What a concept, genius. Especially in an age like ours—secular, rational, disenchanted. No one, perhaps, was more suited to exploit the idea of genius-as-enigma than Prince Rogers Nelson, who died on Thursday at his Paisley Park compound, outside Minneapolis, at the age of fifty-seven. Prince played impenetrability like a guitar. To think about him was to ask a series of questions: Why purple? Whence the glyph? Did he really love spaghetti and orange juice? What was up with the retinue of light-skinned, long-legged women, who were visually identical to one another and to him? Vis-à-vis sex and sexuality and gender: what, if anything, was he trying to say? Such was the depth of Prince’s mystique that any story about him was interesting, as proved, hilariously, by the “Chappelle’s Show” sketch in which Charlie Murphy (Eddie’s brother) describes a night of pickup basketball (“shirts versus blouses”) and pancakes at Prince’s. Even his diminutive size served as a kind of metaphor: he was energy compressed. One imagined his bones as birdlike; he might’ve up and flown away on a whim.

But there’s a way in which the notion of the special person, landed from nowhere, does the artist an injustice. It steers us away from the specifics of Prince’s achievement. He was his generation’s most startling and dramatic guitarist, guiding his solos through a landscape of varied terrains: first rocky, dissonant bends, then long, plainlike notes, sustained like breaths. He’d often finish them by repeating an anthemic, singable melody, altered minutely until its intensity helped it lift off. His drum work in the studio was subtle and insistent, often resembling the clapping of fine-fingered hands. His voice was one of pop music’s most distinctive, a mixture of quintessential American expression: the revivalist’s falsetto, the crooner’s ease, a rasp like David Ruffin’s, the occasional exasperated holler. In performance, he joined rock-and-roll insouciance with flamboyant precision (and a perm) like James Brown’s, then added a dash of tricksterism borrowed from the blues. What resulted was a unified and inimitable style, rivalled only by Michael Jackson’s in terms of its magnetism.

As a lyricist, Prince was avant-garde. Often, as in “I Would Die 4 U,” he crafted symbolic structures that, depending on the listener’s mood, could be read as sensual or devotional, or both. He could also play the sly, folky storyteller. In “When You Were Mine,” he recalls sweet, sad details—“When you were mine,” he yelps, “I used to let you wear all my clothes”—leading one to expect a conventional recounting of love and loss. Then he makes a surprise turn into a tale of a complicated threesome: “I never was the kind to make a fuss / When he was there sleeping in between the two of us.”

Prince wrote as a refutation of clarity and easy categorization. In songs like “Controversy,” in which he wishes that “there was no black and white,” he offers an echo of the poet Jean Toomer, who spent his entire life in a struggle against labels, asserting that “I am simply of the human race. . . . I am of the human nation. . . . I am of Earth. . . . I am of sex, with male differentiations. . . . I eliminate the religions. I am religious.” Unlike Toomer, Prince was not shy about his ancestry, and found in blackness a consistent vein of creativity. But he did seem to share Toomer’s expansive, almost mystical view of America, his hope that the nation could leverage its racial and ethnic diversity to create a new kind of person, never before seen on Earth. Prince’s American vision, of course, also had a sexual element: orgasm as agent of transcendence. For him, obscurantism was not a branding ploy—it was an attempt at togetherness.

Prince was odd and inscrutable to the end; he remains our unbelievable thing. Maybe it’s appropriate that he died just after announcing plans to write a memoir. But what we need to know we already do: Prince was a genius, but he was also, somehow, a person, just like us, and now he is gone. ♦