Prince, an icon capable of uniting a fractured culture

Grief, in the 21st century, is increasingly refracted through the prism of the internet.

As soon as anyone of note dies, tributes, remembrances and outbursts flood social media, blogging sites and other corners of the internet, creating a collective anguish that has the odd effect of making everyone feel alone together.

For music fans, 2016 has been notably brutal.

The year, in only its fourth month, has born witness to a grim parade of deaths: David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Merle Haggard and nearly two dozen more besides.

It has become, in deeply wearying fashion, a familiar rhythm: the rumors, the confirmations, the denial, the outcries, the memorials, the moving on and trying to make sense of life with a hole where there was not one before.

On Thursday, perhaps the largest wound since the sudden death of David Bowie was inflicted: Prince, dead at 57, reportedly found unresponsive in an elevator in his Paisley Park studio complex.

At first, the internet went through its expected motions — taking up the communal ritual of grief once again, just days after doing so for Merle Haggard — but as the day progressed, it was difficult not to detect an overwhelmingly personal tone to much of what was being posted, shared and reported. (People would share lyrics that most affected them, or share the date and venue of the best Prince show they ever saw, or a quirky ancedote about an encounter with Prince in the wild — similiar in tone to Bowie’s passage, but seemingly coming from a far deeper place of pain.)

Not since the passage of Michael Jackson, likewise at a shockingly young age, has the death of a musician so profoundly reoriented the culture — for crying out loud, even MTV scrapped its planned programming (as did sister station VH1) to play Prince videos on a loop — and highlighted the singular life and art of one person.

Sifting through the many dispatches filling Twitter — there was Ben Collins’ report about Prince’s close relationship with Minneapolis’ public radio station The Current — or re-reading archival stories (New York magazine had a terrific 2014 piece it shared again today, as did The Guardian, with a fine profile from just five months ago) was profoundly moving, and cathartic, and instructional.

Everyone grieves in his or her own way, and in this respect, Prince’s death is no different.

It is different in that, the world over, Prince’s music is being played — loudly, one hopes — and connecting those who hear it to an artist that changed the shape of music.

And that we — the collective, those who prize music as illuminating the human condition, who seize it as something elemental in life — are grieving together.

Together, at a moment in history when that word has never been more out of fashion. The single screens, the ala carte media consumption, the silos of interest — all of it conspires against that feeling of unity, the sensation of a culture tuned in to something remarkable.

There are precious few individuals — fewer of them still even drawing breath — who can lay claim to such accomplishments.

But, he did — by provoking, declaiming, misdirecting and simply ignoring those who said he couldn’t or shouldn’t or dare not do any of what he tried, and often achieved.

As these seemingly invincible, eternal musicians are, one by one, summoned to death, another passage also transpires.

We now live in an age of on-demand entertainment, a moment in time where everyone can effectively customize whatever they’re watching or reading or hearing or playing. The era of a “monoculture,” a sense that the general public was aware of superstars in music, film or TV, is rapidly fading into memory.

The reason the deaths of artists like Prince shake everyone so deeply is that, almost to a person, everyone has a memory of or memory associated with his music. His catalog is, broadly speaking, a known quantity, and one which permeated nearly every corner of the country in his white-hot 1980s hey day.

(For me, having been way too young to partake of Purple Rain when it was initially released, I became aware of Prince as a superhero-addled child, mystified by, but unable to stop listening to, the wonderfully unhinged Batdance.)

These deaths are significant, the delinations of an end of an era — a movement away from a music industry built upon artists as comfortable with substance as they were style.

It is not enough to simply look the part, as so many of the modern pop and rock stars do. For the music to make an impact, to reach anyone, let alone everyone, there needs to be more there, something to grab onto.

Prince gave us that — for four decades and nearly 40 albums — and now it is gone.

The prism, stitched together with tweets and articles and images, is again reflecting our grief.

The glare, in its discomfiting familiarity, is a vivid reminder of yet another death, yet another profound loss, yet another artist incapable of being replaced.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 11:16 PM with the headline "Prince, an icon capable of uniting a fractured culture."