The other day I was purifying myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka and I started thinking about all the cruel, I mean, cool things Prince has done to me over the years. You know, when I covered “Nothing Compares 2 U,” I did so without his permission, and he invited me over to his house and started punching me. Because I’m a pacifist, all I could do was spit on him. And then there was this one time when I was hangin’ at Club 3121, and Prince walks up to me and says the club is only for “the select.” I replied that I wish he hadn’t disbanded the Revolution, and then he just went off on me. He took off his purple bandanna, put it around my neck, and said, “Don’t you make me ruin my favorite bandanna by chokin’ the life outta you, sucka.” I said “It’s coo’ … it’s coo’,” and Jerome personally threw me out of the club.
I love Prince!
Seriously, I do love Prince’s music, and have since I first heard him in high school. The album was Controversy, and while my high school soundtrack consisted of a lot of new wave, hard rock, and pop, soul music (which Prince’s music was considered prior to the release of 1999) was not a big genre in my record collection. I remember showing my older brother the Controversy album cover and asking him, “Hey, have you heard this guy?” He pulled out a copy of Dirty Mind from his record collection and said, “Yeah.” Stuck to the cover of his copy was a news story from the Associated Press wire (yellow paper and all) that basically recounted how shocked people were when they heard all the sexual references and noises on Prince’s records. Considering how sexually open many songs are nowadays, it seems kind of quaint to read stories like that. But the early ’80s were another time.
