Bowie: Prince and the Other Man Who Reinvented Pop
David Bowie died on 10 January 2016. He had released Blackstar two days earlier — his farewell record, constructed with a precision and deliberateness that only became fully apparent after his death. The man who had been reinventing himself for fifty years made one final reinvention: the artist as someone who knew they were dying and chose to make that dying into art.
Six days after Bowie died, Prince performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. He chose to play Purple Rain in actual purple rain — a weather system that appeared over the stadium as if on cue, as if the universe understood the assignment. People who were there say Prince looked up into the rain during the performance with an expression they still can't describe properly.
He was thinking about Bowie.
Three months later, Prince was gone too.
Ninety-Two Days
The track opens with Prince speaking directly about this timeline — the six days, the Super Bowl, the thinking. It is the most specific opening on either album, the most anchored in real chronology, and the effect is immediate. You are not in the space of metaphor. You are in Prince's head in February 2016, standing in purple rain, feeling the loss that the rest of the world had just registered and that he had been living with for six days already.
We never spoke enough / But we didn't need to / Two aliens on the same planet / Saying the same thing through different frequencies.
That line is the key to the whole track. Prince and Bowie were aware of each other — deeply, professionally, with the specific attentiveness that one transformative artist pays to another — but they rarely discussed each other in public, rarely appeared together, never collaborated. The relationship existed in the music and in a mutual recognition that did not require articulation.
Both of them understood that pop stardom was not a destination but a vehicle. Both used it to say things that pop was not supposed to be able to say — about gender, sexuality, race, mortality, the sacred and the profane — in forms that were simultaneously accessible and radical. Both of them were told they were too strange, too much, too everything, and both of them converted that rejection into the engine of their work.
The Costume and the Truth
Every record was a new costume / Every costume was the truth. The lyric understands something that most people still get wrong about both Bowie and Prince — that the persona was not a mask worn over a true self, but a tool used to express a true self that had no other language available to it. Ziggy Stardust was not a lie. The Artist Formerly Known was not a lie. They were both attempts to say something real in a world that only responds to spectacle.
Bowie — we are both the music now / And the music never dies.
It is the most consoling thing Prince could offer. And the most honest.
Ground control. Do you read me.