I once had a girlfriend, a thousand years ago across the continent, who got her dark curly hair cut into an off-center wedge that hung across the right half of her face. She liked to wear purple paisley-pattern dresses, and cut out her own paisley stencil to use in repainting her red 1969 Vespa scooter. She used to talk dreamily about the affair she’d have with Prince someday, which would not jeopardize our relationship — I mean, surely I would understand — and which for some reason involved a house on Lake Geneva. (She and I are still close friends, and in fact she is also a New York journalist now. It wouldn’t be fair to out her in this context.)

I don’t think my friend ever got to have her Swiss escapade with Prince, which sounds like an episode out of an undiscovered Henry James novel, and it’s too late now. Prince Rogers Nelson, formerly the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, one of the most talented, exuberant and profoundly frustrating songwriters and musical performers of our time, was found dead at his Paisley Park complex outside Minneapolis on Thursday. She had a point, though, when it came to my reaction to her proposed liaison: What could I possibly have said? At the peak of his powers, Prince was an ambiguous, erotic figure of tremendous potency and protean symbolism. I’m not a woman, he sang to us in 1984. I’m not a man/ I am something that you’ll never understand.

Prince was not a generation-spanning, culture-shaping genius who transcended or transformed all questions of style and genre, as the late David Bowie was. He was a massive influence on one micro-generation — which happens to be mine — and something of a mixed and mysterious legend to those younger or older. He recorded and released too much music too fast and too carelessly, to the point that the albums he made after about 1994 (at the latest) often feel like the work of a different and far less focused artist. His struggles with religion, the Internet, his fans, and record companies and promoters became a bigger part of the story than his recordings or performances.

None of that was unique in the annals of pop music, to be sure, but Prince was such an outsize talent and — how do I put this on the day of his death? — such a challenging personality that everything about his story felt exaggerated. In any case, the similarities between Prince and Bowie are unavoidable, and I feel certain the two artists studied each other’s musical output and mercurial personas with fascination. The fact that the former was not quite the latter reflected various things, from race and nationality to timing and temperament, but definitely not a lack of talent or ambition. Prince was a prodigious natural musician who could play almost any instrument and sing in any male vocal range from falsetto to baritone. If Bowie was a relentless chameleon who experimented with every possible style, Prince was the ultimate pop synthesist of his era. While the mixture of rock and funk was pretty much atmospheric in the 1980s, few hitmakers of that decade understood both genres as deeply as Prince did.

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This article was written by Andrew O'hehir from Salon and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Pansexual ? I don't think so!

Pansexuals.... so how right now.

"...slapdash 'Lovesexy'" !

OK. This suggests a sensibility that is not well-gifted for appreciating music. Or a resentful man. Or both.

ETHERSPIN said: