MINNEAPOLIS (CelebrityAccess) Prince, performing on a massive video screen, played alongside 13 musicians at the Target Center in Minneapolis April 20.
The more than two-hour performance, coinciding with the second anniversary of the performer’s death, was attended by 7,000 people dressed in purple, according to the city’s Star-Tribune. A live performance of Prince was displayed on a backdrop as some of his musical friends played his music live.
“Cool? Creepy? Comforting? It’s all in the eye of the beholder,” the paper said.
The performance was put on by Paisley Park, which is run by GracelandLLC (which launched a live video tour of Elvis Presley 20 years after he died. Graceland CEO Joel Weinshanker introduced Prince’s surviving sibling and heirs at last night’s show, saying the were “tasked to allow h is legacy to live on,” according to the Star-Tribune.
The review of the 30-song set, which noted that many people in the audience were in tears, was tepid. It noted that the artists were from Prince’s NPG crew but “not as crisp as Prince himself would have demanded” and that Prince’s performance, taken from a later tour, was “sufficiently exciting for a video.”
Prince’s abhorrence of technology was also cited, where he was asked in 1998 about dueting with the dead: “That’s the most demonic thing imaginable. Everything is as it is, and it should be,” Prince opined. “If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age.”
