When the meteoric success of Purple Rain arrived, I felt something of the "conspiratorial" style of Dirty Mind fading away. The songs were excellent, but Prince himself was becoming all-American, and I didn't like his movie at all. I didn't want him to become a new Michael Jackson, I didn't want him to be "respectable" and a family-friendly artist. With his 1985 album Around the World in a Day, I started to realize that Prince had entered his own authentic but also solitary artistic path. His albums had vague, poorly designed covers, like painted by a child's hand, full of symbolic (and somewhat naive, I thought) references. It was as if he wanted to show that he had created his own personal Disneyland, and I had to find the key to entry within the cover illusions. The more confusing his symbolic images became, the more beautiful, tight, with a complete structure and a sense of melody, his songs turned out to be. Prince was very interesting. Now he also needed to become a little more social.

And so it happened: The 1986 album Parade made Prince cool even in clubs (with the song "Kiss" which was played in heavy rotation on MTV, which was like YouTube before YouTube). Prince was strange, and we liked it: He used symbols, numbers, and abbreviations in his song titles long before texting became popular. He had ambiguous sexuality (but in a humorous way again). We thought it was very clever that he adopted different personas in his music: He created separate bands as musical projects, gave songs to other artists that became hits, signed songs with his father's name, and even created his own female persona, Camille, by recording his voice at a higher speed to sound feminine.