I think it’s safe to say that 2016 was a year of loss and death. The news of Carrie Fischer’s passing really drove the point home for me. When I heard the news, I thought back to April, when Prince died. To be honest I’ve never been a very big fan of Prince. I learned about that news of his death in an airport during a layover on my way to Coachella. I suspected that a lot of the performers I was about to see would modify theirs sets to pay homage to Prince and cover his songs. That turned out to be true, but the most profound tribute I saw was a simple video. Between sets, on the enormous screens on either side of the stage, they played the video of Prince covering “Creep” by Radiohead during Coachella 2008.
Looking back on it now, this was the most remarkable thing I saw at the festival, even better than the live acts, as strange as that sounds. I think this performance is one of the best cover songs ever recorded. When I watch the video now on YouTube, it occurs to me that it’s a fundamentally different experience than seeing it on the huge screen. In April, standing in the dessert, being hit by a wall of sound and purple light, we were in the very spot where the performance happened 8 years before. It felt like holy ground.
You could argue that it would have been better to be there in 2008, to have seen the real thing. But there was something about the absence conveyed by the video that I’ll never forget. Projected video, and cinema in general, always acts like a bridge between our world and the world of dreams, spirits, and the afterlife. People are turned into light. Prince was not there, and it was sinking in that he would never be there again. Between the two obscenely large screens sat an empty stage.
I think it also matters that Creep was not his song. I know Prince wrote some great songs, but a cover song is the perfect way to get past the distraction of originality. His way of performing the song was not about making something, it was about displaying a way of being. He was showing how he could read and repeat back something we all knew, and do it in a way that revealed things we’d never heard before.
Right now 2016 feels like a year where we lost a lot ways of being. A lot of possibilities died.
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