A Retrospective--City Pages, local Minneapolis alternative news weekly, recently celebrated it's 20th anniv. It culled its archives and shared with it's reading public, a history of sorts. It collected snippets, blurbs and other information from the past 20 years and published it. I thought the 2 decade retropective of Prince popping up in it's covers was kinda interesesting. Granted this is not EVERY reference of Prince - but a nice cross section of good, bad and the ugly.



"In the late Seventies, the two friends from grade school were first musically united when keyboardist Harris joined Flyte Tyme, a band led by bassist/vocalist Lewis. Before and after Harris joined, Flyte Tyme didn't play around that much because only a few clubs would book them even though they played all the popular black tunes of the day. Prince chroniclers have commented on how smart the kid was to not play around Minneapolis, instead taking his act straight to the major labels and make his shows special events.



However, Prince and the acts that followed them ... went right to the top because nobody at the bottom--local radio, press, and clubs--would give them the time of day...
That ignorance of what local black musicians were doing bothers Harris in retrospect, but at the time Prince set an example that inspired other acts. "[W]e said, 'That's the way to go.' So rather than pouring all your money that you'd make from gigs into band equipment, you'd put it into going into a studio and doing a demo tape. It just changed everybody's perspective." - Michael Welch, April 22, 1987



Prince's ballads--the ones that last year made girls of all ages squeal with dee-light at his premiere concert--seem for now to be his forte... What we have here is genius unfolding. Prince is still in the bud. Where else do you think a groove got started? - Frank Schwartz, December 1979



Clad only in matching zebra-striped vest and briefs, high-heeled boots, and thigh-high stockings, Prince prances about the Orpheum stage like a stripped-down version of Gene Simmons in a drag show...



At the time of the first interview, he shunned local radio... When asked to name musicians and songwriters whose work he admires, he came up with Joni Mitchel, Janis Ian, and then randomly listed names off the top of his head, like he was dialing a car radio in search of a sound. Nobody he mentioned was black. - Martin Keller, January 21, 1987



This brazen little genius from Minneapolis is such hot stuff that I, for one, have no doubt he'll take over the world. It's not too early to claim two honest-to-God musical history makers from Minnesota: Dylan and Prince. - Randy Anderson, March 18, 1981



Honoring Koerner, Ray & Glover after all these years as the Best Folk Group was a bit of collective inspiration on the part of the voters. And the sight of these three aging West Bankers clad in their street duds presenting the Best Musician Award to Prince was indeed a rare, incongruous moment... There His Royal Badness stood in a swashbuckling pose among his band members, sporting different-colored cowboy boots, wrap-around shades, a shirt open to the navel, and the familiar studded trench coat. "When will they give the award for the Best Ass?" Prince quipped as the crowd roared out with a standing oh. - Martian Colour, May 27, 1982



[N]obody has it that perfect, nobody wears purple shiny plastic Revolutionary War coats around the house. Nobody's baby cums all day and all night... That's just high school cool gone mad.



Look who comes to your birthday party. Microskirts and chains. Black white girls and white black girls... Chilly groovers with hostile intentions. Look-alikes who imitate you like hollow canyons. Clockwork purple. See, no matter how princely you be, we've been fed this entree before. If you sell us this hero sandwich and we find out it's dead meat, we're gonna be mad. Or we're gonna be broken-hearted. Again. Maybe we'll kill you, and maybe we'll just shed you like yesterday's worn-out costume... Give it up and introduce yourself as a human instead of a divine ghost. Tell us why your are not home tonight blowing out candles.



Happy birthday, Prince. You're gonna need it. You've created yourself and you've created us in your own image, and you've got the hardest job in the world. - Greg Linder, June 13, 1984



Sex is supposed to be the driving obsession at the heart of Prince's records, but it's really always been community: how to belong, how to overcome loneliness. Sex is just part of that equation. The prodigious urge to merge in his early music may have sounded like hedonism pure and simple -- sometimes it was -- but more often it was a matter of struggling to get outside one's own skin for a while. - Steve Perry, August 22, 1990



Prince's post-show party at Paisley Park, "A Lovesexy Affair," provided a beautiful example of the kind of dichotomy common to the music business. On one hand, the gala was a full-on, star-studded bash; a place to eat, drink, gawk, and rock. On the other hand, it was a bunch of people standing around a parking lot in Chanhassen in the middle of the night. (The Muppet were using the sound stage, so the party was set up in tents.) I never saw Miles Davis, but people said he was there... Chaka Khan never made it to the stage either, but George Clinton and his lime-green wig did, which was a blast, and Mavis Staples took command when she strolled up. the guy I went with says he danced with Sheena Easton and while I didn't see that either I did see many women wearing their underwear as outerwear and lots of music business biggies getting really drunk and trying to pick them up. Michael Welch, September 21, 1988



Clearly "Automatic For The People" would make a more honest title for Crystal Ball, which marks the ultimate downsizing of Prince's community-building worldview -- from the mythic, all-inclusive "Uptown" in 1980 ("White, black, Puerto Rican/Everybody just a-freakin'"), to the block-busting First Ave., the impenetrable fortress of Paisley Park, the ill-fated Glam Slam and NPG stores, and now, finally, his sweatshop mail-order outlet and Web site peepshows. - Rob Nelson, March 18, 1998



Do rock "critics" dance? I mean, can you imagine Dave Marsh hip-hopping to that 2 Live Crew record he wrote had good beats? Have you seen Jon Bream shaking a leg at a Prince show? And that guy on MTV -- Kurt Loder -- can you imagine him with hips?
I worry about these things, because popular music and dancing runs deep and wide. And how can you say you've experience, say, Public Enemy, if you didn't stop gawking -- even for a moment -- and start translating beats to feets? - Terri Sutton, September 5, 1990



MTV contest giveaways aside, it's easy to see why Prince's Under The Cherry Moon premiered in Sheridan, Wyoming. If you were the director and you'd made a film this bad, you'd premiere it in an obscure place, too. - G.S. Brennan, July 23, 1986



Purple Rain's premise is how a selfish artist finally develops a heart, but the premise is transparently self-serving. So when the [Prince character] finally agrees to perform a song composed by two snubbed members of his band (one he previously and adamantly refused to sing), Prince is having his cake and eating it, too, since he actually wrote the song. - Edward Staiger, August 1, 1987