Last Minute Gift Ideas
For music fans with questionable taste. Prince Perfume, this is what it smells like when doves cry. The Chemical Romance prom jacket by Hurley (nee Nike). Metallica light switch plate and Kiss caskets...
View ArticleThis Prince Interview Is Everything You Hoped For
In honor of Prince joining Twitter—you can follow him at @3RDEYEGIRL, where he tweets things like “PRINCE’S 3RD TWEET: DID EYE ADD 2 MUCH PEPPER? pic.twitter.com/3jfe3rb41g“—take a look at Vanessa...
View ArticleSong of the Day: “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”
It’s a good day, isn’t it? The sort of day where we feel the need to rock out a little bit, and let’s be honest, we “wouldn’t be satisfied” unless we do. Prince’s thrilling top ten single from 1987, “I...
View ArticlePrince Returns to the Internet
Since recording “Baltimore,” written in response to the deaths of Mike Brown and Freddie Gray, Prince has returned to the Internet. We at The Rumpus were captivated by Prince’s last Twitter experiment,...
View ArticleSong of the Day: “Purple Rain”
Our history of rock-stars-turned-movie-actors goes back a long time, but one highlight has to be Prince’s performance in his bizarre 1984 drama, Purple Rain. Though chock full of laughably weird...
View Article?uestlove’s Rivalry with Finding Nemo
With Finding Dory, the sequel to the Pixar hit, coming to theaters soon, ?uestlove has been inspired to recount a Nemo-related anecdote: apparently, one time Prince fired the artist from a DJ gig, and...
View ArticleSong of the Day: “Creep”
An important part of Prince’s artistic image has relied upon mystery—the mystery of his genius is comprised of equal parts sexuality and technical prowess. But there is another component to it, and...
View ArticleWatch Prince Cover Bowie’s “Heroes”
Prince played two shows in Toronto on the Piano & A Microphone tour, and his sets featured a series of covers: the artist performed his take on David Bowie’s “Heroes,” along with Joni Mitchell’s “A...
View ArticleSound Takes: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David BowieThe Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (RCA Victor)The narrative David Bowie concocted and ascribed to his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the...
View ArticlePrince, We Miss You
This has been a difficult year for our musical heroes. The loss of Prince has the world mourning, once again, an artist whose work gave listeners the strength and permission to be as different,...
View ArticleDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Something’s Happening Out There
Taking the Red Line from Central Square to Park Street Station a few days before the November election to get to the Mondale rally at the Boston Common, Giff and I started up a lively conversation with...
View ArticleFive Stages of Prince Fandom
Stage 1: You Got the LookPrince and you are the same height, so you both look good in cropped jackets. Because it is the mid ’80s, you have collected an unholy number of cropped jackets, enough to...
View ArticleYou’re Just a Sinner I Am Told: Prince & the Sexual Revolution
I wanted to have sex, to lovefuck, to sweat, open, close, get fucked, taste and kiss and lick, and I wanted to dance.I was sixteen. I had a beautiful, kinky, experienced boyfriend. D. was nineteen, an...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #73: Prince Rogers Nelson, Guitar Player: A Symposium
The passing into the afterlife of Prince Rogers Nelson was sudden, it was unwarranted, and, because of his very reasonable wish for privacy, it was inexplicable. The outpouring of sentiment that...
View ArticleChaka Khan Seeks Treatment
Now that Prince’s death has officially been linked to opiate use—an accidental overdose of Fentanyl, the be specific—some artists are heeding the icon’s death as a warning to get their own opiate use...
View ArticleThe Ever-Present Now
“We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”–Bruce Springsteen (“No Surrender”) I was not a Springsteen fan at the time of the concert. I grew up in New Jersey,...
View ArticleAlways a Good Day to Celebrate Prince
Because it’s always a good idea to read about Prince, and to mark the six-month anniversary of the icon’s passing, okayplayer. published a master list of memories both intimate and hilarious. They’ve...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Butch and the Bathroom
My beloved and I have a routine, worked out over thirty years, a road show really, or a vaudeville act, each venue a version of the venue before, a wall-long mirror, a sea of side-eyed, not-looking...
View ArticleRumpus Original Fiction: My Name Is Jean-Pierre and I Am Still an End Table
DAY 1 I am still an end table. I know that I had been operating under the assumption that the spell would break as soon as I left the castle, and that assumption was incorrect. Most of my brain power...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #92: Perfection
The listing impulse in music criticism is, well, hard to like. Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, ruined it, perhaps, at a time when it was going to be ruined anyway by reason of overuse. The...
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