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<title>Music and gender-bending fashion</title>
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<div class="article">
<div class="generic-info">
<div class="title"><h1>How<span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s Androgynous Genius Changed the Way We Think About Music and <span class="keyword" id="gender">Gender</span></h1></div>
<h3 class="subtitle">His clothes, songwriting, and production prowess all played a part in breaking through any and every type of convention.</h3>
<p class="author">Simon Reynolds</p>
<p class="publication-date">04/22/2016</p>
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<div class="content">
<img src="img/img articolo 3 gaia/princeheader1440.jpg">
<figcaption class="img-description">Prince circa 1986. Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns.</figcaption>
<p>“If I was your one and only friend—would you run to me if somebody hurt you even if that somebody was me?”</i> - <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>, “If I Was Your
Girlfriend”</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">T</span>he 1970s was the Glam Decade. But in some ways the -80s were even glammier. <span class="keyword" id="gender">Gender</span>-bending was rife, from synth pop-s eyeliner pretty
boys to cross-dressing <span class="place" id="UK"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom" target="_blank">UK</a></span> stars like <span class="person" id="BoyG"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_George" target="_blank">Boy George</a></span>, from <span class="place" id="LongIsland"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island" target="_blank">Long Island</a></span>-s frightwig rockers <span class="person" id="TwistedS"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted_Sister" target="_blank">Twisted Sister</a></span> to the Sunset Strip-s gaudy parade
of mascara metal. Unlike the glitter -70s, the pop charts were overrun not just by straight boys posing as gay or bi, but by actual gay
frontmen like <span class="person" id="MarcA"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Almond" target="_blank">Marc Almond</a></span>, <span class="person" id="HollyJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Johnson" target="_blank">Holly Johnson</a></span>, and <span class="person" id="JimmyS"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Somerville" target="_blank">Jimmy Somerville</a></span>. And for the first time women got in on the glamdrogyny too: <span class="person" id="GraceJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Jones" target="_blank">Grace Jones</a></span>,
<span class="person" id="AnnieL"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Lennox" target="_blank">Annie Lennox</a></span>, <span class="person" id="SiouxsieS"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siouxsie_Sioux" target="_blank">Siouxsie Sioux</a></span>.</p>
<p><span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> was right in the thick of all this ambiguous -80s action. Just check the covers of his records as the decade proceeds. On the
back of 1980-s <i>Dirty Mind</i>, he poses languidly in black thigh-high stockings, bikini briefs, and little else: an invitation to the
kinkiest of reveries. For the front cover of 1981-s <i>Controversy</i>, he-s fully-clothed this time, but still very much the dainty dandy,
sporting eyeliner and blush, and clad in mauve coat, wing-collar, and cravat. On <i>Parade</i>, from 1986, he-s wearing mascara and a
stomach-baring top that cuts away just below his nipple line. And by 1988-s <i>Lovesexy</i> cover, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> appears as an angelic nude hovering
amid lush blooms. In a sly, saucy touch, one flower's stamen—close by the singer-s crotch—mimics the arc of an erection.</p>
<img src="img/img articolo 3 gaia/covers2.jpg">
<figcaption class="img-description">The evolution of Prince's androgyny in the '80s, as shown through his album covers.</figcaption>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">E</span>ven the color that <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> fetishized so flamboyantly had gay overtones. Purple represents gay pride; its paler hue lavender was once
code for homosexual pulp fiction and a word to describe marriages where one or both spouses were closeted. Over the centuries the color
has also connoted ambiguity, royalty, artifice, and pretentiousness (“purple prose”), all of which fit <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> abundantly. In rock-s own
lexicon, purple suggests hallucinatory sensory overload, thanks to <span class="person" id="JimiH"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix" target="_blank">Jimi Hendrix</a></span> and more recently <span class="person" id="Future"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_(rapper)" target="_blank">Future (aka Future Hendrix)</a></span>, who titled
a recent mixtape <i>Purple Reign</i>. But you didn-t need to consciously tune into any of these resonances to grasp that <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s empurpled
excess was a way of declaring himself “not like everybody else.”</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">I</span>n the early -80s, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s unmanly aura was taken as an affront by punk-funkateer <span class="person" id="RickJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_James" target="_blank">Rick James</a></span>, who also presciently grasped the
commercial threat posed—perhaps subconsciously sensing that <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s deviance would make his own bad-boy image look old-fashioned.
In an increasingly one-sided feud, <span class="person" id="RickJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_James" target="_blank">James</a></span> accused <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> of not only “faking the funk” but being a bad role model. “He-s a mentally
disturbed young man,” <span class="person" id="RickJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_James" target="_blank">James</a></span> told one interviewer, sounding incongruously prudish. “He-s out-to-lunch. You can-t take his music seriously.
He sings songs about oral sex and incest.”</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">D</span>ecades later, recalling the time <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> played support on 1980-s Fire It Up tour, <span class="person" id="RickJ"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_James" target="_blank">James</a></span>- uncomprehending disgust was still apparent,
however much he tried to disguise it as condescension and pity. “I felt sorry for him,” he wrote in <i>Memoir of a Super Freak</i>. “Here-s
this little dude wearing hi-heels, playing this New Wave Rock & Roll... Then at the end of his set he-d take off his trench coat and
he-d be wearing little girl-s bloomers... The guys in the audience just booed the poor thing to death.” Yet <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s prancing stage
antics made him a misfit in mainstream rock as much as in R&B. Supporting those ageing androgynes the <span class="person" id="RollingStones"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones" target="_blank">Rolling Stones</a></span> on their 1981
tour of <span class="place" id="America"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" target="_blank">America</a></span>, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> was pelted with cabbages.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">A</span>ll this attention, negative and positive—for some rock critics, he-d already become a mascot figure for the dream of a
genre-crossing, races-uniting superstar-to-come—went to <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s head. The result was <i>Controversy</i> and its titular lead single, on
which the racially/sexually mixed-up singer presented himself as the Enigma at the roiling center of a vortex of discourse, parroting
back the fascinated confusion of his audience and the media: “Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” By the time of <i>Purple Rain</i>,
his mass-market breakthrough 1984 album/movie, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s sense of himself verged on the messianic: Not content with naming his backing
band the Revolution, he sang, on “I Would Die 4 U”, about how “I-m not a woman, I-m not a man/ I am something that you-ll never
understand.” <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> posed himself as a human question mark, a mystery creature who could not be contained by conventional categories,
someone whose very being transgressed and transcended any division or boundary that stood in the way of total emancipation.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">T</span>he culmination of this trajectory was the singer-s decision to abandon nomenclature itself as too confining: He swapped his given
name <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> for an unpronounceable glyph composed out of the male and female symbols, which, in a concession to the pragmatic needs of
everyday discourse, he deigned to translate as The Love Symbol.</p>
<p><span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> posed himself as a human question mark, a mystery creature whose very being transgressed and transcended any division or
boundary that stood in the way of total emancipation.</p>
<p><span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s -80s evasion of conventional <span class="keyword" id="gender">gender</span> definitions speaks to us now in this trans-aware moment. But it also harks backwards in
time to the origins of rock-n-roll in racial mixture and sexual blurring. The earliest ancestral echo is <span class="person" id="LittleR"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Richard" target="_blank">Little Richard</a></span>—right down to
the dainty little mustache they share. <span class="person" id="JimiH"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix" target="_blank">Hendrix</a></span>, another obvious influence on <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>, seems hyper-masculine at first glance:
Originally marketed as rock-s wild man, he wielded his guitar like a phallus and bombarded audiences with blazing noise. But <span class="person" id="JimiH"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix" target="_blank">Jimi</a></span> was
also a dandy; he was drawn to delicate 'n- dreamy ballads as much as virile strutting raunch; on his oceanic-rock masterpiece “1983
(A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” he came over like a child-man seeking womb-like sanctuary from a scary, ruined world in an undersea
utopia.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">A</span>s far as -70s influences go, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> must have picked up something from the genderqueer <span class="person" id="DavidB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie" target="_blank">Bowie</a></span> of “John, I-m Only Dancing” and “Boys
Keep Swinging”; at his last concert on April 14th, he covered “'Heroes-.” But if there-s a true glam precursor to <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>, it-s
probably <span class="person" id="MarcB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bolan" target="_blank">Bolan</a></span> more than <span class="person" id="DavidB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie" target="_blank">Bowie</a></span>. After witnessing him play <span class="place" id="NY"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City" target="_blank">New York</a></span>-s Ritz Ballroom in 1981, <i>NME</i>-s <span class="person" id="BarneyH"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Hoskyns" target="_blank">Barney Hoskyns</a></span>—one of <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s
most perceptive early critics—testified that it was like “like seeing <span class="person" id="MarcB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bolan" target="_blank">Marc Bolan</a></span> and <span class="person" id="JimiH"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix" target="_blank">Jimi Hendrix</a></span> in the same body.” <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s
“Cream,” from 1991, is a fairly blatant homage to <span class="person" id="Trex"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Rex_(band)">T.Rex</a></span>-s one <i>Billboard</i> smash, “Bang a Gong,” also known as “Get It On.”</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">T</span>he bopping elf and the purple pixie had a bunch of things in common. They were both petite; they were both lovely little movers
onstage; they both released a string of decade-defining singles that funked as hard as they rocked. <span class="person" id="MarcB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bolan" target="_blank">Bolan</a></span>-s nubile boogie-groove (which
he nicknamed “the slide”) anticipated the urgent-yet-languorous feel of <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> tunes like “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Dirty Mind”; in
both cases, the love-action conjured is a reciprocal grind rather than a unilateral wham-bam body-slam. Above all, what the singers
shared was a vocal quality of feline narcissism: A purring, honeyed rasp with <span class="person" id="MarcB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Bolan" target="_blank">Marc</a></span>, a fluttery falsetto with <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>, but in both cases it
comes over coquettish, suggestive of someone preening and pirouetting in a mirror while knowing all the while they are being watched by
rapt eyes.</p>
<img src="img/img articolo 3 gaia/princeboa1440.jpg">
<figcaption class="img-description">Prince circa 1985. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.</figcaption>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">I</span>f a single <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> crystallizes <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s persona as Imp of the Polymorphously Perverse, it-s “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” the second
single off <i>Sign O- the Times</i>. It-s a delirious fantasy of self-transcendence, the plaint of a man whose yearning to get close to his
female lover is so intense that he-s come to feel that his own <span class="keyword" id="gender">gender</span> is a barrier to ultimate intimacy. If only he could somehow be his
woman-s best girlfriend as well as her boyfriend, helping her to pick out clothes, confiding and advising, hanging out without the
hang-ups and sexual friction caused by the <span class="keyword" id="gender">gender</span> divide.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">W</span>ould you let me wash your hair?
<br>Could I make you breakfast sometime?
<br>Well then, could we just hang out?
<br>I mean, could we go to a movie and cry together?</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">R</span>ight at the <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span>-s end it veers off course a little, verging on hetero-male fantasy of the “I think of myself as a lesbian” type.
But for the most part, the desire in the <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> is not really sexual: It-s <i>agape</i> rather than <i>eros</i>, a dream of companionship and
communion. A tense, taut funk track, “Girlfriend” throbs with an impossible longing, an impulse to break through the skin surface,
past body parts and erogenous zones, and grasp hopelessly for total mind-meld. The <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> is too agonized, too twitchy with unrest, to
really be sexy. It wants to be free of the straitjacket of sexual identity. Of any identity.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">A</span>nd we don't have to make love to have an orgasm…
<br>Listen, for you naked I would dance a ballet
<br>Would that get you off?</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">A</span>fter the unexpected detour into dizzy-making dirtiness in its final half-minute, the flesh fever subsides into calm, and “If I Was
Your Girlfriend” ends on a still note of pure mysticism:</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">W</span>e-ll try to imagine what silence looks like.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">M</span>ore than the lyric, though, the conceptual and technical masterstroke of “Girlfriend” is the <span class="keyword" id="gender">gender</span>-morphing of <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s vocals,
which are pitch-shifted to create the feminine alter-ego Camille. Doing peculiar things with the human voice is such a common feature
of contemporary music, from the online underground to the upper reaches of <i>Billboard</i>, that it is hard to convey just how
confoundingly brilliant, original, and creatively twisted this move by <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> seemed in 1987. <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-watchers instantly grasped that
this was the wholly logical, yet completely unexpected and surprising, extension of his androgyny, his compulsion to dissolve
borderlines and barriers.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">I</span>n another sense, the artificially high-pitched Camille voice was simply a technological expansion upon what <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> already did
vocally: sing falsetto in the soul 'n- funk tradition of <span class="person" id="AlG"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Green" target="_blank">Al Green</a></span>, <span class="person" id="CurtisM"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Mayfield">Curtis Mayfield</a></span>, <span class="person" id="MarvinG"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Gaye" target="_blank">Marvin Gaye</a></span>-s “Got to Give It Up,” where the “the
sound of a woman coming from a man,” as critic <span class="person" id="MichaelF">Michael Freedburg</span> wrote, served “to demonstrate to his intended lover that he understands
her fears and desires as if he were female himself.”</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">I</span>n a certain way, falsetto—as a contrived vocal technique, an “unnatural” way of using the throat, lungs, etc.—could be seen as kind
of introjected technology. As with any extreme mode of singing—yodeling, Tuvan throat singing, opera, Inuit vocal games, you name
it—there-s almost a disembodiment of the human voice, as it is pushed to produce sounds that seem to speak of things outside earthly
existence, far beyond our physical mortal limits. That-s why these forcibly etherealized vocal sounds generally connote the angelic,
the extra-terrestrial, the cosmic and otherworldly. They can also be the sound of those who feel alienated from mundane normative
existence, who feel like they are from some other place.</p>
<p><span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s pitch-shifted, feminized vocal sound was the wholly logical, yet completely unexpected and surprising, extension of his
compulsion to dissolve borderlines.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">S</span>ome <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-ologists say that the singer chose the name “Camille” for his alter-ego after a 19th century French intersex person
generally known by the name <span class="person" id="AlexinaB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin" target="_blank">Alexina Barbin</a></span> but who later called themself Camille. <span class="person" id="AlexinaB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin" target="_blank">Barbin</a></span> was brought up as a girl but was reclassified as
male at the age of 22 and came to use “Camille”—in French, it can be both a female and male name—to describe the masculine phase of their
short life.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">P</span>artially reproduced in a 19th century medical paper, <span class="person" id="AlexinaB">Barbin</span>-s memoirs were rediscovered and published in 1980. Philosopher <span class="person" id="MichelF">Michel
Foucault</span>, who was gay, wrote an introduction celebrating <span class="person" id="AlexinaB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin" target="_blank">Barbin</a></span> as a sort of exemplar of the sexual misfit, whose biography spoke to and
for all those “virile women” and “passive men” who live in a “happy limbo of nonidentity.” But <span class="person" id="AlexinaB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin" target="_blank">Barbin</a></span>-s story leaned more to the tragic:
grappling externally with uncomprehending medical and religious institutions, and internally with persistent feelings of “vague sadness,”
“inexpressible uneasiness,” and “strange perplexity,” culminating in lonely suicide at the age of 30. If it is in fact true that <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s
“Camille” was inspired by <span class="person" id="AlexinaB"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculine_Barbin" target="_blank">Barbin</a></span>-s tale, it-s possible that he didn-t get it from the republished memoir but from the 1985 movie <i>Mystère
Alexina.</i></p>
<p><span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> originally intended to release a whole album of material using the Camille alter-ego and the pitch-shifted, feminized vocal
sound. But the self-titled, eight-<span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> LP <i>Camille</i> was scrapped, with most of the tunes resurfacing later as album tracks or B-sides. “If
I Was Your Girlfriend,” “Housequake,” and “Strange Relationship” appeared on <i>Sign O- the Times</i>; “Shockadelica” came out as the B-side to
the single version of “Girlfriend.” Camille is also said to be the guiding force behind another abandoned project, <i>The Black Album</i>, and
to figure in the spiritual schema of 1988-s <i>Lovesexy</i>, which involves a struggle with a darkside alter-ego called Spooky Electric. But by
this point, even for a fan like myself, <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s personal cosmology is getting too convoluted to follow.</p>
<p><span class="myFirstletter">A</span>s much as I love “Girlfriend,” I don-t know if it-s my favorite <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span>. Depending on the day, that might be “Pop Life,” or “The
Beautiful Ones,” or maybe “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” or “Hot Thing,” or most every <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> on <i>Dirty Mind</i>. “If I Was Your
Girlfriend,” though, is certainly the <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span> <span class="keyword" id="song">song</span> I find most impressive; the one I admire as well as adore. Far more than famous
anthems like “1999”, this feels like <span class="person" id="Prince"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)" target="_blank">Prince</a></span>-s mission statement, his (wo)manifesto. It-s a mystical-political rebuke to reality. A
prayer.</p>
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