Weekend self-care open thread: Purple reign

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time to see you laughing
I only wanted to see you
Laughing in the purple rain

Five years ago this week, the inestimable Prince Rogers Nelson left our plane of existence.

I remember being at work, scrolling through Twitter, when the reports began to come in. The invariable reaction was "shit, not again", as this was a short three months after David Bowie's passing. Many of us took this as a sign that 2016 was not going to be a good year. And as the deaths of good people kept coming in, while an orange buffoon kept creeping up to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., we were proven correct.

Most Americans were introduced to Prince from his "Purple Rain" album and movie. Growing up in New York, we were funking to "1999" a few years prior to his breakout. (The video for "1999" was just a turning point for many of us.) But whenever you arrived to the gates of the Purple One, you knew you were in a different space. He was funk. He was rock. He was psychedelic. And the music just kept flowing out of him. Some of his music was better than his other compositions, but for my money he never went through a fallow period. I had the chance to finally see him live when he had his residency in Inglewood at the Forum. I wasn't a grown man that night, but a teen seeing a hero at last.

Rest in peace, Prince. We'll keep the groove going.

As always, be bold, be brave, be beautiful, be kind, be good.