Prince was ridiculously fickle and capricious, bringing chaos and disorder everywhere he seemed to go, but, quite frankly, we loved that side of it in a world that was highly organized.
In 2014, our little fan group spent days combing Twitter and the news for intel on the next gig and a couple of thousand of us speculatively queued up in Camden ALL DAY - cold and wet - for a possible gig. Turned out to be two gigs in one evening. Did Prince get on Twitter to tell anyone? No. Did he launch a website? No. He did a random press conference a few days before from Lianne La Havas’s tiny flat.
Did he take Bitcoin? No, it was cash on the door.
So much of what he did from about 1994 on was driven by a slightly paranoid suspicion that he was being ripped off somewhere along the line and only he should control how his work was enjoyed, leading him into weird situations with his fans, other bands and musicians (remember his cover of Radiohead’s Creep), and it only really eased up once he STOPPED trying to work with internet technology and realized his performance skills were his bread and butter.
While I absolutely love and adore his music, I consider him to be a control freak and a terrible communicator outside of the studio who couldn’t handle reality, which is probably what helped kill him in the end, along with some dumb beliefs. I could honestly kick Larry Graham in the balls for that.
For plenty of supporting source material, check out Kevin Smith’s incredible answer to a question about Prince, go look up the Hit & Run tour, and the vast swathes of terrible album covers that helped to bury so much of his later work - that and the fact that you couldn’t buy many of these albums in the shops anyway.