s ridiculous what playing someone’s music on your instrument almost daily for 15 years can do to you. Sometimes, skipping songs to jam on I would be like “man not Prince again, although I like that little intro” and I would play the song anyway. I don’t know how many times I did that with Lady Cab Driver.
57 makes me feel so vulnerable. If I had to go like him that’s 20 years left, 4 times 5 tiny years that’s not much. Not much at all.
One of my favorite memory is waking up in the last 80s for school at 630am in winter in Paris East suburbs, listening to Sign O The Times introduction with the singing percussions and the cold ass bass/synth riff while his monotone voice circulates in between. Then the Stratocaster takes over.
It’s June.
I didn’t love it, I just really liked it. It was and is completely unique.
Prince was all over the radio in the 80s and 90s. I liked Purple Rain but I was still a kid in France, couldn’t relate that much with it and what it meant. Sexy MF was the jam, I was old enough to understand the controversy and how he didn’t give a damn with his pistol-mic.
Then he started rapping and kind of disappeared from my life.
He reappeared in a weird way when he had a blog in 2000 way before anyone known. He was talking about how labels are bad and he was letting other artists write their points of view about Napster and that digital revolution. And then he released The Rainbow Children in 2001 which is an excellent album. At that time I was absorbing anything and everything I could about music production, musicianship, etc. I read a lot of musician interviews saying how important Prince had been to them even if they were not playing guitar and R&B funk at all.
So his trademark “produced, arranged composed and performed by Prince” line note got be amped up. That dude became some kind of mentor, in a way. I started to listen to his old stuff for real this time, reading everything I could find about him. Met with Prince fans, some of the most hardcore fans I have ever seen. I know why.
And I finally understood why he was such a corner stone for music from his respect and collaboration with the past, present and future of music to his finger skills and humor.
And so I spent pretty much every day of the past 15 years playing at least one song from the purple genius on my bass, from the most simple bass lines to the most exhausting ones. Played over his 1987 New Year’s Eve concert in Paisley Park I don’t know how many times, crying over his Purple Rain intro or how he controls his band when Miles Davis shows up on stage like a black hole in the middle of a funk galaxy.
His parkour on the edge of blackness and whiteness, masculinity and femininity, old and new will always be remembered as an act of freedom that we are all still scared to go through even though he showed us a path where all of those labels, boxes, are just prisons.
Just play, put it out there. Let’s go crazy. I can’t believe it happened.