Prince is on the cover of V Magazine looking absolutely ageless. Seriously, he doesn't change (he might even qualify for the same club of Time Wizards that Pharrell Williams belongs to). Keeping with the theme of never changing, Prince refused to be recorded for the profile inside the magazine. Prince is notoriously protective of the sound of his own voice and its virtually impossible to find Prince music through typical internet channels.
A few highlights of Prince's technology-averse cover story:
The only tense moment comes when we file into the theater and a security guard says, "No cameras, no cellphones-don't even take them out of your pocket. Tonight, we're not asking, we're just escorting." I ask her what that means. "If we see you with your phone out, we're not going to ask what you're doing-you're just gone."
...
Soon the door to the tour bus opens: it's the man himself. He's changed into a new outft of flared pants with primary color stripes, a large ring with a blue evil eye at the center of his right hand ("nothing evil about it," he tells me) and a rhinestone-encrusted pimp cane in the other. The cane is just for decoration; he is clearly in amazing shape.
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"This organization is diferent than most, in the sense that we don't take directions from the outside world. It's like a galaxy. The sun is in the center giving of energy, and everything revolves around it." He talks about what it would be like if instead of the sun giving of energy, energy was trying to exert its force on the sun. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. It would be, he says, like "meteors hitting a planet!" What makes much more sense is "a sun pulling everything around on its own axis, with information. The sun is information. Nobody really talks to me. Nobody talks to me a lot." He points at Ramadan. "I talk to her. She talks to you. She talks to Richard. And so on and so forth. If I trust her, then you can trust her."
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I ask how tech-averse he really is; does he have an iPhone? "Are you serious?" he says. "Hell, no." He mimics a high-voiced woman. "Where is my phone? Can you call my phone? Oh, I can't fnd it." He talks about people who come to his concerts all the time, akin to the Deadheads. "People come to see us fifty times. Well, that's not just going to see a concert-that's some other mess going on. This music changes you. These people are not being satisfed elsewhere by musicians, you feel what I'm saying? It's no disrespect to anyone else, because we're not checking for them. But we don't lip synch. We ain't got time for it. Ain't no tape up there."
Check out the full excerpt over at V Magazine.
Prince is currently working with his group 3RDEYEGIRL and will feature on Janelle Monae's upcoming album The Electric Lady.
