No, no, no, not Prince - GIFs

Prince is gone. How can death be so cruel? Rest, sweet Prince. We will miss your jams, your style, your uncanny ability to appreciate and distill those that came before you and influenced your singular sound. Such heartbreak over our lost musical geniuses in 2016.

Prince wasn't your typical once-in-a-lifetime musical genius, but a control freak extraordinaire. It was part of his aesthetic. Over the years, I would enjoy finding Prince videos on the Internet just to see how long it would take for his long lace-ruffled arm to reach out and yank them off for violating copyright. He was all-powerful—a nattily styled wizard of sound. Those videos would usually be gone from the Internet anywhere from between 40 minutes to one day after discovery.

What control he had. And he kept releasing the tunes, chug, chug, chug, like Prince's musical factory of sound, all streaming from his head 24/7. No wonder he felt competitive with the Internet. He was so musically astute, he was like a human Internet. You could hear bits of everyone from the history of R&B, pop and rock in the Prince catalog, filtered through his lively mind. He was giving it out on his terms his entire career.

Thank you, Prince. We will miss you terribly.


















I give this video two to three days to exist here. I just have to believe he can still yank it away at will.