Bruce Hutton: Prince’s death calls for generational eulogy

Prince has died.

I was born in 1967; I graduated high school in 1985; I am 48 years old; all of which means I’m getting old. It’s probably natural to feel lost as the icons of one’s youth fall away, one by one, the way they have seemingly by the dozen this year, beginning with David Bowie and now with Prince. The world I was born into was already dying, but it gasped its last breath Thursday, and I think we’ve seen the last of it.

I grew up in a world radically different than this one, and it would be hard to explain the difference to someone younger. Everything is so diffused now it’s hard to remember that there was once a world when Prince was mine. Or Bowie, or Merle Haggard, or Harper Lee, or Pat Conroy, or Glenn Frey or Alan Rickman. I didn’t share them with the world. I didn’t share them with anybody.

We live now in a cacophony of opinion and advertisement; it drowns out the solitary voice within us, the place where we hear ourselves. Some say it’s better now, the world before the unimaginably vast interconnectedness of the Internet made for isolated pockets of people who had no idea there were millions of others out there just like them, and it’s good that all those people can reach out to each other. Maybe.

But right now I’m mourning a different world, one where I made my own mixtapes and thumbed for hours through my records looking for one song, set aside time to watch my favorite TV show because it wasn’t going to be on again until summer reruns, asked bookstore clerks if a particular author had a new book coming out this year, went to a movie with no idea what it was about other than the words on the poster, learned what was going on in the world when it came on the evening news or was in the morning paper.

In the summer of 1984, I rode around on my bike listening to the “Purple Rain” soundtrack over and over on my Walkman. Every time I turned on MTV, there was Prince in that bathtub, singing “When Doves Cry.” I yelled at the radio whenever they’d play the edited version of “Let’s Go Crazy,” without the spoken intro. I listened to “Darling Nikki,” and I was pretty sure I got what it was all about, but not totally, and there was no website to consult. I had to make up my own answers.

The music was mine. Of course I knew Prince was a worldwide superstar and everybody and their dog owned that record, but it didn’t matter. Alone in my room, lying on my waterbed with huge headphones that covered the entire ear, the music spoke only to me and there was no way to reach me when I was there. That was the world, and no one could get in.

It may sound lonely, but it wasn’t. It was just quieter.

Bruce Hutton is a customer services specialist for The Spokesman-Review.