There’s a lot of things I don’t do now that I did 30 years ago. You want to see how far you can push everything. As he told Arsenio Hall in 2014, “When you’re 20 years old, you’re looking for the ledge.
People change, and who knows why? Prince became a devout Jehovah’s Witness in the early 2000s, after which his performances often featured toned-down versions of the lyrics to his raciest songs. The question of how someone whose art once seemed to preach the very idea of “sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever”-with magazines, etc.-could become so conservative is both fundamentally unanswerable and very simple. But the years after that saw Prince actively avoid talking about gay rights, and some writers saw subtle homophobia in a few of his later lyrics and actions. “The pop star who made his name on his effete, androgynous ‘Is he GAY or not?’ persona-now he hates us.” Representatives for Prince would tell Perez Hilton that the New Yorker misquoted him: “What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment,” Hilton wrote. “The irony, it burns,” wrote the blogger Joe Jervis. The “homophobe” label attached itself to him, accompanied by the bitter shock of many fans. This exchange caused one of the last great controversies in Prince’s career.
Why Does Sweden Have So Many Start-Ups? Alana Semuels