Five years on from his declaration that the internet was “outdated” and “completely over”, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Prince may have a slightly conflicted attitude towards social media. On the one hand, it’s one of the means by which an artist can circumvent a music industry he has long claimed to distrust. On the other, he’s smart enough to know that rock stars whose public persona revolves around a certain mystique probably shouldn’t get involved in the world of selfies and hashtags. It’s hard to maintain an aura of charismatic inscrutability if you persist in posting photos of what you’re eating – “Cheeky Ginsters! #knutsfordservices #nomnom” – and getting into venomous Twitter spats over who should be voted off Strictly when you’re a couple of glasses to the good on a Saturday night.
Blessed even at the best of times with what you might reasonably describe as a pretty whimsical approach – his career path suggests a man not much afraid of completely changing his mind or contradicting himself in public – it’s almost as if you can see the two arguments fighting themselves out in his head. He started an official Facebook account, announced an online fan Q&A, then answered a grand total of one question – about sound frequencies – in three hours. He set up a livestream to his Paisley Park studio but the #PRINCEGLOBAL PARTY barely featured Prince at all: people got to watch an series of interviews with his collaborators, before he played all of three songs and the stream ended. In November last year, the Facebook account and his short-lived Twitter feed – first Tweet: a photo of salad, second Tweet: “PRINCE’S SECOND TWEET” – vanished. (A verified Prince account has since returned.)
So you do have to wonder how long his dalliance with Instagram – or, as he dubs it, PRINCESTAGRAM – is going to last. Thus far, it’s proved fascinating, not least because it’s so amateurish, like the work of an ardent 11-year-old Prince fan, should such a thing exist. Amid the shots of Prince onstage or looking about awesomely cool at various points during the past 30 years, there are reposts of faintly clumsy photomontages of Prince, clearly put together by fans and of those meme-ready images with comical text attached which feature Prince - or David Chappelle dressed as Prince.
There is also a flatly amazing video of (presumably) his computer’s wallpaper – it features Prince – with added visual interest provided by Prince (presumably) moving the mobile phone he’s filming it on around a bit.
His mystique remains more or less intact, although we learn that he is a master of the prosaic photo caption – a shot of Prince touching a large poster of himself on the face is captioned TOUCHIN MY FACE – and that he is not immune to the lure of the food-based selfie: CHOCOLATE OVERDOSE offers the caption of one photo featuring Prince face-down on the carpet, clutching a box of sweets. If nothing else, this is not the work of a team of social-media professionals dedicated to providing beautifully polished content: on Instagram, as everywhere else in his career, Prince clearly insists on maintaining total artistic control.
