Music in the 1980s was often a segregated experience. In an almost reflexive response to the dominance of funk and disco in the '70s — which culminated in mass record burnings — radio was bifurcated between black and white, R&B and rock. MTV was the voice of a generation and, Michael Jackson notwithstanding, almost entirely white. Full coverage: Prince | 1958 - 2016 » And then came Prince, who looked like Little Richard after a weeklong stand in a harem. High heels and blousy shirts and a pompadour that wouldn't quit, always covered in sweat, his mascaraed lashes concealing his doe eyes like boudoir drapes. His music came from the well of funk, but he infused it with a synth-shimmy and Hendrix-ian guitar thunder. He was outlandish, outsize and pansexual at a time when black artists simply weren't, when the aura of black masculinity was both a yoke and a badge of honor. He was a misfit when there weren't black misfits on a stage that big.

Prince performs at the Hollywood Bowl in 1997. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

From the Archives: July 1996 Prince: 'If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldn't be in the music industry' What David Bowie was to white kids who didn't fit in, Prince was to black kids. He gave young African Americans growing up in Harlem or St. Louis or Watts the license to be who they wanted to be, not what society thought they should be. When I was growing up in the suburbs of New York City, I and all my friends were deep into the throes of b-boy culture. We formed a breakdancing crew because that's what you did if you were black in the early '80s, despite the fact that none of us could pop, never mind lock. We had the nameplate belts, the matching track suits, the baseball hats artfully askance. We called ourselves the X-Men, because I was a closet comic book nerd and I sold it to my fellow 14-year-olds as a Malcolm X homage. (Similarly, they didn't blink when I called myself Mr. Fantastic, despite the fact that Mr. Fantastic was in the Fantastic Four, not the X-Men, and I was profoundly unfantastic.)