This is lousy.
Goodbye, Prince.
We are gathered here today.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
But it seemed to make people feel better after David Bowie died earlier this year, so, sadly, let’s try it again: Send in your favorite memories of Prince and we’ll post them up here as we get them.
We are going to have a much, much harder time posting videos of your favorite Prince performances, because one of the things about Prince was that Prince was often at odds with the Internet (among other things).
So there’s very little performance footage of him available on the web, and even less decent footage. If you were a Prince fan and you found something from him online, you enjoyed it with the knowledge that it was going to disappear sooner than later.
Still, if you put in some work, there’s some stuff out there. Here’s “1999,” the first one of his songs that seared into my head:
And here he is covering Radiohead’s “Creep” at Coachella in 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFXZNt4oLkE
So, send along what you have and we’ll get it up. We’ll take stories, too.
And in the meantime, read this wonderful multimedia essay by Anil Dash about Prince’s “Purple Rain,” which includes this miraculous clip of Prince, Michael Jackson and James Brown onstage together:
https://youtu.be/Yy9L4ft7EGk
Here he is blowing everyone else off the stage and getting a delighted grin from George Harrison’s son, Dhani, when Harrison was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7INsVaR-S-w
This appears to be from a 1991 Arsenio Hall appearance. Thanks to Steve Jang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8BMm6Jn6oU
Ah. Here’s one of the all-time great ones. The debut performance of “Purple Rain” at First Avenue, in Minneapolis. Thanks to Ludovic Dreux.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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