PRINCE OF MINNEAPOLIS?
MINNEAPOLIS—For starters, we're talking God or at least E.F. Hutton. You drop the name Prince in a lot of Minneapolis circles and suddenly you're reading from the Bible at a tent revival. It wasn't always that way. Here in separatist Minneapolis (probably the only city that would dub one of its black-settled suburbs Coon Rapids and let the name stand), Prince Rogers Nelson came from the northside—not exactly a ghetto, but a doomed side of the tracks considered Nowheresville by the tight-lipped white folks who roll through on the Freeway and never stop to smell the barbeque.
PRINCE OF MINNEAPOLIS?
FEATURES
by
Greg Linder
MINNEAPOLIS—For starters, we're talking God or at least E.F. Hutton. You drop the name Prince in a lot of Minneapolis circles and suddenly you're reading from the Bible at a tent revival.
It wasn't always that way. Here in separatist Minneapolis (probably the only city that would dub one of its black-settled suburbs Coon Rapids and let the name stand), Prince Rogers Nelson came from the northside—not exactly a ghetto, but a doomed side of the tracks considered Nowheresville by the tight-lipped white folks who roll through on the Freeway and never stop to smell the barbeque. Within that sealed-off community, Prince was the product of a 90-proof troubled family, shuffled from mom to pop to step-pop to relatives until he came to roost in the basement of his friend Andre Anderson (later to become Andre Cymone).