Bruce Springsteen honors Prince as tour kicks off in Minneapolis
No one would blame Prince and Bruce Springsteen if they had been rivals.
In 1984, they were two giants vying for one musical throne. In August of that year, Prince’s “Purple Rain” knocked Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” from the top of the charts.
But rivalry never took root. Instead, the man known as “His Royal Badness” and the one called “The Boss” shared something else mutual respect and genuine affection.
Now, nearly a decade after Prince’s death, the two are connected once again this time by Minneapolis, the city that forged Prince and that Springsteen has risen to celebrate as it fought back against President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration surge there.
Springsteen kicked off his new tour in the city Tuesday with a cover of Prince hit “Purple Rain,” a song he last performed nearly a decade ago.
In January, he released “Streets of Minneapolis,” an anti-Trump and anti-ICE protest anthem written after the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents.
The New Jersey native first flew to Minneapolis in January to perform the song and performed it again at the No Kings rally in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota on Saturday, telling the crowd of many thousands: “This past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis. Well, they picked the wrong city.”
After George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in 2020 just over four years after Prince died from an accidental fentanyl overdose at the age of 57 in April 2016 a meme spread fast as protests erupted around the country and the world: “Nobody thought the revolution would start in Minneapolis…except Prince.”
It was a nod to his band, The Revolution. And to who Prince was.
Prince spent years using his platform to advocate for others by fighting for artists’ rights, the Black Lives Matter movement and underprivileged youth.
A year before he died, in response to the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, Prince wrote “Baltimore,” traveling to the city to perform the song at a rally and releasing a lyric video that ended with a statement from him: “The system is broken.”
“It’s going to take the young people to fix it this time,” he said in the statement. “We need new ideas, new life.”
Springsteen has lived by the same code standing up for unions, for veterans, for the forgotten. In 2001, he performed a song called “American Skin (41 shots),” to protest the killing of Amadou Diallo, shot to death by officers with the New York City Police Department.
He has been outspoken about his opposition to the Trump administration and recently allowed the American Civil Liberties Union to use his hit single “Born in the U.S.A.” for an ad campaign around the Supreme Court’s consideration of Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship.
But what bonded Prince and Springsteen wasn’t politics. It was music.
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