Prince, 1958-2016

It was September or October 2006, about a month into my first year at Berkeley, when I saw a new copy of Purple Rain for $5.99 in the discount bin at Rasputin Music. At that point, I knew Prince as a symbol (literally), a revered musical icon, and a Chapelle's Show character, but had never actually listened to his music. I had gotten off to a rocky start to college, and my growing music collection played a substantial role in helping me through. I dug into every corner of the Beatles' back catalog; I continued to wear out the copy of The Eraser I'd bought the previous summer; and after only one or two months I had already spun St. Elsewhere more times than I could count. As I bought music, I'd always intended to listen to Prince, and this particular afternoon seemed as good a time as any.

Sometime towards the end of college – by which time I'd acquired most of the rest of Prince's discography and bought Purple Rain and its otherworldly accompanying poster on LP – I decided to average out that $5.99 over the number of plays or hours I got out of that tinny, mid-80s pressing CD. Though the index card bearing my arithmetic has long since disappeared, by whichever metric I used we were talking about fractions of fractions of a cent per unit. Among the storied peaks of the many discographies I acquainted myself with at the outset of college, Purple Rain resonated with confident, inexhaustible vitality. Today, it's my pick for the best album of the 80s, and certainly one of my 10 favorites ever made – yet it's not without competitors for the title of best album in his catalog.

Prince passed away this morning. In the sense that his health in some way necessitated an emergency plane landing last week, it's not surprising, even for someone as young as 57. And yet the idea remains a shock – perhaps because his transcendent otherness was so immaculately cultivated that it suggested he might, in fact, actually be impervious to such Earthly concerns as death. From his star-making turn dressed in a purple jumpsuit atop a motorcycle, Prince somehow grew more eccentric as he aged, including such highlights as waging war on the internet and fully embracing his extramusical celebrity. Even as he receded from the experimental forefront of popular music, he remained one of its few truly fascinating figures. He announced his memoirs a month ago, and for the first time in my adulthood (with one obvious exception), I remember being genuinely curious to read a musician's full take on their own life. In every aspect of his person, he was one of a kind, and the world is less rich for having lost him.