Questlove Remembers Prince: In This Life, You’re on Your Own
Later on, I got into the music business myself. I got to meet Prince several times. I roller-skated with him. I went to parties that he threw. But I always felt like a fan, never a peer. I remember once I was at Paisley Park. By this time, Prince was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he didn’t stand for cursing. I slipped up. It wasn’t anything too major. I think I said “shit.” Prince had a curse jar; every curse cost a dollar. “But you’re rich,” he said. “Put in $20.”
“Hey,” I said. “You taught me how to curse when I was little.” People laughed at the joke, but I thought I saw Prince wince a little bit, too, and I walked away wondering if I just confirmed to him that he was justified in taking a hard line. Maybe he actually felt bad that he had turned a generation of kids toward foul language and impure thoughts. I hope not. I was just trying to get out of paying a fine that was justified, for cursing that was probably justified, learned from music that will forever be justified.
Prince was singular in his music. He was his own genre. That same singularity extended to everything. He went the other way in life, too. As he got older, the way he managed his career showed off that contrary streak. It came to the forefront in the way he mastered his records, in the way he handled reissues, in the way he used (or didn’t use) the Internet and online streaming services. In the summer of 2014, his old band, the Revolution, reunited at First Avenue in Minneapolis. They were all set up for him to join in and play. He drove right past. Prince was a great drummer, and he was always marching to his own beat.
“Prince was singular in his music. He was his own genre.”
In moments of extreme sadness, pop-punk psychology may not be welcome, but it sometimes seemed like his need to do things his own way, and only his own way, overtook him. Control was job one to him, which allowed for amazing things in the studio and onstage, unprecedented leaps of inspiration and synthesis and an energy so prolific it seemed like it would never be shut off. But it also suggested that there was a level of mistrust when it came to letting the outside world in.
There is a fictionalized version of this in Purple Rain, where one of the main points of contention throughout the film is whether The Kid (played by Prince) will listen to a song on a cassette given to him by Wendy and Lisa. Eventually he does, and it evolves into “Purple Rain,” and The Kid plays onstage, both as a tribute to his father and a way of making peace with the group. It’s an emotional moment for every character. In real life, it didn’t really happen that way. Sometimes I think that the thing that Prince shared with other geniuses — Ray Charles, Bessie Smith, and James Brown — is that they were abandoned, at some level, by their mothers. Many artists in black music were abandoned by fathers, but an absent mother creates a faultline that runs much deeper.
I don’t know. There’s so much we all don’t know. This is what I do know: Much of my motivation for waking up at 5 a.m. to work — and sometimes going to bed at 5 a.m. after work — came from him. Whenever it seemed like too steep a climb, I reminded myself that Prince did it, so I had to also. It was the only way to achieve that level of greatness (which was, of course, impossible, but that’s aspirational thinking for ya). For the last twenty years, whenever I was up at five in the morning, I knew that Prince was up too, somewhere, in a sense sharing a workspace with me. For the last few days, 5 a.m. has felt different. It’s just a lonely hour now, a cold time before the sun comes up.
Elton John calls Prince the “greatest performer I have ever seen” in a tribute to the deceased musician. Watch here.