When the news broke yesterday that music legend Prince had suddenly passed away, the last thing I thought about was my kids.

I thought about growing up in the 1980s, listening to his music on the radio every day. I rewatched his magical Super Bowl halftime show performance.

I looked back on Dec. 31, 1999, celebrating New Year’s with friends, really unsure if “oops, party’s over…out of time” was going to happen.

To be honest, I also debated the slotting of 80’s music superstar deaths: Prince. Michael Jackson. Whitney Houston. [Prince’s was the most shocking. Whitney’s was the saddest. Michael’s was the most tragic.]

Several radio stations started playing tributes to the Purple One all afternoon. Thankfully, I had to be in the car, so I got to flip around the channels and hear his greatest hits and heartfelt tributes from fans and DJs.

Prince was iconic. But not really an artist we frequently played around the kids. Or so we thought.

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After picking my daughter up from school and strapping her into her car seat, I turned the radio on so she could at least hear some of Prince’s songs. I wasn’t going to talk about death. The car ride home is nowhere near long enough to broach that topic and this was not the situation to discuss it.

“Kiss,” probably my second-favorite Prince song (behind “When Doves Cry”) began playing.

“I know that song!” my four-year-old screamed out. “It’s from the penguin movie!”

Of course she knew that song. I had completely forgotten that “Kiss” was featured in the opening medley in Happy Feet. We watched that movie at least a dozen times.

Check out the scene here:



My daughter being familiar with this song is another reminder that music is immortal.

Prince created such an amazing song that it made a little girl ridiculously happy to hear on the radio 30 years later.

The song is bigger than the artist, which is what makes the artist so special.

Prince lives on because his music will.

That’s a pretty amazing legacy.

Photo Credit: Micahmedia at en.wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons