Mere months before he was found dead in an elevator in his home/studio complex, Paisley Park in April of 2016, Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most talented, celebrated and enigmatically reclusive rock stars of all time put out word with little to no fanfare around the publishing world that he was ready to write his memoir. Shockwaves and rumors and several aborted attempts to pin Prince down – a seemingly impossible task since his emergence on the music scene as a nineteen year-old phenom that convinced Warner Bros to give him complete creative control over his work. Enter writer/editor, Dan Piepenbring, who was both an advisory editor at the Paris Review and a rabid Prince fan. The story of his enchanting but furiously quick time in Prince’s presence working through pages of scribbled screed from the man himself about his childhood makes up a third of The Beautiful Ones. The other two-thirds of the book is just as intriguing.
The second part features Piepenbring’s yeoman’s work making heads or tails of Prince’s cadence, his use of weird symbols that replace words like “two” and “four” with their subsequent numerals and “I” with a drawing of an eyeball, and many other eccentricities into a readable text that is the most revealing of Prince’s private thoughts, fears and dreams. The passages about his parents and his awakening as a musician and eventually one of the great artists of the latter half of the previous century and the first sixteen years of this one is well worth the effort.
The third part is a treasure-trove of extremely rare photographs, notes, and mementos from Prince’s rise to fame all the way through the triumph of his groundbreaking smash hit Purple Rain album, film and tour. There is original artwork and designs for album covers, tour outfits, staging and insights into the magical world that Prince had figured in his head and set about infusing into the music and eventually those who helped make it a reality.
And while it is a bittersweet document of what could have been had Prince not accidentally overdosed on prescribed opioids at age fifty-seven, we nonetheless have a better grasp on the mysteries surrounding the blossoming of a superstar in his own words and with images from deep inside his life.
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