jessethorn:

It was hard to decide to write and record this Outshot for Bullseye. It’s been a tough day, and by the time you hear this, it’ll be next week or ten days from now. But it was what was in my heart today. Sorry if it’s rough, it was rough to write.

My wife and I went to see Prince at the Fillmore. It was Valentine’s Day, maybe ten years ago.

We were lined up outside. We’d never been to one of his shows, and we were surrounded by the folks who’d gotten tickets through his fan club.

There was this tall guy, six six, maybe. Thin. Black, maybe forty something. Dressed in this wild outfit.

And he was walking down the line. And every person in line he’d stop, give them a rose, and tell them that he loved them.

I struggled to figure it out for a minute. Like: did this guy work for the promoter? Was it like getting a bobblehead at a baseball game? He didn’t look high. He didn’t seem crazy. He didn’t want money. He didn’t seem to want anything.

And by the time he got to us, it made sense to me. 

This was just a guy who wanted to share a feeling. Just share something beautiful with each person. Tell each person he loved them, as they were.

Look: Prince might have been the greatest pop musician of the last fifty years. He found #1 hits on his garbage pile and played every instrument and synthesized genres and danced his rear off and all of that stuff.

But it’s not just that music. What he left was an idea and an example. He was this skinny, short, shy, fey black kid from a rough neighborhood. And he lived in an America where there were all of these cultural expectations of him, All these ideas based on all of that. And he didn’t reject the categories people wanted to put him in. He transcended them. Made them completely irrelevant.

It wasn’t oppositional. It wasn’t negative. Prince said it, pretty simply. I am me. I am doing my thing. 

And he invited everyone to come visit Paisley Park and do theirs.

And so when I think of his leaving, I think of the people whose lives he helped define. I think of kids backed into corners in 1980s America. By circumstance of society or birth or whatever. Weird kids and queer kids and kids who were bad at doing whatever it was that was expected of them.

Prince didn’t show them to be Prince. He showed them they could be themselves. That they could live without apology. Love defiantly.

Prince gave them a rose.