Ten years after his death, a personal account of how Prince became a musical, emotional and political guide – and why he still feels alive through new generations.
I was fourteen, in London on a study trip, and back then something could still happen that today feels almost remote: the group leader would give us a meeting point – “see you back here in two hours” – and from that moment on, off we went. No mobile phones. No way of being tracked in real time. Just a badly folded map of London in your hand, a friend beside you, a couple of hours of freedom, and that exact kind of excitement you feel when an unknown city begins to open up. In one of those small adolescent escapes, somewhere between the Batman posters and the dark charge of London, Prince began to take on a different shape in front of me.
April 21 is not an anniversary to me. It is a crack in time. Prince died on April 21, 2016. Ten years have passed. And yet, when I think about him, the first thing I feel is not absence. I feel movement. I feel how much of my musical and human formation passed through him, and still passes through him.
I already knew Prince, of course. But I did not really understand him yet. For a kid that age, there were artists who felt more immediate, more readable, more ready to use. Duran Duran, Madonna, Michael Jackson – they reached you straight away. Prince seemed to speak a more adult language, more oblique, more carnal and mental at once. Then Batman arrived. And something opened. The album begins with The Future and then comes Electric Chair. Not two songs: two gateways.
The Future got to me in a way I could not yet name. There was a nocturnal city inside it, a dark desire, a toxic elegance, an almost mechanical tension that, for me then, was new. And then Electric Chair. That is where the level changes. If Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for a teenager, is darkness as spectacle, narrative, scene, the immediate pleasure of a thrill, Electric Chair works in another zone. It does not entertain you with the dark side. It leaves a sentence inside you and lets it grow. When Prince reaches that image of the electric chair tied to future crimes of the mind, at fourteen it does not pass over you like a special effect. It starts to
acquire weight. At that age the mind enters a more complex phase: desire stops being just impulse, guilt stops being just a word, imagination stops being an innocent game. In Prince, none of this is softened or explained away. It stays there, alive, ambiguous, and forces you to take a step forward.
From that moment on, every song of his became a door.
Prince did not just give me songs. He gave me trajectories. He taught me that music is not a row of titles but a constellation of connections. You followed him and ended up in another world. Then another one after that. You followed him and reached funk, George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic. You followed him and jazz opened up: writing, horns, the sense of a band as a living organism, the idea that arranging was already composing and composing was already directing energy through space. You followed him and understood that Black American music was not a sum of separate genres but a fertile continuum – electric, aristocratic, and dirty at once. Along that path, even a name like Duke Ellington stopped feeling distant or scholastic and re-entered the picture as part of the same great idea of elegance, invention, orchestra, presence.
Graffiti Bridge remains a crucial node for me for this reason too. It contains We Can Funk, credited with George Clinton, and around that track there is also Amp Fiddler, present in the album credits. To me, Amp Fiddler is not a collector’s footnote. He is a first degree of separation. He is someone who came through Serendipity. And at that point the whole discourse stops being abstract: you realise that the music you love really does touch itself, that genealogies are not critics’ theories but living lines, real experiences, actual crossings.
By then Prince had already done something else enormous for me: he had taught me that sex could be a high language, communication, spirituality. Not surface provocation. Not badly managed sin. Not machismo. In him, eros and transcendence lived in the same room. For a teenager, that is a formative revelation. It changes the way you look at the body, shame, tenderness, intimacy. It makes you understand that desire can be a form of knowledge, not just an impulse to consume or repress.
Then there is an even deeper level, one that concerns growth itself. Beyond my parents, Prince was also a presence that helped me stay away from drugs. I do not mean moralism. I mean inner alignment. In him, I felt that true intensity did not lie in intoxication but in vision, rigor, obsession with work, precision. He conveyed the idea that one could go to the extreme and still remain lucid. That you could burn with energy without surrendering to a self-destructive shortcut. That matters when you grow up.
And there is another misunderstanding that always comes back with Prince: the story of “the greatest guitarist in the world,” or “the most underrated guitarist.” That formula has always meant very little to me. In fact, it shrinks everything. It reduces Prince to a ranking, while he escaped precisely that mechanism. The guitar was one of his bodies, not his enclosure. Prince was a performer, composer, arranger, producer, bandleader, conductor, architect of sound and energy. In him, technique had already been absorbed and surpassed. What remained was the essential: the right note in the right place, the right silence in the right place, the ability to ignite and then remove, to raise the temperature and the next second leave you
suspended. Sometimes It Snows in April explains this far better than a thousand rankings ever could: there is no need to win there. There is only an artist who knows exactly how much to say, how much to hold back, how much to leave hanging in the air.
This idea also helped me understand techno, Detroit, the electronic music I love and later tried to bring into Dancity. Prince is there, even when he is not named immediately. He is there in the relationship between machine and body, in the way groove can remain sensual and futuristic at once, in the idea of the total author, in artistic sovereignty, in the possibility of holding together eroticism, discipline, independence, Black vision, and a radical openness to language. His presence in the history of dance music and in the imaginary of Detroit also passes through The Electrifying Mojo, the radio DJ who helped introduce Prince to the Detroit market and is recognised as one of the key influences on the development of techno in the city. And in a figure like Moodymann, that line becomes visible again: soul, groove, independence, eroticism, Black consciousness, refusal of cages. For me, again, this is not theoretical. I invited Moodymann. I invited Amp Fiddler. At that point Prince stops being only a historical figure. He becomes a matrix that keeps radiating concrete connections.
Prince mi ha insegnato il mondo – Dancity Mag package
Then there are the concerts, which completed the picture. Rome. Milan. Umbria Jazz. Not simple Italian dates, but stations in a relationship.
The memory I hold closest is Rome. End of the concert. The arena’s neon lights already on. My girlfriend and I still there, talking with friends while most of the audience was leaving and the experience seemed to be entering its cooling-down phase. Maybe two hundred, three hundred people left. Maybe fewer. And that is when Prince runs back onstage with the band and launches into Peach. Torrid. Dirty in exactly the right way. Funk and rock’n’roll wrapped around each other effortlessly. A gift for those who had stayed under the full lights, when the ritual seemed already over. The rest – that almost erotic feeling of witnessing a return outside the script, with the arena fully lit – belongs to the memory of those who were there.
And this is perhaps the most important point. Many people can analyse Prince as a character, an icon, a genius. All true. But I feel him above all as a personal guide to the world. A musical guide, of course. But also a guide to emancipation. He taught me to dig deeper, to look for sources, not to stop at the surface, to understand that a real artist is not consumed: he is followed, studied, crossed through. He taught me that you can be sensual without becoming caricature, radical without becoming sectarian, popular without becoming predictable.
And then, after his death, another phase began. Almost a mission. To make new generations discover him. To put him back into circulation outside lazy formulas, outside social-media summaries, outside the caricature of the unreachable genius or the guitarist turned into a ranking. Every time I see someone – often younger – truly enter his folds and discover that behind the image there was an entire universe, I feel that Prince is still alive. Not in a rhetorical sense. In a concrete one. He lives in the wonder that returns. He lives in the connections that keep opening. He lives in the moment when a person, sometimes also thanks to me, stops merely “knowing” him and finally begins to listen.
Maybe that is the memory that really matters. Not the one that preserves.
The one that reactivates.
Playlist
Prince Taught Me The World
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The Future
La porta d’ingresso. Il momento in cui capisci che Prince può essere urbano, oscuro, sensuale e quasi technoide senza smettere di essere Prince. Apre Batman. -
Electric Chair
Il brano in cui il buio smette di essere scenografia e diventa pensiero. Quello che a quattordici anni inizia a prendere forma nella mente. -
Purple Music
Una scheggia preziosa del Prince più fisico, più ipnotico, più da groove come stato mentale. Non da enciclopedia: da culto. -
Controversy
Identità, ambiguità, corpo politico, macchina ritmica. Una chiave d’accesso perfetta al suo centro nervoso. -
Dirty Mind
Secco, nervoso, quasi crudele nella sua economia. Una scuola di essenzialità. -
Automatic
Ripetizione come trance. Sessualità come meccanica del desiderio. Ancora modernissimo. -
D.M.S.R.
Corpo, disciplina, libertà, sudore. Una filosofia in forma di funk. -
Erotic City
Una delle tracce che spiegano meglio il ponte fra Prince e tanta dance music venuta dopo. -
The Ballad of Dorothy Parker
Intimità liquida, scrittura obliqua, spazio mentale. Un brano che si muove come un ricordo caldo e storto. -
Housequake
Funk elastico, vivo, sgangherato nel modo giusto. Dentro c’è già una visione del corpo come zona di scossa. -
Sign o’ the Times
Minimalismo, cronaca, visione. La prova che l’essenzialità può portare un mondo intero. -
The Question of U
Mistica, sensualità, teatro. Una delle sue altezze più strane e più necessarie. -
We Can Funk
George Clinton in faccia, senza filtri. E per me, in controluce, anche Amp Fiddler come primo grado di separazione: Graffiti Bridge, P-Funk, Serendipity, Detroit, tutto che si tocca. -
Joy in Repetition
Notte, palco, ossessione, racconto. Una lezione su come si costruisce tensione. -
Peach
Per me è Roma, luci accese, pochi rimasti, il concerto che sembrava finito e invece si riapre con una vampata torrida. A volte una canzone coincide per sempre con una scena.
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