Prince has two new albums out today, bless him — he’s never been one for self-restraint, and that’s one of the reasons we love him, right? Just like everyone else, we’ve been listening to PlectrumElectrum and Art Official Age all morning, and we’ll no doubt be publishing our thoughts on them in due course. In the meantime, though, it seems like a fine time to celebrate music’s most eccentric genius with a survey of his, well, most Princely moments. Read them all and we’ll serve you pancakes afterwards.
10. Prince’s legal team
If you fuck with Prince, you fuck with Prince’s lawyers. And Prince’s lawyers are not to be fucked with. A couple of years ago, he told Billboard about his crack legal team: “I have a team of female black lawyers who keep an eye on [legal] transgressions,” he said. “And you know they’re sharp.” Damn straight.
9. Prince’s documentary stash
If you’re a Kevin Smith fan, you may already be familiar with the above anecdote, wherein he describes how Prince contacted him out of the blue, spoke for ages about being a huge fan of Dogma, and hired him to direct a documentary that has never seen the light of day. The word is, though, that Smith isn’t the first filmmaker to be summoned to Paisley Park to shoot footage of Prince, and that His Purpleness is in fact sitting on a pretty sizable stash of footage that is reserved for his consumption alone. Because why wouldn’t you want a bunch of documentaries about yourself that no one apart from you will ever see?
8. Prince wears this outfit
He used to be a stripper, you know.
7. Prince fires his manager because he’s cold
As everyone knows, Prince is from Minneapolis. It is cold in Minneapolis. Prince does not like to be cold. If you are Prince’s manager, you had best fetch him a space heater when he decides he requires a space heater, no matter how many bazillion other things you are trying to do at the time. If you do not fetch Prince a space heater, he will fire you.
6. Prince changes his name to a symbol
Obviously.
5. Prince redecorates Carlos Boozer’s house
Carlos Boozer is a basketballer. He’ll be playing in Los Angeles this season, but he spent the last decade in Utah and then Chicago, which raised the question of what to do with the palatial mansion he owned in LA. There are not many people who can put down $70k a month in rent, but Boozer happened upon one of them: Prince, who happily shelled out to take the place off Boozer’s hands circa the released of 3121 in 2006.
The thing is, unfortunately, Prince wasn’t so keen on the décor, so he made, y’know, a few alterations. As per the ensuing lawsuit, “Prince/MPG Music violated its eight-month lease by ‘painting the exterior of the [house] with purple striping, ‘prince’ symbol, and numbers 3121.’ Inside the home, among other renovations, a purple monogrammed carpet was installed in the master bedroom and plumbing and piping was added in the downstairs bedroom ‘for water transfer for beauty salon chairs.'” It gets better, too — according to Boozer’s friend and former Duke teammate Jay Williams, the singer also “changed the master bedroom to a hair salon, he changed the streaming blue waters that led to the front door to purple water, he knocked out walls, he changed the molding on top of the ceiling.” Boozer, understandably, was less than pleased, but apparently a check for $1 million put his heart at ease.
4. Prince goes rollerskating
The obligatory Prince anecdote from Questlove’s book Mo’ Meta Blues is, as we’ll see, largely standard fare: Prince randomly summons musician/celebrity for unlikely activity, Prince arrives late, Prince turns out to be batshit crazy. But then, there’s Prince’s roller skates:
Prince was carrying a big briefcase in his hand, and he was acting all mysterious… He clicked the lock and opened it, and took out the strangest, most singular pair of roller skates I had ever seen. They were clear skates that lit up, and the wheels sent a multicolored spark trail into your path. He took them out and did a big lap around the rink. Man. He could skate like he could sing.
3. Prince plays basketball with Charlie Murphy
“Game: blouses.” (It’s all true, apparently — or mostly, anyway.)
2. Prince declares the Internet “over”
If you’ve been living on this planet for the last 20 years, you’d probably be happy to admit that, yeah, this Internet thing has kinda caught on. Unless, that is, you’re Prince: “The Internet’s completely over,” he pronounced to British tabloid The Daily Mirror in 2010. (That didn’t stop him from joining Twitter three years later, in all the grammatically questionable glory u could hope 2 c from him.)
1. Prince summons Jimmy Fallon to play ping pong
I really can’t do this one justice — you really should just watch the video. Suffice it to say that it’s a) hilarious and b) better than anything the Stories About Prince guy could ever dream up.
OK, fine, here are your pancakes.