The legendary, category-defying artist Prince died this week at 57, and Slate joined music fans everywhere in mourning. “He didn’t merely combine R&B, rock, electro, funk, jazz, singer-songwriter folk, orchestral pop, and his other influences; he catalyzed them into a new chemistry, a periodic table of Prince elements that countless artists who followed would employ,” as music critic Carl Wilson put it. Prince absolutely ruled the charts in the ’80s, not just through his own music but in all the songs he wrote for the other artists and all the other songs that his singular style influenced, Chris Molanphy remembered. And Jack Hamilton spotlighted “Little Red Corvette” as the singer’s masterpiece. (For all these reasons, it’s particularly disappointing that his music isn’t readily available for streaming on services such as Spotify and YouTube.)
Prince was also ahead of his time in his embrace of gender fluidity as well as in the way he championed female artists. His poetic, surreal lyrics; his rivalry with Michael Jackson; his Minneapolis roots; that time he changed his name to a symbol—there’s so much lore to the Prince myth and so many stories to celebrate, even as we’ve lost one of music’s greatest ever live performers. Read all of Slate’s Prince coverage here.
If you have the energy to think about anything non-Prince-related, a few more links from the week in culture:
- Two new miniseries that tinker with the Euro thriller
- Why fans should be happy that Hamilton has critics
- Is it time to declare Better Call Saul better than Breaking Bad?
- A clever novel about the administrative staff behind a superhero group
- How the new live-action Jungle Book deals with Rudyard Kipling’s racism
- What Slate’s Seth Stevenson learned at umpire school
- Why Avatar was better than people grousing about sequels give it credit for
- The hidden history of gaslighting
- Alan Partridge’s attempt to write XTC into history with his memoir
- All the sad, broke, literary men
