RIP Prince
I can’t say I know much about Prince’s music except that he was mega-famous and a tremendous number of people loved his work. I know the song “Purple Rain” and very little else. However, the reports about his cause of death (the flu) made me wonder whether he wasn’t another victim of sepsis, an illness that recently killed a very good friend of mine.
I’ve also noticed that Prince and his first wife had a series of tragedies—the death of a baby born with a genetic illness, and then a later miscarriage. His ex-wife says the couple never really recovered from those events, and that such things either make a couple stronger or break them. That has the ring of truth to me.
RIP.
it’s never too late to become a Prince fan.
Here’s a story https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/04/21/raunchy-prince-was-actually-a-conservative-christian-who-reportedly-opposed-gay-marriage/
and here’s a tune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfxhRy-iFqs
I never heard any of his music except the few hits were on the radio. They weren’t to my taste so I never looked any further. I’ve heard so many people praise him so much, a few whose opinions I respect, especially over the past 24 hours, that I’ve wondered if I missed something. So I checked out a few songs–“Little Red Corvette,” “1999”, now this one that M links to.
Nope, still not to my taste.
MSNBC went wild last night on this. Gushy. Way over blown.
I’m in the category of “You’ve got me confused with someone who gives a Sh*t”. If it was to ill health, RIP. If it was a drug overdose…not so much.
My assessment of ‘Prince’ has always been that he was at best, a mediocre talent. But the accolades and adulation being expressed is not about his nonexistent artistic impact, since flash without substance has no lasting value.
No, this is about his generation being subconsciously confronted, through his unexpected death… with their own mortality.
Most of them have little religious faith and now, dimly sense that most terrifying quandary of all; they fear that their names have now appeared upon the grim reaper’s list and, they find that they have nothing upon which to base hope in a future beyond the grave.
All I remember of him was from MTV days when he had a girl in his band who played bass guitar or drums or whatnot. She was pretty … what’s the term … hot looking.
I think it was his band. It was a little guy who wore a cape and danced and pranced around and sang about yellow rain or something; he would yelp for punctuation every once in a while. Yeah, I’m almost positive it was him.
Geez … “Purple Rain”.
I should have read the damn post through before commenting.
DNW:
“Yellow rain” was somewhat different.
You might wish to update your concerns, Neo, based on further news reports. I read his plane touched down somewhere 4 days antemortem and he got a quick shot that reversed his symptoms (Narcan?) in an ER, and he left AMA.
Frog:
Yes, I read he had taken too much Percocet.
It’s not clear whether he took Percocet regularly, or whether this was for some condition that was related to his pre-existing flu (or pneumonia, or whatever he may have had). Percocet can also depress breathing, so if he had pneumonia (or some sort of sepsis), Percocet could cause death through that mechanism without an OD.
I await further information. Sepsis was just a guess of mine.
For the first time, I was truly saddened by a celebrity death. I think Mr. Britain got it right: “No, this is about his generation being subconsciously confronted, through his unexpected death… with their own mortality. ”
Prince’s music took me through high school and college and hearing it brings me back to more fun days. His being 57 is a very young age to go, regardless of the circumstances.
Prince who? Was he on Trumps campaign staff?
Jaysus wept.
It’s times like this that I very much doubt John Donne got it right. I *am* an island where it comes to this departed drug addict, and do not feel remotely diminished by his passing. Didn’t like his music either. What an age of barbarism we have been cursed to live in.
Agree with the commenter who pointed out that these outpourings of emo are because godless airheads are being forced to confront (however briefly) the abyss every time one of their favourite celebrities dies.
Sadly chronic drug users are unaware that their abuse habit causes serious damage to the myocardium, (heart muscle).
Imperceptibly their heart muscle deteriorates becoming weaker over time and the aging process.
Elizabeth Taylor was actually a chronic user of pain meds.
And would insist on Percocet & other strong narcotics for the most minor of discomforts. She passed at 80 from *heart failure*, so they trade the easy way out of some pain for diminished cardiac capacity down the road.
Hank Williams, he came up from Montgomery
With his heart full of broken country songs
Nashville, Tennessee really didn’t understand him
Cause he did things differently
Then the way they were done
But when he finally made it to the Grand Ole Oprey
He made it stand still
He ended up on alcohol and pills.
— Fred Eaglesmith
Prince was IMO talented. He owed alot to James Brown and Michael Jackson, but he was his own pop/r&b genius. And he was a master at the guitar and wrote many tunes for other vocalist . His catalog of songs is impressive. He was a troubled soul. RIP.
As far as talent, I’ll take 1 Prince over a 1000 Kayne Wests and his ilk.
In fact, burying Kayne West instead would be a better idea.
Technically if he died of the flu then it would be speaking loosely to say that he died of sepsis since sepsis is a bacterial infection but flu is a viral infection. If he died of sepsis associated with the flu that means that the flu weakened him enough to enable a bacteria to take over. Since the flu affects the respiratory tract a pneumonia is a common complication and often leads to sepsis. Another possibility is that he thought he had the flu but actually had a bacterial infection which had symptoms which resembled the flu.
Dennis:
If you read my link about sepsis, you would see that the word “sepsis” can refer to a bacterial, viral, parasitic, or fungal infection, although bacterial is the most common.
The *flu* that is mentioned so often in these unexpected deaths most likely is the *early stages of heart failure*.
The heart gradually peters out. It is beginning to fail as a *pump* therefore fluid is beginning to accumulate in the lungs
To the average person & the victim it seems like the *flu or a cold*. They will experience fatigue too & erroneously think those are the flu symptoms, when all along more fluid is accumulating in the lungs. Eventually the failing heart will experience a fatal arrhythmia or the fluid filled lungs will have no room for oxygen & the person succumbs to pulmonary edema (drowns if you will). Sudden OD deaths are usually pulmonary edema too, cocaine is notorious for taking people out that way.
The trend in medicine is to move from groups of symptoms called syndromes to etiologies. Often we discover that what we originally thought was one disease is several similar diseases with different etiologies.
With the term sepsis we are moving in the opposite direction from an illness caused by a serious bacterial infection usually with bacteremia back to a group of physical signs related to an infection of some type. The theory that the cause of sepsis is not so much damage by the infection as it is dysregulated host response has been around for years but the mortality rate is still very high especially as we enter the post antibiotic era. My guess is that if we ever obtain more effective treatments for the underlying infection the death rate from sepsis will improve rapidly.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2492881