Remembering Prince: The Greatest Musical Talent of His Generation

- Tom Carson

Mourning has no sense of priorities. When an artist's achievement is as complex as Prince's was, trying to assess his huge legacy is undone by recognition that now everything is in the past tense: that panoply of scorching and/or aching grooves, the Jimi Hendrix-meets-Keith Richards guitar fused with a voice able to switch from angelic to devilish quicker than Charlie Chaplin wiggling his mustache, the pansexual Pied Piperism and belief that all life is a doomed but exciting revolt against death, the effrontery and wit of the whole ­project even after he had been at it for decades. But every appreciation has to start somewhere.

So let's start by trotting out that overused word "unique" and remembering how, um, uniquely true it was. The Beatles were competing with similarly derivative -- just less alchemic -- U.K. bands before anyone stateside heard of them. Bob Dylan was the star pupil of a bustling New York folk scene. Getting closer to home, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder were both nurtured from boyhood on by Motown before ­individuating themselves, and James Brown had learned everything there was to know about R&B from years of gigging by the time he chose to announce to the world that he was James Brown. Nobody and nothing hatched Prince except Prince Rogers Nelson's desire to be Prince.