Other than Anil Dash, I think I may be the biggest Prince fan that I know. I’ve seen him live four times, I own all his albums, and purple is my favorite color. The man is an instrumental and songwriting genius, and there are very few artists that have influenced the musical landscape to same extent as Prince.

All that to say, I was a bit disappointed when I heard that Prince was going the way of Celine Dion and others by closing out his career as a Vegas performer. Las Vegas just seems to be kind of place where musicians go to die. Luckily, Anil recently pointed to an article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker that talks about his experiences at Studio 3121. An excerpt:

Permit me to plan your dream weekend. You’re going to see a musician, a great one, play at a small club in Las Vegas. For a hundred and seventy-five dollars, you could stand on the dance floor in front of the stage. But, if you want to sit down, house policy requires that you buy at least two tickets and pay an additional three hundred and seventy-five dollars, which entitles you to a bottle of alcohol and seats at a V.I.P. table at the edge of the dance floor. At midnight, the performer will begin a hundred-minute set.

Just from that opening performance, I’m already planning my visit to Las Vegas to see this for myself. Also, I might put Sasha Frere-Jones on my list of people I would love to be. I’m so jealous. For those of you that still don’t get the whole Prince obsession, here’s how Sasha puts it in the article:

He is perhaps the greatest living performer in the pop tradition. The fact that, as he says during his live shows, “my friends all look different—I look just the same” simply enhances the impression that he is our Dorian Gray, if Gray had been raised by Cher and James Brown. Prince’s songwriting heyday, which stretched from 1979 to 1988, is rivalled only by the Beatles’ in generosity, formal variety, and intensity.

Anyone want to go to Vegas this summer?