For at least three decades, no Minneapolis musician could pretend for an instant that he or she would be as famous as Prince. Or as cool as Prince. Or as innovative. That kind of total cultural dominance messes with a city's psyche. The man put Minneapolis on the map. Right next to it, in big purple letters, he wrote, “Population: Prince.” And we never stopped loving him for it. When we learned of his death, we wept for him all day in front of Paisley Park, his home, and danced to his music all night in First Avenue, the club he made a national music landmark.

Minneapolis likes to claim Dylan as a hometown boy, but Bob was just an outstate kid who crashed here on his way to New York, treading the path to glory familiar to so many midwestern overachievers. Minneapolis yearns for his approval like an abandoned child. Dylan went out for a pack of smokes one morning and never came home, but he calls every couple years on a day he mistakenly thinks is our birthday.

Prince, on the other hand, only left us briefly, relocating to Los Angeles first for a short time early in his career, and again in 2007. But he came back both times. And anyway, what matters is that Prince didn't move to a coast and become a star according to the established patterns. He would become famous by making Minneapolis famous. America did not love its dwindling cities in the '80s, especially the forgotten ones in the middle, and for Prince to align his stardom with Minneapolis was an act of civic solidarity that inspired an unshakable local loyalty.

It was also a brilliant career move. Like his rival for Reagan-era stardom Bruce Springsteen, Prince recognized that every superhero has an origin story, and Minneapolis was both his Krypton and his Smallville. If Bruce had to struggle to transform Jersey from punchline to poignance, Prince was more fortunate: He worked on a blank slate. The year that Purple Rain came out—1984—Minneapolis was known for what? The Mary Tyler Moore Show and a former vice president who would go on that November to secure one fewer electoral vote than McGovern had?

Maybe no one in the rest of America really believed that Prince came from a town where stylish black musicians hustled for dominance of a thriving party scene, but they didn't had any image of Minneapolis to compare it to. Prince invented himself by inventing Minneapolis. And now, every performer who walks onstage at the First Avenue Mainroom—in other words, almost every notable performer of the past 30 years—walks out onto Prince's stage, and more than a few of them have noted that over the years, almost always with nervous excitement.

Prince allowed white Minnesotans to see themselves differently. “How could you be an uptight, repressed Midwestern square when you had a photo of a skinny guy in his underwear on your bedroom wall?” my friend Brad Zellar asked on Facebook yesterday. But more importantly, he allowed black Minnesotans to be seen, period. As Mayor Betsy Hodges phrased it in her official statement yesterday, “Prince was one of us.”

Nearly everyone around town has a Prince story, often a surprisingly entertaining one as far as celebrity anecdotes go. Most creative people here worked on some unfinished/barely started Prince-related project over the years. Every major R&B and soul act who comes through town wants Prince to be watching from the VIP. Sometimes he is. Sometimes he isn't and the performer says he is anyway.