When someone like Prince dies, I wonder why I’m struck with such sadness. I mean I know WHY: an incredible artist is gone, and living in a world without him feels less vibrant. But it’s not like I knew the guy. I knew his music. I loved his music. I loved who he was and what he stood for. I’ll never forget the first time I came across Prince. It was 1982, I’m at my friend Damon's house and we head down to his brother Jeff's room in the basement. Jeff is listening to Prince on vinyl – Dirty Mind or 1999, I can’t remember which record – and he shows us the album cover then opens it to a picture of Prince lying on his side naked, glistening like a pornographic Calvin Klein ad. I was like WHAT THE SHIT IS THAT? Jeff replies, “That’s Prince,” and I was like, “I need to forget I ever saw this” as I continued to stare…and listen – my prepubescent brain knew something was up. Purple Rain wasn’t far behind and somehow with that release, the same little lascivious creature from Jeff’s room had crept his way, still naked, across a bathroom floor and into the mainstream. The rest for me was history. Decades later as a DJ, I’m closing every party with a Prince jam (or Michael Jackson) (ok sometimes with Footloose) (I no longer DJ) and I'm playing Raspberry Beret daily for my kids.
And now he’s gone. But his music is still alive. It’s right here on my computer, though frankly, I haven’t been waiting anxiously for him to drop an album in some years. So why my profound sadness? I think it has something to do with how I feel about time and space and the slim odds of being alive to bear witness to someone so extraordinary in the first place. Humans have been around in modern form for a couple hundred thousand years, and could be around for thousands more (barring a Trump presidency), so to think that within my small window of time on this planet, Prince was also here making music, that’s pretty fucking fortunate. John Quincy Adams never heard Darling Nikki and I feel bad for him. You and I are part of an elite club that in my opinion is learning and experiencing the most exciting stuff ever to be learned or experienced by human kind: the dawn of rock and roll, the Internet, Doritos, and so much more (not that the light bulb wasn’t mind-blowing for folks back then or the wheel wasn’t the illest thing on “Shark Tank B.C.”). I just feel like our era (about the last hundred years) is such the sweet spot for seminal sounds, tastes and patterns, that losing Prince is losing a rarity that in essence will never be matched for an eternity, not just because he was so unique and self-possessed, but because of how watered down the world has become and will become. I hate to sound so cynical, but we all know that with every passing year, art and culture get exponentially derivative – to me, one of the future’s saddest truths – (and yes I'm aware that much of Prince's music was derivative, but skilled and wildly creative nonetheless). So can we even breed another Prince? And will that person have the edge of someone as raw as Prince? For my kids’ sake I hope so. God we were so lucky to have had him. Maybe I’m sad not just because Prince is dead, but because he represents a certain sort of genius that, in the wake of a ticking clock, will never be heard from again.