‘Earlier, I had been talking stuff in a violent room’—- okay, it wasn’t a ‘violent room,’ more like a violet one. Purple. THE color that belongs to only one artist and no one will own it the way he has for more than 35 years. In this purple space, I was contemplating and discussing what the VMAs mean to me this year, 16 months after Prince’s passing. Like many, I still roam these musical streets in a constant state of WTH!?, but I am coping by listening to what he left us, watching his films and videos and fervently reading things I hadn’t read since I was 12, new books, hard to find out-of-print books and even a few advance copies of forthcoming works. In the midst of my healing, I found these books listed to be useful as I work on liner notes for a free tribute album produced by Nyle Girgis and Elisa Fiorillo Dease (who worked with Prince), a chapter in a 2018 scholarly work on Prince and the Minneapolis Sound that I am calling “For Love is the Color: Prince’s Paisley Park as One of Black Music’s Forgotten Treasures 1985-1994,” and an earlier interview I did with Afshin Shahidi about his forthcoming book on Prince.

Fonte: booktrib.com