I’m a little freaked out, because last weekend I found my Batdance cassette I used to listen to in my Mom’s car back in the day. Not even sure how it ended up on a high shelf in the kitchen closet, but it probably sat there undisturbed for two decades. I took it as a good omen, because of the happy memories attached to it.
I was also musing last week that MST3K made a lot of Prince references. Of course they were both based in Minnesota.
I recently had do a bit of search for the Batdance video to make a point about just how wacky it was. This was made difficult by The Artist formally known as the Artist formally known as Prince’s stance against allowing his material being free to view on Youtube and other such media organs.
It’s weird for me because he was very important to me during my midteens to midtwenties but I don’t really feel impact or shock at the news in the way I did with Bowie. Possibly because I was buying Bowie records right up to the last moment. The last Prince album I got was Love Symbol (1992).
I know precious little of his work after that point and didn’t really feel a pressing need to investigate it and I can’t for the life of me figure out why either.
It’s possible I’m also suffering from celebrity death fatigue. We have lost so many people in such a short period of time, all of them key players in my life that I’m not sure if I can process these sorts of events anymore in a personal context. Naturally every death is tragic and annoying and I wish consolation on his family and friends. But as a fan I’m not really feeling it.
With so many of my heroes much, much older than Prince I worry that this year will be a Ouija Board party line.