Review: 'Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia'

Prince was always an enigmatic artist. Check out the mass of speculations he unloads in "Controversy", a song written before he was even a house-hold name. Because it was sometimes hard to find the human behind all his supernatural abilities and purple sex-E.T. persona, reading testimonies from the people who had close encounters with him is always enlightening. Prince often isolated himself, but he could also be generous and disarmingly goofy. His tireless work ethic and the devotion he poured into his own music are legendary, but he was also a music fan and went out of his way to reveal his devotion to such seemingly unlikely artists as Squeeze and Suzanne Vega.

This is the Prince Paul Sexton aims to reveal in his new book Prince: A Portrait of the Artist in Memories & Memorabilia. Across seventeen short chapters, Sexton pulls back the veil on specific incidents in Prince's life as told by the people who knew him well, or in Vega's case, had a less intimate brush with him. There's a chapter on the note Prince sent to her to proclaim his love of "Luka". There are more revealing chapters on how Prince stepped out of a troubled home life to live with bassist and friend André Cymone, how he mentored protégés such as the Family, remade himself as a Jehovah's Witness on the recommendation of Family Stone bassist Larry Graham, and how he and engineer Susan Rogers (who also pens the foreword) called out any co-worker asleep on the job by photographing them with a giant toy penguin. 

Details such as these do not provide a full biography. Rather they round out existing biographies with additional details about Prince's background, beliefs, tastes, and personality. Because Prince was such a visual artist, a dazzling selection of photos of Prince defying gravity multiple times or jamming with Ron Wood, as well as images of his stage outfits, guitars, handwritten notes, and personal Bat-a-rang, further fill in the funky gaps.