Different Than the Day Before

I don’t comment much on celebrity deaths. I don’t feel like they belong to me, like they’re mine to mourn, so I don’t want to platitude just to platitude. Prince is different. The outpouring of true remorse, whether for his virtuosity, his influence, or for one or two favorite songs, feels real and unifying. No one’s grief is bigger or smaller or truer or falser. We’re all crushed. Here’s some of the why for me.

I can’t think of Prince without thinking of my mom. She’s the biggest fan I know. When news came across that there was a death being investigated at Paisley Park, I thought “I have to tell her before she hears it from a stranger or casual acquaintance.”

My childhood, like many of peoples, was spent listening to “Raspberry Beret,” “When Doves Cry” and “Little Red Corvette” — the clean stuff — in the car and in the living room on Saturday afternoons. As a little kid, I conflated the woman wearing the secondhand-store raspberry beret with the black-and-white photo of my college-aged mom wearing a beret, undoubtedly from a thrift store. During my stormy tween years, we could still sing along together to Prince (and a handful of other artists). He was common ground, proof that some things bridge generations, and that those things aren’t always safe, sanitary or ritualistic.

But (or maybe “and;” maybe my mom feels similarly, and that’s why she was ok with letting me listen to such sexual music) listening to Prince also taught me that there was more than one way to be a woman. The women in his songs were all different from each other. Most were quirky, but in different ways. Most were brash. Most were boldly sexual and independent. Some were man-eaters, some were tender. Some were friends, some were one-night stands. Most importantly, while some of his songs reflected hurt or bafflement, I never found them contemptuous. He was matter-of-fact about leaving and getting left, hurting and getting hurt, and maybe more importantly about caring for and being cared for. That’s powerful to a girl growing up in a world where most music labels women good or bad, and the more assertive and sexual ones are generally the latter. It would be a stretch to say Prince shaped my feminism (my mom had a lot more to do with that), but he definitely informed it.

So that’s it. That’s why I’m weepy and reflective and listening to Prince nonstop. Plus there’s the obvious: He made a lot of really great music, and now he can’t anymore, and that’s fucking devastating. That’s the part I’ll have trouble recovering from.