Prince giveth, and Prince taketh away. Just a few months after blessing the music world with not one but two well-received new albums, and mere weeks after blowing up TV screens with a wild performance on Saturday Night Live, Prince has suddenly shuttered his 3rdEyeGirl Twitter account and both of his official Facebook pages, as well as yanking all but three videos from his YouTube channel.
The Star Tribune speculates that Prince might already have a new project in the offing, possibly a jazz/funk/soul album as NPRQ, but given his uncomfortable history with the Internet, and the recent throttling Steve Albini gave his Purpleness, there is also the distinct possibility that he has just grown tired of pretending to interact with people in cyberspace. Several attempts to use the ‘social’ aspect of social media went assless-chaps-up for him recently, including a failed Facebook Q&A that resulted in less than one answer for over 4000 questions and a disappointing Yahoo live stream that featured a lot of filler but only three actual songs, leaving fans to complain, echoing Mr. McGee, that he was a bit too leisurely. On the plus side, unlike Taylor Swift, you can still access Prince’s music on Spotify, so he’s still on your computer, even if you can’t talk directly to him anymore.