“When it's 1985, and you're a 15-year-old boy growing up in a blue-collar town in upstate New York, and the choice is between Springsteen and Prince, you go with Springsteen. Springsteen meant cars and escape and distant fathers and shitty jobs. Springsteen was nihilism. Glorious, self-pitying, pre-Cobain nihilism. What could be more masculine, right?

”But the girls. The girls always went with Prince. Always. That confounded me. It confounded my male friends (redundant: all my friends were male) with our stupid basketballs and chicken wing parties. Prince wore boots with heels. He wore makeup. He sang like a girl. Prince confounded us because he was about sex, because he challenged our parochial definition of what it meant to be a man.“

-- Steve Fennessy, ”Prince and My Evolution," in Atlanta Magazine.