Explaining Prince to People Who Don’t Know Prince

It is the mission of this site to bring you Wrong Media: bizarre pieces of pop culture that simply do not belong to our dimension. Things that fit our reality like Magnum condoms fit everyone who buys Magnum condoms. But not everything that penetrates the veil and stains the sheets of our zeitgeist is bad. For example: Prince.

In the 1980s — an extremely conservative era full of white-washed and heavily consumerized corporate music — one of the biggest acts in the world was a guitar-shredding minority sex-elf. In a time when the radio was so afraid of masturbation we had to “dance with ourselves” and “turn japanese,” Prince put the line “I met her in a hotel lobby / masturbating with a magazine” on his biggest album. That’s so horny I actually don’t even understand what it means. R-rolled up, like a tube?  

Everybody was supposed to be cute about sex, but Prince very openly wanted to fuck your girlfriend on top of your mother and we thought that was the best. We let him make a movie! Purple Rain was a smash hit! He basically cast himself as the bad guy. All he did for an hour and a half was rock, fuck, ride motorcycles, and slap women. He did many of those things simultaneously and for some reason we loved it? This feisty lil’ fuckgnome clearly did not belong to our universe, and that’s before I mention he was a Jehovah’s Witness. 

But it’s been so long since Prince molested every single year of the 1980s that there are now grown-ass adults who’ve never heard of him. What follows is something of a field guide to his biggest hit, “When Doves Cry,” in the hopes that it might help you explain Prince to a generation that’s way into silly dances and devouring butt.

Both of which Prince may have invented.

When Doves Cry

Dig if you will the picture

Of you and I engaged in a kiss

The sweat of your body covers me

Can you my darling

Can you picture this?

Prince knows the importance of foreplay. He’s not going to slingshot you straight into his bizarre world of inverted sex and sticky velvet without the proper lubrication. He’s going to ease you into it. This is just the tip of the song. All he really asks here is that you, the listener, picture yourself fucking Prince. You, of course, are already doing this. 

Let’s go to the video for visual reference…

See, at this stage you’re just opening the ornate doors to Prince. The world outside — the one that you’re used to — is dilapidated, ugly, worn-down. But beyond it lies a soft purple glow, a kind of color out of space. It pulses softly, just like you’ll be doing shortly.

Dream, if you can, a courtyard

An ocean of violets in bloom

Ah, Prince is still setting the stage. You are in a courtyard. There are purple flowers all around you. Soon there will be purple deflowering you. This is all sort of a mise-en-place for you getting reamed. 

And now you meet Prince for the first time, the same way anybody meets Prince for the first time: Orbserving him in a distant bathtub through an explosion of doves.

Animals strike curious poses

They feel the heat

The heat between me and you

Okay, it is important to understand that nearby wildlife will watch you fuck Prince. This isn’t a big deal, but some people get upset the first time a giraffe peeks in the window to watch you spread-eagled on the bed while a sexual sprite spelunks your various caverns. But this is just nature: Every animal knows when you’re about to fuck Prince just like every animal knows when an earthquake is about to hit. There’s just something monumental impending in the air.

Prince has now emerged from the bath and is cat-crawling across the courtyard as if to remind you, who has been rendered idiotic by lust, what an animal is.

How can you just leave me standing

Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)

Maybe I’m just too demanding

Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold

Ah, this is also important to understand about Prince: Sometimes you get all set for a thorough gaping — you’ve emerged into the courtyard, beheld the violets, the requisite animals have sensed your fuckmusk and agreed not to attack you until you cum — and then Prince wanders off to talk about his father. 

Don’t worry, as soon as he’s done gazing at his dad, and then himself in the mirror, back to his dad, back to himself, and then puts on the hat, he’ll strip naked once again and return to savage your holes. Try to stay primed by watching the animals. See if you can find a salamander: Nature’s penis.

Maybe you’re just like my mother

She’s never satisfied (she’s never satisfied)

Why do we scream at each other?

Whoops, hold on. This happens, too. Sometimes you start off fucking Prince and then you wind up fighting him for a while instead. This is to be expected. This was actually what Purple Rain was all about.

This is what it sounds like

When doves cry

Okay, we’re coming back around. We’ve got the animals involved again. There are some doves now. They were intrigued when they sensed your sex on the wind and knew you two were about to pound, then they wept at the fuckfight that ensued, but now they’re ready for love again.

Let’s check in with the video:

Oh, sorry. You gotta remember this video was also a tie-in with Purple Rain, so it’s intercut with unrelated scenes from the movie. Mostly B-Roll of Prince riding his motorcycle around. That’s Prince’s motorcycle outfit. 

Touch if you will my stomach

Feel how it trembles inside

You’ve got the butterflies all tied up

Don’t make me chase you

Even doves have pride

Shit, shit! We missed something vital. Okay, while we were watching footage of Prince fopping his deep purple motorcycle through a shuttered steel factory…

The real Prince employed his shapeshifting abilities. I know the doves were only watching you before, but now one of them is Prince. You’ll have to find it, but don’t worry: Most doves eat dogshit out of ruptured plastic bags that fell out of the garbage can. You just have to find the one with pride and we can get this sex parade back on the street again.

No, no, you took too long. This is always a danger with Prince: See, Prince is so sexy and so horny that nobody wants to fuck him more than himself. Right now he doesn’t just want to fuck you, he wants to fuck himself while fucking you. I know you kind of want that too, so I hope you can shimmy like an erotic worm because we’re going to need to bait him back to the bang-zoo before-

Damn it. God damn it. We’ve lost him. If Prince gazes too long into his own eyes he will enter the Prince-Space — a lavender null-dimension that at once exists inside Prince, and also contains Prince. Unfortunately, he’s brought you in with him.

You need to pay careful attention, because the stakes here are dire. This is no longer about fucking — or well, it is about fucking, but it’s a kind of fucking that will unravel who you are as a person. This is a dangerous sexual arena ruled by Prince and his Four HorsePrince of the Apocalypse:

You must remember their names. When you become lost in The Erogenous Zone, you have to first identify the things fucking you before they will show their true forms. If you cannot name them, you’ll be fucked apart until you dissipate into the purple ether, losing coherence as a singular identity and instead becoming just another violet-in-bloom in the ocean that rings Prince’s Sexual Courtyard. 

All right, from left: 

This is the Anal Aviator, dashing explorer of forbidden territories. 

Next up is Prince himself, who is dressed like your grandmother’s couch because he’s so jaded with seduction that he sets himself fun little dares. 

Behind him, in the back, is Rainbow Rikki — a being made of pure light so that it can penetrate the tightest holes on your body: The pupils. I know they’re not technically holes. They technically will be if you look at Rainbow Rikki without protective eyewear. 

On the right is Lake Minnetonka, the human avatar of a mystical and ancient body of water. She has power over, and can become, all fluids. Yes, even those. Especially those.

Last, of course, is Doctor Fingerbang.

If you don’t carefully track each of the many penetrations and orgasms bombarding you at all times within the Prince-Space, and then quickly assign them to the proper HorsePrince responsible, they will overwhelm your senses and begin to dissolve the thin film of ego that you use to hold your body together. You’ll-

Fuck! You already missed a penetration! Your thinking is too narrow. That sensation of implacable brightness, like looking at the sun through a closed eyelid? That was Rainbow Rikki slipping it in you. You have to be careful: This is how it begins, the dissolution of self. You start to recognize that these creatures are not their bodies, that they are more and less, one and the other, themselves and you and what is sex but the joining of flesh to flesh, body to body, two constructions losing distinction and becoming-

No, it’s not too late! 

I know the temptation – God knows I do – but do not split the self you hold inside as true from the self you present to the world, and then let your two selves fuck each other while Prince whispers what sounds you will make as you orgasm seconds before you make them. If your mirror-selves cum at the same time they’ll shatter the pane that separates reality from perception and you’ll see the lie behind the truth that-

No, I’m sorry. 

I’m so sorry.

That was it. You entered the Prince-Space and did not properly guard against the metaphysical orgasms of the HorsePrinces, so Prince guided your mirror-selves into a simultaneous orgasm and you ejaculated the last vestiges of conventional humanity. You will lose yourself to the purple now, becoming one more soft fiber on the velvet panties of Prince.

Look, Prince never wants this kind of thing to happen. It’s his curse and his nature. He is both the scorpion and the frog, stinging himself and being stung. All he wanted was to fuck you on a concrete floor atop a bed of wet flowers, but instead he absorbed your psychic essence into his sexual maelstrom. Now he must once again retire to his ancient bathtub, mourning your sacrifice even as he waits for another.

And anyway that’s what “When Doves Cry” is about, if someone asks.