Maybe the best way to remember him is to embrace our humanity and imperfections, and the fact that we’re still alive to appreciate them.Ĭertainly, as a Prince fan who never got on board with his family-friendly 21st-century reinvention, I appreciated being able to remember him with a few cuss words intact. Prince, as we all know, was perfect, until suddenly–and tragically–he was not. And if the band missed a few cues here and there, then maybe that’s for the better, too. Seeing them–real, appropriately aged, and in person, not immortal in celluloid and Aquanet–is wonderfully humanizing. Fink still iconically geeky in scrubs and shades Bobby Z as rock-solid a timekeeper as ever Wendy and Lisa now delightfully resembling the coolest lesbian moms we could ever ask for.
More importantly, they’re clearly having a blast: Brown Mark remembering way more of his old dance steps than one could have reasonably expected Dr. They aren’t quite the well-oiled machine they were in the mid-’80s–how could they be, without their tiny slavedriver in heels cracking the whip?–but they can still ride a cyborg funk groove like nobody else. Astonishing as it may be, 30 years later, they still have it. Did I really want to see them in their fifties–not to mention without the pint-sized whirling dervish of musical and sexual energy who had always been the group’s unambiguous focal point?īecause I’m sure I’m not the only arrogant thirtysomething with these misgivings, allow me to answer my own question: yes, I did want to see the Revolution. I was two years old when the Revolution disbanded, so they always seemed frozen in time to me: forever lip-syncing on the First Avenue stage in Purple Rain.
Yet even after I understood the reunion, I still didn’t know what to expect.
All of us, the majority of whom never met the man in person, felt a profound loss when Prince passed so how does one even fathom what it meant to the people who shared some of his most successful and creatively fertile years? And if listening to “Sometimes It Snows in April” helps to process our grief, can we really blame Wendy and Lisa–who were, as Wendy recalled the other night, actually present and involved in the song’s composition–for singing it to process theirs? This was, in many ways, less a conventional rock reunion than an act of collective mourning. But when I read the reports from their first set of shows in Minneapolis last year, suddenly it made sense. I have to admit: when I first heard the Revolution were reuniting, I wasn’t sure what to think. The very notion of the Revolution without Prince sounded bizarre, like Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding getting together to tour as the Experience sans Hendrix.
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