When Doves Cry

2016 is shaping up to be quite a year for artists I care about shuffling off of the mortal coil.  First David Bowie, now Prince; just a plea to Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, please keep your doctors appointments.   I have to admit that I am definitely a bit of a shallow fan of Prince's music.  I have Purple Rain like everybody else in the world, but for the most part I sort of admire Prince's music like I admire Jackson Pollock paintings; I like them, but not all the time, and not with complete understanding.
When I was in high school, just starting to play the guitar and basically idolizing Jimi Hendrix, I would often wonder why there weren't any other players out there like Jimi.  I mean we had Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eddie Van Halen, all virtuosos, all amazing, but not quite like Jimi.  Hendrix, to me is the definition of a guitar genius because he changed the way guitars were played.  I remember having some level of angst as a budding guitarist and a fan of music, about how there was no one who pushed the level and range of what could be done with an electric guitar.  Mostly because I wasn't paying attention to freaking Prince.
I now recognize that Prince is a guitar god, he also deliberately remained outside the genre where sheer guitar virtuosity is really put up on a pedestal.  Purple Rain was a bit of a clue, a definitely Hendrix-like bit of driving and rhythmic fuzzed out space guitar with a profoundly simple and undeniably catchy hook, just sort of stretched out with some really hardcore R&B vocals.  It is still one of my favorite songs ever, but like Bowie, Prince refused to just endlessly remake the same song, even if it was great.
In my days of going all fanboy over blues artists like BB King and John Lee Hooker, I was missing out on an artist who was pushing the forms and patterns of that music into a new era.  Partly because the artist himself was changing his name to a symbol and seemed more about posturing and cultivating a weirder-than-thou persona that wasn't cuddly or cute at all.  In fact his androgyny and that aloofness made Prince the person sort of an acquired taste.  I always got the impression that he might be about to spit on somebody, or kiss them, or grind on them, or whatever, he just kind of made me uncomfortable in some of the same ways that Bowie did.
Prince had his moments where he stepped out from behind his weirdness and showed the world that he was all about the music, and that the music he could do was, well pretty much peerless.  When he did the Superbowl halftime show, people were like, "What? Prince at football game?  That doesn't seem right!"  And then he appeared in the driving rain and gave perhaps the single greatest musical performance of Superbowl history.  Let's remember that U2, The Rolling Stones and Sir Paul McCartney have all played the Superbowl halftime show, and Prince puts them all in the rearview, with what amounts to a fairly simple set, where he played a couple of his songs and a couple of other people's songs.
See also, the now infamous performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps (at about 3:25 a dude in a red hat starts making a bunch of guitar type legends look on in awe, the youngish set musician behind Petty, at one point just shakes his head in wonder at what Prince is doing).  This is an example of what Prince could do, but perhaps the most impressive thing about his musical catalog is how little he actually did it.  If I could play like that, I would do nothing but that, all day every day, until my fingers fell off.
Prince was weird, and wonderful, and well, purple, the color or royalty.
Oh and also there is this. (Warning: that video is from Chappelle's Show and has some NSFW, very bad language in it, but if you're a Prince fan... you need to see it, just not with kids or sensitive souls in the vicinity.  Almost as good as the Rick James sketch).