Purple Rain
It's been 8 years and 14 days, since Prince passed away. It stung, I mean as far as someone you admired and who was there on your TV, in your house when you were a child but you grew up and realized you would never meet or have anything in common besides a love of music suddenly being gone could hurt you. His death capped the end of my 30s which started with my daughter's birth (definitely the high point) and ended with a mostly off again relationship with a former employer that left me shaken. The decade's end was as empty as the bass line in When Doves Cry. Echoey and cold. Listening to Purple Rain that April was heartbreaking and necessary.
When you're a working mother, balancing a waning work ethic and the desire to start your own company so you don't have to travel if you choose not to, so you can be around more, be present, finding time to self soothe is not a first priority (or third or fourth) but it helps fight the growing specter of failure that lurks in the quiet moments. Music isn't a novel distraction but is always in my pocket. So my collapsing facade of self determination paired quite nicely with grief (along with menacing guilt from a topic that I'm sure I'll address later but is much more serious and deserves its own book) and I can only thank my playlist for keeping me sane. Honestly, I don't know how anyone else started their 40s but it was very typical for me to funnel energy into a cultural moment outside of my own sphere of influence instead of taking a more reflective approach. Kind of like how Darling Nikki draws you into her space and then just takes off without another thought, leaving you there to wonder what the hell just happened.
As an aside, Kevin Smith, my generation's pinnacle indie film director, gave a talk at a college in 2002 that included a 20 minute description ofmeeting Prince which can only be described as the best first hand account of an introduction to an eccentric icon that should be it's own script for a short film. This speech lives rent free in my head still and I rewatched it after Prince passed as a makeshift eulogy. Highly recommend it if you're at all curious what he was up to in his final years.
Needless to say this time of year brings up a lot of memories, and one of those will always be I Would Die 4 U on a loop. Everyone who grew up in the 80s had a Prince memory to share, whether it was a love or hate relationship with Raspberry Beret, going to see Purple Rain in the theater or perhaps a concert you were lucky enough to attend. You remember where you were on April 21, 2016. If you need to know why, Baby, You're A Star...
-N
