Tears flowed.
My heart went back to 1999. Back to Purple Rain. Back to imagining the Raspberry Beret.
I had the urge to use music, to use music videos to back fill the hole in my heart that was suddenly blown open hearing that Prince, the former and the latter, the symbol of independence, the symbol of a man who was so focused on perfection and independence that he made life miserable for anyone to share his music videos, had passed away without any notice - like Michael Jackson - like Robin Williams - like David Bowie.
A heart is a strange thing - it goes and works without giving it any thought. It beats - it pumps - and works day in and day out until it doesn't.
And just like that there is nothing.
When the heart stops for someone you've always had around - a person who isn't of a relationship, but of a piece of your life nonetheless, there is this profound sadness that begs to be filled and to be satiated.
Being a half century earth walker myself who has found youtube to be a patch for such heart ailments, I was not prepared for how far Prince would enforce his life of privacy and protection of hard work.
I couldn't turn to youtube as I had done with Bowie. I couldn't find that sense of connection that my mind wanted to make whole with my heart - to relive those moments from the past to come to grips with a death. I wanted so much to lose myself in the passion and the energy of a person who once lived but who now assumes perfection by virtue of morbidity. The dead always have that escape route where their imperfections that they carried with them like Marley's chains in "A Christmas Carol" suddenly are released in our review of their lives.
I found myself running into Prince's legacy of protecting his work. For someone who had such a body of work, he had no body of work worth shit on YouTube. There is something so utterly contemptible about a music video with the music silenced because of copyright infringement.
I'm not pleading selfishly that I out to have a right to view music videos by Prince, but whereas I could cry my eyes out with Bowie's vast music video posting, my selection of Prince music videos ended up on third rate websites where you dance with the devil at every keystroke.
Yes, I'll likely do a post mortem music purchase at iTunes where I'll trade the video presentation for closed eyes blubbering away at audio files retreating back to the first time I heard Prince.
I was so looking forward to pulling together a dedication to Prince as I did with Bowie, but there shall be nothing. Prince likely would have wanted us to just forget him and to respect that he was a former life that had independence and now he's be given the ultimate gift of that.
And so there is no dry eye here at the UV Nest. I hope that you'll take time to seriously spend some time looking at my masthead that I created to express my heart ache with Prince's passing. There are so many elements that I added that you are likely to see new ones throughout the time I leave that.
Independence. RIP. Former and latter ye be Prince. Doves cry. I cry. And there will be no party like it is 1999 today.
Click here for the background about maniacal efforts at stifling his material from being posted.
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