The Roots’ Questlove has taken to Instagram to pay tribute to the late Prince by listing 40 reasons why the artist was a pioneer of the hip-hop genre.
Questlove has previously paid tribute to Prince with special DJ sets, a written essay for Rolling Stone, a Billboard Music Awards tribute and shared stories about the artist during the monologue segment of ‘The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon’.
In this latest Instagram post, Questlove is responding to hip-hop magazine The Source putting Prince on their cover. Starting the post he writes, “1st i chuckled cause well…—ok it’s been a min since I saw The Source but after I pondered —-yeah it made sense.”
Reasons included that Prince “came from troubled home”; that he “pretty much wrote the book on gettin some better than any of his contemporaries” and that he “had beef w his peers who hated on him”.
Questlove also claims that Prince “invented the remix (not disco edits, but reimagining the album version)” and “ghostwrote for everyone”. He also adds that Prince “refused 2 b ordinary & eschewed the proper English language as a ways 2 communicate”.
A memorial service was held in honour of Prince over the weekend of May 14 at the Jehovah’s Witness church where he worshipped. The memorial took place at Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka. Billboard reported that 500 people attended the event, although only around 50 invited guests were actually allowed in the church.
Reports state that the memorial included a tribute led by Larry Graham, the former Sly and the Family Stone bassist and uncle of rapper Drake who is credited with introducing Prince to the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion.