Ned's Atomic Link Bin: 25 Must-Read Prince Reactions and Remembrances

Writer's note: Greetings! My name’s Ned Raggett, occasional music writer for a variety of spots. The Cream approached me to talk a bit about interesting music news, think pieces, longreads and more from the previous week. And some actual music too, strangely enough. You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator. Welcome to the column, and hope you enjoy!

Prince more than deserves a full Link Bin’s worth of reactions on nothing but him following the tragic news of April 21. And honestly I wanted to turn this into something as truly exhaustive as my Bowie column back in January, with any number of subsidiary links and a further separate Tumblr post. But as I told some friends on Facebook as the rolling tide of reaction came in, much as I wanted to, I’m feeling done, like it’s just a terrible toll that continues to get worse on top of all the other deaths that have marked this year alone, still barely one-third through. John Peel famously said Roy Orbison’s death felt like someone bricking up one of his windows; with Prince gone, it’s more like the foundations of my place are destroyed and they’re salting the earth. So please consider this simply the merest, small sampling of what emerged last week after the news broke.

A Transformative Artist Known as Prince

As noted, there was no greater story than the passing of one of popular music’s most inspired geniuses — like Bowie, Prince woodshedded early on in one decade, dominated another, then, even when things moved away from him on the commercial front, still held pride of place among the swarms of artists — not just musical — who emerged in his profound, deep wake as he continued to record and perform as he chose. So sudden and shocking was his death at 57 that practically nobody had any kind of pre-set obituary to offer. One of the first came courtesy of Danielle Belton at the Root, paying careful attention to his later days as much as his earlier ones.

Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, Prince’s reach went beyond just music. He was also quietly known for his activism. After Hurricane Katrina, he produced two songs for disaster-plagued New Orleans, and shortly after civil unrest in the city of Baltimore, Prince came to the torn city to perform his #Rally4Peace concert in 2015. Proceeds from the concert went to various youth groups in the city.

There are so many more things that can be said of Prince: his ageless looks, his innovation in the music industry when during his Musicology Tour in 2004, he gave away copies of his album with the concert tickets to the now defunct NPG Music Club, which got fans in touch with his music, and exclusive concert tickets, online. He played his largest audience ever — 140 million — in 2007 during Super Bowl XLI where he literally performed “Purple Rain” in the rain. He was known for his pop-up, surprise, late-night shows when he would sometimes play his hits (and sometimes not). And never one to settle down, Prince was on tour shortly before he was found dead in his home.

Alfred Soto, again on his blog, offered up one of the first attempts to try and capture the sheer range of musical impact and more that Prince made over his life.

So vast is Prince’s catalog that what sounded like tinsel starts to show pink around the cheeks at unexpected times. With the exception of James Brown, I can’t think of a catalog less intimidating. Prince unlike Miles Davis was fun. Cream sh-boogie-bop. Morning noon and night you give me head. The rumble of the Linn drum. The flock of swooping multitracked harmonies that he learned from Joni Mitchell. The bass in The Time’s “777-9311.” His drumming on “Tambourine.” The use of space in “Let’s Have a Baby,” a track from 1996’s Emancipation that also doesn’t get much love. He found no joy in repetition but he repeated joy, unceasingly. As musicians age and their craft improves their inspiration wanes. Prince’s last few albums going back to 2007’s Planet Earth are the exceptions. The untainted purity of his falsetto and the rigor with which he directed his bands signified his commitment to wringing the fresh and the occasionally strange from the rote. And “Chelsea Rodgers” is a banger — and it’s mine, got it?

The following day, Michaelangelo Matos, one of many critics from Minneapolis for whom Prince was an eternal lodestone, offered up his own extensive overview for MTV of the artist’s life and work, touching on many highlights and noting the grim sorrow that such an abrupt end brings.

One reason Prince’s death hits so hard is that in recent years he seems to have been coming to terms with his own legacy. Last month, he announced that he was working on a memoir titled The Beautiful Ones with Paris Review web editor Dan Piepenbring, due out next fall. Since January, Prince had been on a hit-and-run-style solo tour dubbed Piano & A Microphone, the genius sitting with an iPad and a keyboard he occasionally ran through pedals, à la his old LinnDrum, while he played through hits and sundry favorites. At those shows — the last of which he played in Atlanta just a week before his death — he discussed the music openly and with real candor: Introducing “Raspberry Beret” at a preview show at Paisley Park, he gave former keyboardist Lisa Coleman credit for hipping him to Bill Evans, then demonstrated by playing her harpsichord line: “That’s the whole song, right?” he said.

Chris Molanphy wrote for Slate about Prince’s unusual but overarching form of pop dominance during his main '80s stretch — even while not having as many chart-topping hits as contemporaries, his combination of hyperactivity, songwriting contributions and direct homages paid to him ensured his omnipresence.

What gave Prince an edge over all those artists was his sheer prolificness. Starting with his debut For You (No. 163, 1978), for the next decade-and-a-half, Prince scarcely let a year go by without an album release, and beginning with his self-titled sophomore disc (No. 22, 1979), all 13 studio albums were gold or platinum hits. (The one year Prince “skipped,” 1983, he was busy mining hits from the late-1982 album1999, a two-LP set.) Compare this furious pace to the album-release schedules of Jackson (four studio albums from 1979 to 1991), Madonna (five studio discs and two soundtracks from 1983 to 1992), and Springsteen (six studio albums and a live set from 1980 to 1992), and Prince was more than keeping up simply by flooding the zone. And that’s leaving aside all the songs that remain in his storied “vault.”

“I’m Not Even Going To Say Rest in Peace Because It’s Bigger than Death.” On his personal Tumblr, Frank Ocean spoke with passion about Prince’s multileveled impact on his as a songwriter and performer. (The all-caps are how he typed the entry out.)

HE WROTE MY FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME, ‘WHEN YOU WERE MINE’. IT’S A SIMPLE SONG WITH A SIMPLE MELODY THAT MAKES YOU WISH YOU THOUGHT OF IT FIRST, EVEN THOUGH YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE - A FLIRTATIOUS BRAND OF GENIUS THAT FEELS APPROACHABLE. HE WAS A STRAIGHT BLACK MAN WHO PLAYED HIS FIRST TELEVISED SET IN BIKINI BOTTOMS AND KNEE HIGH HEELED BOOTS, EPIC. HE MADE ME FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE WITH HOW I IDENTIFY SEXUALLY SIMPLY BY HIS DISPLAY OF FREEDOM FROM AND IRREVERENCE FOR OBVIOUSLY ARCHAIC IDEAS LIKE GENDER CONFORMITY ETC. HE MOVED ME TO BE MORE DARING AND INTUITIVE WITH MY OWN WORK BY HIS DEMONSTRATION - HIS DENIAL OF THE PREVAILING MODEL…HIS FIGHT FOR HIS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY - ‘SLAVE’ WRITTEN ACROSS THE FOREHEAD, NAME CHANGED TO A SYMBOL… AN ALL OUT REBELLION AGAINST EXPLOITATION.

Geoff Edgers interviewed Gibbons for the Washington Post, the latter revealing a late-night conversation about guitars and playing the two had by chance some years ago in New York as well as his unstinting praise and admiration for Prince’s skills and inspiration.

We can only surmise that there were a great number of hours in private where he was developing ways to approach the guitar that ultimately led to his prowess over the instrument. I bring this up over the years. My friendship with Prince was made known. There was hardly a day that went by if Prince’s name came up in the conversation, little did they give credit to his guitar playing. It was more about the flash. The showiness. There are a few repeatable examples that were fortunately caught on film or record that will settle the score once and for all. When I sat down with Prince that fateful evening in Manhattan, he was really touched by the fact that I knew quite a bit of his guitar playing … It was so funny because there was a legion of Brazilian carnival dancers that had invaded the club and they had taken over the bar. They were dancing on the bar … this was all going on in the background. Prince was unfettered. He just wanted to talk about playing.

While not a native son like Prince, Mould remains identified with Minneapolis due to his time there in Husker Du and after. In town by chance for two upcoming solo dates, Mould remembered, via a Facebook post, their respective eighties scenes and beyond, a salute from one giant of music to another.

I had the pleasure of spending seven days recording the basic tracks for my first solo album at Paisley Park in December 1988. It was the most professional studio I had ever seen at that point in my life. On the seventh day, I moved from the B room to Studio A, which was Prince's primary room. I remember seeing Sheila E's percussion in one of the isolation booths. The large control room was decorated with several of Prince's scarves. It certainly felt like Prince's home.

Prince was an artist through and through – always pushing himself to new levels, often creating controversy through his actions and words, and ultimately creating a lifetime of wonderful memories for the world with his incredible volumes of published (and unheard) works.

In Rolling Stone, another famous Minneapolis musician remembered Prince encounters over time, and how his personal touches could emerge in the most private of contexts.

The first time I met him was at a urinal at a nightclub in St. Paul. There he was, and I said, "Hey, what's up?" And he answered, "Life." One word: "life." And I can't say that we went on to be pals. But we did record a lot at Paisley Park, and he became comfortable enough to grace us with his presence, not bejeweled and not dressed up. He'd be wearing maybe his jammies and sweat pants or maybe a pear of jeans and sneakers. He could sort of just hang out. He may have been a little more normal than he would've liked people to know. That's the treasure that we got, to be able to sit in the big atrium where you're taking a break and Prince shuffles by in his slippers and makes some popcorn in the microwave. My sister's a disc jockey, and he would pass by and say, "Tell your sister hi for me." People like to paint him as a reclusive this or that; I think he was genuinely truly, truly shy. But one thing says a lot about him: I was there making a solo record a few years later, and I got a message that said that my friend had just died. I was truly rattled, and the next time I went back into the studio, he had filled it up with balloons. Now I'm gonna cry.

In Rolling Stone, Keith Harris reported from the vigils outside Paisley Park Studios, where Prince passed away, and the city’s famed First Avenue venue, site of numerous Prince performances over the years and immortalized in his iconic Purple Rain film.

Staff instantly scold anyone who snaps a photo while standing along the fence. "Out of respect for the family," they say, all pictures must be taken from behind a barricade across the street from the fence, where the media are gathered in tents. Well, it just wouldn't be a Prince event without some rules – after all, when he allowed the public to watch him perform at Paisley Park, he banned not just photography but cell phones and alcohol, prohibitions that bouncers vigorously enforced.

Compared to the First Avenue contingent, many of these mourners are younger and more openly tearful. There are weeping teen girls in purple lipstick, and more families too, with somber parents wrangling children who have no idea why they're standing in a blocked off street, peering over barricades like they're at a parade. Again, what's striking is the hush. Again, there's no music.

Harris also wrote for the Pitch about Prince’s impact on their joint hometown, and how for all this tours and stints around the world there was only one place that was home — and how important that was.

Like his rival for Reagan-era stardom Bruce Springsteen, Prince recognized that every superhero has an origin story, and Minneapolis was both his Krypton and his Smallville. If Bruce had to struggle to transform Jersey from punchline to poignance, Prince was more fortunate: He worked on a blank slate. The year that Purple Rain came out—1984—Minneapolis was known for what? The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a former vice president who would go on that November to secure one fewer electoral vote than McGovern had?

Maybe no one in the rest of America really believed that Prince came from a town where stylish black musicians hustled for dominance of a thriving party scene, but they didn't had any image of Minneapolis to compare it to. Prince invented himself by inventing Minneapolis. And now, every performer who walks onstage at the First Avenue Mainroom—in other words, almost every notable performer of the past 30 years—walks out onto Prince's stage, and more than a few of them have noted that over the years, almost always with nervous excitement.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib wrote for MTV about Prince’s famed Super Bowl halftime appearance in 2007, a singular moment where all the pre-game hype and circumstance actually paid off in the end thanks to his breathtaking performance — and a little help from the weather.

The crown jewel, of course, is what ended the performance: a glowing, towering performance of “Purple Rain.” That moment forced me to imagine a world in which this was the Super Bowl itself. I saw all of the players, coaches, and cheerleaders bowing at the feet of Prince and going home, letting football take the rest of the night off in a show of respect. There are times when the night pushes against the clock and time slows down: when you lock eyes across the room with someone who you think you could love. When a football is thrown down a field and into an end zone where a mass of bodies await its descent. When Prince leans into a microphone and generously asks, “Can I play this guitar?” as if there could be anything other than one million affirmative answers. A sheet blowing up from the front of the stage until Prince is only a silhouette making beautiful noise. There is no moment like this one in any other halftime show, before it or since. Prince, only a shadow, putting his hands to an instrument and coaxing out a song within a song. And of course there was still rain, beads of it covering the camera lens from every angle, drops of it covering the faces of people in the front row, and still none of it visible on Prince himself. And of course there were two doves scattering themselves above Prince’s head when the sheet came down and he was whole, in front of us again, walking back to the mic and asking: “Y’all wanna sing tonight?”

Van Jones appeared on CNN with a passionate interview about his friendship with the musician and wrote an accompanying piece about the many sides to him that he saw over the years, touching on intellectual interests, political activism and the lighter side.

Prince was immensely charitable — giving away lots of money anonymously. As a Jehovah's Witness, he was not allowed to boast about his donations. But he helped causes as diverse as public radio, Green For All, the Harlem's Children's Zone and Black Lives Matter. More importantly, he made lots of calls behind the scenes to get people to act on causes that needed attention. He would see something in the news, and start calling people — "We need to do something about this." He was kind of the like the 911 of the celebrity class.

Steven Thrasher wrote for the Guardian on Prince’s near-unique impact on conceptions of black masculinity in the popular sphere, providing open ways of conceiving of sexuality, identity and individuality beyond oppressive stereotypes from any number of sources.

My father was a loud and outspoken black man, but he didn’t have much material wealth to show for it. Black people who’d “made it”, I was starting to see, were supposed to be as grateful as Oprah Winfrey to the corporate machine that gave them wealth. But like baseball player Curt Flood, who famously said, “a well-paid slave is still a slave”, Prince was willing to talk about the exploitation of the professional black artist and he refused to play anyone’s game or to act with gratitude. Choosing a symbol, (and one that fused the icons for male and female), meant journalists couldn’t even print his old name anymore. It was, in retrospect, the first time I experienced someone refusing to live under the oppressive binary regime of gender, or to submit to the dominant power’s rules.

Similarly, Michelle Garcia wrote for Vox about Prince’s happy and dedicated working against the grain in so many areas, providing a template for doing just whatever you liked and enjoyed, and what made someone fulfilled.

Prince rocked eyeliner. He wore sequins and rings and skin-tight spandex in the wildest colors imaginable. He strutted like a peacock on the stage and in music videos. He oozed sexuality from posters on the bedroom walls of teenagers across the country.

He was also openly kooky and didn’t care that you made fun of him. When he dropped his name for a symbol in 1993 and went by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, he became fodder for jokes in late night monologues.

But, as he said in 2004 after he went back to Prince, "When I became a symbol, all the writers were cracking funnies, but I was the one laughing. I knew I'd be here today, feeling each new album is my first."

How Prince Taught Me About Female Sexuality Nichole Perkins wrote for Buzzfeed on a common theme expressed across Facebook, Twitter and more from any number of female fans — how Prince’s enthusiasm for all things sexy and sexual was liberating, even with his moments of less-than-enlightened views accounted for.

Prince still has moments where he wags his finger at a woman because of her choices, but then I think of “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” from the 1987 album Sign O’ the Times. It’s a song so important to me that I have a line of its lyrics tattooed around my left ankle. In it, Prince’s alter ego Camille sings in the perspective of a man who wonders if becoming a woman would lead to a closer relationship with his current female lover. Again, Prince disrupts heteronormative ideals of masculinity by being willing to change genders for more significant connection, the kind shared between women.

It’s hard to reconcile the Prince of gender-fluidity with the one who refuses to comment on same-sex marriage. I’ve overlooked his bouts of hypocrisy and sexism to concentrate on what I’ve learned from his music over the years. With his music, I gave myself permission to be bold and shameless in my desires. As a Southern woman, I’ve grown up dancing to a lot of music that directly contradicts my feminist beliefs, like bass and bounce. Lyrics demanding women to pop their pussies or guaranteeing material goods in exchange for satisfactory sex fly directly in the face of the idea that a woman is more than her body and sexuality. It’s not enough to shrug off the misogynistic verses simply because of a good beat. Not only did I give myself permission to speak freely about sex, I also had to allow myself to be a complex person who enjoys flawed artists and their art.

At NPR, Ann Powers reflected similarly on Prince’s resonance and invitation to women on multiple levels — not merely objects of desire but direct participants in his lyrics and performances, as well as participants in the music he created for himself and for others.

Some of Prince's most influential songs, including the ecstatic "When Doves Cry" (famously described by the musicologist Nancy J. Holland as an aural depiction of female jouissance), the blues-honoring "Darling Nikki" and the contemplative "Joy in Repetition," clearly aimed to give musical space to women's sexual desire — something many male musicians have sought to stimulate but few have studied with real curiosity and sympathy. Prince often talked about having a female alter ego, or even (to Oprah!) having a spirit of indeterminate sex living within him. He gave this being a voice and even a name, Camille; recording his vocals at a slow speed and then adjusting it to reach a higher pitch, he unleashed her spirit in songs like "Strange Relationship" and on an unreleased 1986 album bearing her name. While such experiments added to his reputation as an eccentric, throughout his recordings he reached for sounds and song forms that transformed the worst impulses of cock rock and pimp-daddy R&B into energies that were equally intense but far more welcoming. That's not to say Prince didn't love raunch — he could lick his guitar like no one else — but he felt that every human should have equal access to it, and that required recasting his machismo as a universal, gender-expansive force.

In the New Statesman, Tracy King delved deeper into Prince’s well known work with both female musicians as collaborators as well as band members, and the importance that had for those looking to work as musicians themselves.

Wearing a perfectly fitting flared three-piece suit instead of his sequinned catsuits, he spent the first half of the gig on a stool with an acoustic guitar and microphone, and my god he could play. At that point in my life I was spending a lot of time in the bass and acoustic guitar shop my partner managed, so I saw a lot of skilled musicians. World-class touring session musicians buying top of the range Lowdens and Martins with eye-watering price tags of up to five figures. Guitarists who played on hit singles but whose names you’d never know because they were the talent behind the *talent*. Prince was a better guitarist than any of those guys (for guys they were, without exception). And with him, Rhonda Smith. A female bass player who was on that stage on merit and merit alone. You have to be the best to play with the best. Prince hired the best, because he was the best.

Let’s Work On Medium, Jes Skolnik, referencing both Prince and Bowie, talked about how their approach and vision — and visuals — helped to provide multiple levels of comfort and inspiration as an artist and as a person sometimes struggling with a vision of the gendered self.

These men — who were wholly male, yet who represented a kind of masculinity that did not reject femininity — taught me to understand my own clumsy lack of gender. They helped me own my sexual power — yes, you too can be sexy as hell, even if your body isn’t what people expect or even what you expect. Yes, you can move, and you can fuck with delight when you do it on your own terms. You do not have to perform sexuality, no matter how persistently society demands it of you. You can live it. And even though he was straight and he became notorious for homophobia later in life (thanks, evangelical Christianity), to me (and a lot of other queer kids) Prince’s freaky, funky, shady style said more about who I was than pretty much any lesbian icon I had available to me at the time (Joan Jett aside). Someday I will write the definitive Wendy and Lisa biography, because no other musical dykes have meant as much to me over the years. (It’s of note that those two have described Prince as a “fancy lesbian.” Yes, absolutely.)

At MTV, Jane Coaston similarly explored Prince as a connecting force to her own sexuality and how he provided such a welcoming way in for so many to identify with.

Prince wasn’t effortless. Everything about Prince was the result of a lot of hard work, and thought, and a large closet. Prince would never just put on a pair of jeans. Prince wasn’t Springsteen, wasn’t Kurt Cobain. Prince WOULD wear a full leather suit and stare soulfully out at a Minnesota river, looking fabulous as hell. Prince was what happens when you create yourself exactly as you want to be and you just don’t give a single solitary fuck what anyone else thinks about it. He crafted himself in his own image, brick by brick. I can’t think of a better way to explain being queer.

What It Was Like to Get Schooled By Prince Melissa Maerz remembered for EW her stint in Minneapolis as a local music editor and her encounters with Prince, including a conversation that ended abruptly as he left with the slam of a door, followed by a staredown while Alicia Keys played a show.

Now… it’s possible that I was reading this wrong. Alicia Keys was on stage – why would his attention be on me? Then again, the whole night felt so surreal that nothing was out of the question. Why would Prince care what a 22-year-old journalist from a small local alt-weekly thought about him? No one who mattered was reading my column. Why would he take time out from this epic three-night party to talk to me?

Since then, I’ve learned that every music writer in Minneapolis has a story like this. I used to think it proved that Prince was obsessed with power, to the point where he even needed to prove to underlings like me that he could control his message. But maybe there is no subtext. Maybe Prince just genuinely wanted us to understand each other. I wonder if he saw a young journalist and thought, I am going to treat this person the same way I would treat someone from a national magazine, and in return, maybe she will treat me with the same respect.

A swathe of critics and writers offered up short personal stories on Third Bridge Creative about Prince, his impact, their memories, a kaleidoscopic swirl that confirmed that the unpinnable-down figure of “I Would Die 4 U” was in many ways exactly that.

Prince finally made it to Australia in May 1992. He completely tore the place apart and when not recording or late night jamming or playing concerts, he was making a film, hiring crews as he went along. One of the people he picked up was my girlfriend’s sister, Jane. She was given the usual instructions to not talk to the artist, don’t look at him etc. Jane, being both gay and very Australian, didn’t care much for the showbiz side of things. She was just a very good cinematographer. There was no script, so scenes were created on purple whims and everyone just went along. Early in the piece, Prince set up a scene and after Jane had lit and prepared everything, despite protocol, she said, “Do you want to look at this through the camera?” Prince was taken aback. “Can I?” he asked, apparently fearful of crossing an artistic/ industrial line. “Sure,” said Jane. “It’s your film, you’re paying for it.” For all the hype and the mystery, Prince was very modest and respectful of people doing creative work. And he had a sense of humor. — Toby Creswell

My girlfriend shouted, “Prince died?!” and I’m here stunned, semi-numbed, and rushed with myriad emotions. Feelings resurged from a moment when the King of Pop left the face of this earth—prematurely, unmatched, and legendary. Hmm, my verbatim reaction? Not entirely, but close. I scrolled down News Feed and my eyeballs were playing tricks on me, I assured myself. So I took a break from this Guns N’ Roses long-form piece, celebrated 4/20 a day late, accepted my what I saw, and flashed back to the time when I was a part of Tijuana’s flea market lifestyle. A booth adjacent, I am hanging out with the TV retailers who are live-airing 1991’s VMAs performances. A cluster of us kids and preteens gather around. And there he is, the Purple Prince in all of his flamboyant, androgynous glory. Donning a yellow, floral cutout bodysuit, he’s getting funky to “Get Off” with a full-on backing band that provides soulful vocals and lusty grunts. It was an image of ultra swag and über-fluidity, and as I was a Mexican kid from a traditional family, a performance that would change me forever. When I got older, from the time I entered middle school and on, songs like “When Doves Cry” and “Purple Rain” have resonated with me as nothing less than majestic. — Isabela Raygoza

On her personal blog, writer/musician Keidra Chaney let loose the day after Prince’s death with a short, emotional stirring of the memories of what was shown, and what was lost.

I swore I wasn’t going to “think piece” Prince, and I don’t think that’s what this is, but after a 2016 of crushing musical losses, this was the one that broke me in two. I do love Prince, but I am not a superfan. I don’t have an enyclopedic memory of all of his b-sides and unreleased tracks (that’s Nine Inch Nails for me) But Prince was one of the first musicians that really made me want to devour it, envelope myself in it. He was one of the first artists that led me to start a relationship with music — as a listener, a fan, and later a musician — and to take that relationship seriously. I remember my sister (I think it was my sister) telling me that he played all of the instruments on his first album and how quietly awed I was at that, that music was this special gift for him, this superpower.

Prince knew how to channel ambiguity through music like NO NOBODY ELSE. I get a particular thrill when I hear “Let’s Go Crazy” – it’s really the most gleefully fatalistic song, and being a gleefully fatalistic person, even as a child, this spoke to me. From that beginning organ swell, it’s this almost unbearable buildup of elation, fear, anxiety – all of these things at once, and it culminates in that final, explosive wail…”TAKE ME AWAY!” It’s like feeling my chest explode. It puts into the universe that love of life and fear of death that I thought about but couldn’t articulate. He was answering questions I was afraid to ask. That’s some hardcore shit for a kid, but it showed me what music can do to you, for you, when it’s powerful.

The amount of further tributes, remembrances, analyzes and so forth that I could name is, as noted at the start, endless. I’ll end with two pieces — first, by one of the biggest Prince fans I know, and this is among a bunch of Prince obsessives to start with — Simon Price, for the Quietus.

Prince leaves us no Blackstar, no coded farewell to the world. As far as the world knows, he had no inkling of his own imminent demise, even if, inevitably, the cryptic lyrics of the song 'Revelation' on his most recent release, HITnRUN Phase Two, will be pored over by Prince-watchers for clues.

Equally inevitably, if there's any silver lining to the devastating news of Prince's death, it's that his old albums will sell by the truckload, as was the case with Bowie, and younger musicians may start to investigate his unparalleled back catalogue, and be emboldened and inspired to follow the example of a true individualist who never compromised, and followed his own muse to the very end.

Nothing compares.

The second, from Andrea Swensson, reporter for the Current, Minneapolis’s public radio station, and a favorite station of Prince’s over the years. She and Prince were acquainted, and she was one of the first on the scene, helping provide extensive coverage the full day. Her heartfelt remembrance two days later conclude:

The thing that makes me angry is that we don’t even know how much we’ve lost. There’s no way to quantify it. Prince wasn’t done.

He knew that he had mastered the guitar, that he could scorch us with it so effortlessly that it was practically boring to him, and wanted to figure out how to do the same thing on the piano. His dad inspired him to play the piano all those years ago when he was living off Olson Memorial Highway, and he wanted to make his dad proud.

He knew he wanted to share his life’s journey and narrate it on his own terms. I couldn’t wait to read his memoir. I hope he got something down before he left. He never allowed his conversations to be recorded and refused traditional interviews, so his narrative gets passed to person to person like folklore. There are so many books about Prince, but most don’t manage to get their facts straight from page to page, much less between the author’s imagination and reality.

The thing that makes me sad is that people are getting even thirstier for Prince now, searching for answers, wanting to figure out why. I feel this bizarre desire to protect him. I don’t know Prince, but I truly believe that he was able to remain so sensitive, so connected to that other plane, because he was fiercely protective of his privacy and his agency. I don’t know Prince, but I cringe when I see people describe him like he came from outer space, and wish they could see his quiet tenderness and humanity.

The world feels entitled to Prince, and we are so honored he claimed us here in Minneapolis. The whole city is mourning, and my heart aches as I look out on the skyline and wait for it to turn purple. Even with the radio off I can hear him ringing in my ears. I have so much else I want to say, but it wouldn’t be enough.

Good night, sweet Prince. It’s such a shame our friendship had to end.

And for a closing video? The song I turned to when the news hit.

, but just play it and enjoy.