Decider Remembers Prince (1958-2016)

Prince Rogers Nelson, aka Prince, aka the Purple One, aka TAFKAP, aka , passed away today at the age of 57. His place among the pantheon of the greatest musicians of all-time is undeniable, and his towering role as a figure of immense cultural importance over the last five decades cannot possibly be overstated.
As we come to terms with the stunning impact of his sudden loss, here’s a few brief memories from the Decider team about His Royal Highness. May he rest in peace.

LEA PALMIERI

Ugh. This one hurts. The feeling so many of us are feeling now is the exact opposite feeling I had in July 2004 when I saw Prince in concert at Madison Square Garden. Holding tickets in your hand for a Prince concert is already magical, but it was nothing compared to actually being in that building. That man really does take you on a spiritual journey. We joke about it now, but at one point I looked over at my mom next to me who was doing some sort of hand rolling disco-y dance move with her body. It looked silly, but there was something so, so right about it. His music, his performance just takes you to another state.
It had rained earlier in the day, so when he performed “Purple Rain” during the encore, everyone knew what to do: they all raised their umbrellas and it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Almost 20,000 people committed to a move that is normally looked down upon as bad luck, opening your umbrella indoors, and yet right there, it could not have felt more like the best luck I’d ever experienced in my life. It was a moment, a concert, an event I’ll never forget and I’m so lucky to have had that experience.

It’s a sad day, but a beautiful day for us to honor a truly unique genius, and one of the only people brave enough to tell Kim Kardashian to get off stage for not dancing. For that, and so, so many more memories we will cherish Prince forever.

Prince kicks Kim Kardashian off the stage by Zoomin_UK

MARK GRAHAM

When Prince burst into the national consciousness with his album 1999 in 1982, I was an 8-year-old boy living in the Detroit suburbs. Like everyone alive in 1982 (and since), I became immediately obsessed with “1999,” but it was the song “Little Red Corvette” that I really gravitated towards. Of course, it would be years before I was able to fully grasp the sexual innuendo that the Purple One was playing with, but to 8-year-old me, I just thought it was “totally radical” that he was singing about Detroit-made automobiles. (As the son of a Ford employee, though, I was a little peeved that he wasn’t singing about the Ford Mustang, which I perceived to be the superior vehicle.)
When Purple Rain arrived in theaters in the summer of ’84, I heroically attempted to convince my parents that I should be allowed to see the film. After all, I was turning 10 years old; surely now that I had reached double-digits I was mature enough to attend an R-rated movie, right? My parents felt otherwise, and to this day, I still haven’t seen the film. Weirdly, I held this personal disappointment as a grudge against Prince; after all, couldn’t he have made a PG-13 movie? I would have at least had a puncher’s chance of getting into that one. I shifted my loyalties to Michael Jackson, and moved on with my life.
Flash forward twentysomething years and, thanks to the magic of Internet pirates, a video started making the rounds of Prince’s first public performance of “Purple Rain” (before the movie came out). I had mostly (but not completely) gotten over my grudge at this point, and grown to acknowledge his singular, virtuoso genius as perhaps the best guitar player of his generation (with possible apologies to Eddie Van Halen). I clicked “Play” and two things happened: my jaw dropped, and 13 minutes later, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole researching the cut. It turns out that this 1983 performance was so electric and unrepeatable that they used it in the film. It’s a breathtaking moment, one that I’m glad was captured on videotape, and one that I’m glad that brave Japanese pirates have kept on the internet for all of us to see.

Watch it while you can.

JOE REID

Prince’s music video from “Cream” and his MTV Video Music Awards performance of “Gett Off” were a one-two punch of too much sexuality for one pre-teen boy to handle. But they were both too fascinating to ignore. Prince worked on the subliminal and literal levels at the same time, so while the guitar work in “Cream” was a metaphor for sex all on its own, the ass-less pants during the “Gett Off” performance took away all doubt. He was the perfect artist to discover via the medium of music video; to see him was to be endlessly fascinated by him.

MEGHAN O’KEEFE

I came to know Prince through my older sister. She was an avowed music junkie and thought it was part of my education to know Prince’s Greatest Hits. She would play his music ad infinitum until I memorized all the words. When I was old enough, she explained his background, his prolificacy, and how he though sexuality was divine. She explained what “Little Red Corvette” meant when I was a tween. I was not supposed to tell my mother about it.
However, on film, the biggest Prince moment for me was not in one of his own films. I began to understand the power of his music without directly hearing it. There’s a classic scene in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere sneaks in on Julia Roberts character taking a bubble bath. It’s the first time he’s seen her in a position where she’s not catering to anyone else. She’s sublimely happy and signing along with Prince’s “Kiss.” It could be super sensual, but in fact, she’s so tone deaf, it’s silly. And yet, this is the moment when she really charms him. It’s her pure abandon and completely earnest soul that hooks him in. When she catches him watching, she is immediately embarrassed and tries to joke it off. “Don’t you just love Prince?” “More than life itself,” is his response.

That’s the power of great music: it’s the foundation of emotion in every form — in real life and on the big screen. Prince was a master of it.