Eulogy for a Symbol

Every single music lover has one special artist. That person who speaks to them deeply, an artist who has a song for every emotion and every feeling a human being is capable of. For me, that person was Prince. Today, my hero has departed this plane of existence. At about the time I entered junior high, I discovered Prince’s The Hits / The B-Sides collection. Like the people who actually grew up during his reign in the 80s, I discovered an artist with a talent so immense that his B-sides collection just sounded like more hits. Hit after hit, for artist after artist. It was absolutely stacked in ways that I couldn’t comprehend. From that point on I did what any obsessive teenager does – I scoured the internet, local record stores and everywhere I could to get my hands on more of Prince’s music. If I open my music library right now, I have a genre called Mplsound. As in, Minneapolis-sound, a genre of music he created. A type of music that combined the best things of so many genres into an insane pop-funk-rock-dance-R&B hybrid. That genre listing of Mplsound contains 6,712 items as of this very second. That is close