New Online Museum Gathers All of Prince’s Websites in 1 Place
What if, instead of being a hellhole filled with trolls and bad news, the internet offered "the definitive place of gathering 4 all who love life, love God, lovesexy ... a new collective mindstate of unity, love and truth so great every human will want 2 join?"
What if, instead of being a hellhole filled with trolls and bad news, the internet offered “the definitive place of gathering 4 all who love life, love God, lovesexy … a new collective mindstate of unity, love and truth so great every human will want 2 join?” That was the late musician Prince’s vision for what the web could be, as he put it on the homepage of Love4OneAnother, his official website from 1997 to 1999, which revolved around his charity at the time. The site was the beginning of what Prince called “a webwide effort 2 RAISE the vibration of the world.”
Prince, the ultimate futurist, was an early adopter of digital media as a means of circumventing corporate music distribution channels, connecting with his listeners, and amplifying the mystique of his space-alien personas. “Over 20 years online, Prince launched nearly 20 different websites, maintained a dozen different social media presences, participated in countless online chats and directly connected with fans around the world,” Sam Jennings, who worked with the musician on creating websites for nine years, writes on his website. Filled with retro, fantasy art-inspired graphics, most of these sites were defunct by the time of Prince’s death from an accidental painkiller overdose in April.
The Prince Online Museum, launched this week, has revived and archived these sites as an elaborate digital memorial to the artist. From TheDawn.com, launched on Valentine’s Day in 1996 with a wedding program titled “Coincidence or fate?”, to 2013’s 3rdEyeGirl, the online museum allows free access to working versions of Prince’s web platforms, as well as behind-the-scenes stories of their creation.
“They are snapshots in time to experience the Web sites [sic] just like they were when they were active,” Sam Jennings, the director of the Prince Online Museum, told the New York Times. “Other than the music, there is another side to Prince, which was his fierce independence and wanting to connect directly with his audience without any middlemen.” Created by Jennings, who designed five of Prince’s sites, the museum was a “labor of love” — no one will earn any money from it. The interactive timeline is annotated with an oral history of Prince’s online presence: Webmasters and designers of Prince sites discuss designing virtual worlds that reflected his purple-tinted vision.
Launched in 2004, the New Power Generation Music Club, for example, offered “new music, radio shows, and concert tickets directly to fans at a time when very few artists were taking full advantage of the Internet, and certainly not independently without any strings to the industry,” Jennings says. It was also a “virtual estate,” for fans who longed to access some simulacrum to Prince’s mysterious Paisley Park home and studio.
Also featured in the online museums archives: Lyrics printed in neon inside a purple crystal ball, an interactive music video for “Don’t Have to Be Rich,” which features a purple orb in space, and “Prince Interactive,” a CD-Rom released in 1994 “when the term ‘interactive’ was hot but the internet hadn’t quite caught up to these ambitions yet.”
Parts of the long speech that featured on Love4OneAnother2000, which featured only a lyric video for “One Song,” is sadly resonant today: “1999… and the illusion continues. One begs 2 ask – ‘when will it end?’ Unnatural disasters happen seemingly every week. Train crashes, shootings, nuclear accidents; is there any place of refuge one can flee from this insanity? Very few of mankind’s creations r designed 2 make u feel good, unless u get pleasure from seeing the human body desecrated by guns, explosions, fights, and any other things these so-called ‘artists’ create.”
Few websites, these days, offer “places of refuge” to which to “flee from this insanity.” All the more reason to check out this “webwide effort to RAISE the vibration of the world.”
Check out the Prince Online Museum here.
