On Tuesday, Aug. 13, at about 5:47 p.m., Prince Rogers Nelson did the seemingly unthinkable: The notoriously private music icon, who once declared “The Internet’s completely over,” joined Twitter. Surely this master lyricist would drop some (diamonds and) pearls of wisdom. His opening missive? PRINCE’S 1ST TWEET… TESTING 1, 2. . .” The follow-up was just as tongue-in-cheek: “PRINCE’S 2ND TWEET.”
By the third tweet, Prince, using the handle of his female rock act 3rdeyegirl, had found his groove. “Did eye add too much pepper?” he asked, posting a shot of a salad shrouded in the seasoning. From there, he turned the selfie on its head (his portrait was literally a cloud of smoke) and displayed an irreverent sense of self-awareness, posting a popular meme: an image of himself, circa 1984, wearing a puffy shirt and holding a red flower, with the words “hi im Prince.”
The Internet went wild. “I should probably stop tweeting:@3rdeye-girl,” tweeted one of thousands of fans who sent messages to Prince. “They’re probably annoyed.”
“Actually,” a playful Prince answered cryptically.
“Actually what?” the follower chimed back.
Prince: “Exactly.”
In just minutes, Prince had already mastered the Twitterverse.
“There are certain celebrities who you dream would join Twitter because you never get to see their day-to-day,” says Jermaine Hall, editor-in-chief of the music magazine Vibe. “Prince is one of them. Before Twitter, I don’t even know if we ever thought of Prince eating salad. It’s like, ‘Oh wow, you actually eat?’ ”
Just days after his Twitter debut, Prince revealed the likely impetus behind his sudden willingness to share, tweeting the cover art for his new single, “Breakfast Can Wait”: a photo of comedian Dave Chappelle, dressed as the musician in his “Purple Rain” days and holding a plate of pancakes.
That image represents one of the funniest sketches from Comedy Central’s now-defunct “Chappelle’s Show,” when comedian Charlie Murphy narrates the true story of the time he, his superstar brother Eddie and some pals faced off against Prince and his band the Revolution for a game of basketball. A 5-foot-2 Prince, dressed in full New Romantic gear, dunks, humps the ball, levitates in the air and even serves a pancake breakfast to his stunned foes. “Game, blouses,” Chappelle-as-Prince deadpans.
“I think it’s brilliant,” Charlie Murphy tells The Post of the new record art. “People have been asking me, ‘Is it a joke?’ It’s not. The story was true, and the pancakes were off-the-hook. If Prince came out with a pancake line, he could compete with IHOP.”
With friends, Prince has always operated in the world of the absurd.
“Prince can be hilarious,” says former Revolution keyboardist Matt Fink (better known as Doctor Fink), who currently plays in the tribute band the Purple Xperience. “If anybody should have their own reality show, it’s him. It would be so funny.”
Fink remembers how the whole band used to go out on the town in silk pajamas, at Prince’s behest. And the time in 1983 when Prince staged a fight to prank a music writer at a concert. “The guy was backstage witnessing a knock-down, drag-out fight among the band,” Fink says. “We were throwing furniture and flipping over the tables. The writer was horrified. I think that fight lasted five minutes before Prince started laughing and broke it up.”
In the ’80s, when Prince wasn’t filming his own bizarre comedy sketches featuring his bandmates — Fink recalls one in which Prince playfully led his group through a satire of an over-the-top church service, complete with a wailing preacher man — he was pranking airport security.
“We would find an empty wheelchair and put Prince in it with sunglasses on, roll him into an area where there was a lot of traffic and leave him there,” says Dez Dickerson, former Prince guitarist and owner and founder of the Pavilion Group, which operates a social marketing agency. “Then Prince would fall out of the wheelchair, and people would scramble to help.”
However, one joke went awry when Prince decided to take a bullhorn from a plane’s emergency equipment.
“We were sitting out on the tarmac and they announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, someone has stolen a piece of airline equipment,’ ” Dickerson says. He and Prince were
taken off the plane and locked up, “but it ended up being funny anyway,” Dickerson explains, “because Prince was signing autographs at the jail.”
And then there was the time Prince invited Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson roller skating a few years ago. In his recently released book “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove,” the Roots drummer and “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” bandleader details the crazy experience.
“Prince was carrying a briefcase in his hand, and he was acting all myserious, like it contained the glowing substance from ‘Pulp Fiction’ or something,” Thompson writes. After confiscating Thompson’s cellphone, Prince proceeded to reveal the contents of the case. “He took out the strangest, most singular pair of roller skates I had ever seen. They were clear skates that lit up, and the wheels sent a multicolored spark trail into your path. Man. He could skate like he could sing.”
Flash-forward to last Friday. It’s 2 a.m. and a 55-year-old Prince, flaunting a shiny throwback afro, is putting on a surprise performance at New York’s City Winery (one of several rumored appearances). His New Power Generation band is locked in a nasty groove. Then it happens. Someone in the audience yells out, “Game, blouses!” Prince shakes his head and laughs. He’s in on the joke.