2016 was the year that crushed our belief that rock n’ roll would never die. Because so many important musicians did.
Unthinkably, David Bowie left first, though he tried warning us with Blackstar and Lazarus. As I recall, it happened right after that hideous person became the 45th President of the United States.
Then Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Maurie White, Merle Haggard, Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, both Emerson and Lake, and Sharon Jones were all also gone, in quick succession.
But perhaps the biggest shock of all came in April of that year, when an outwardly healthy Prince Rogers Nelson collapsed while in the elevator of his sprawling Paisley Park mansion near Minneapolis, and died, at age 57. Prince had just returned from a gig during which there had been some kind of medical emergency on the plane, causing it to land mid-flight. Cause of death: Fentanyl poisoning.
I am the last person on Earth anybody would ask to interpret this outcome, nor do I pretend to be a scholar of Prince or his music. My experience of Prince and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince began with the rocktacious 1999 album and careened through the sweet and sour of Purple Rain, dwindling after that. But the recent featured article in The New York Times, about Ezra Edelman’s fraught journey to make a nine-hour documentary of Prince’s life and the Prince Estate’s refusal to allow its public release, opens up a ton of questions for me.
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