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so for the majority of their years on earth.
    Prince’s reluctance to look back at his career in more comprehensive ways is a mixed blessing at best. An artist can’t be faulted for wanting to keep moving forward, for making all best efforts not to be weighed down by a legacy that, if he’s lucky, eventually and inevitably turns him into a reliably bankable oldies act. The fact that Prince keeps making new music after all this time, that he refuses to coast on his back catalogue, is admirable, and whatever it takes for him to do that is understandably a priority.
    At the same time, though, we are at serious risk of watching one of music’s all-time greats erase his own legacy. For years, Prince has talked about his vault full of hundreds of unreleased songs—many of which have made the bootleg rounds among his superfans, while others circulate only as rumors or whispers. He constantly scrubs the Internet of unauthorized video footage and even his own official music videos, recently going so far as to file a lawsuit against twenty-two individuals,for $1 million each, who “engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince’s material.” (The suit was dropped a few days later.)
    Where Bob Dylan’s authorized Bootleg Series or the Beatles’ Anthology discs represented attempts by these artists to control and codify their unreleased material, improving the sound quality for fans and editing to help present their own versions of their histories, Prince has run in the opposite direction; in fact, the two primary documents capturing him live in his mid-’80s prime (the 1985 Syracuse concert that was released as a home video and the Sign o’ the Times film) are both out of print and were never transferred for official DVD release in the U.S., leaving the immaculately choreographed and lip-synched performance sequences in Purple Rain as the only real evidence of what he was capable of onstage. And, as cultural critic Greg Tate wrote in The Village Voice when the movie came out, “Those of y’all going gaga behind Purple Rain and never seen the boy live ain’t seen shit.”
    Following the bewildering announcement that Prince would make a guest appearance on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom New Girl , Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer for the Roots (and such a superfan that he taught a course on Prince at New York University in the spring of 2014) posted on Facebook, begging that Prince just “make it count,” since it was a rare opportunity for people beyond the dedicated fan base to see him, and saying that he was tired of needing to explain Prince’s greatness to a new generation without having any material to show them to prove it. It was a thoughtful plea froma true believer, and concisely presented the very real challenge Prince has created for himself by moving only forward. (The amiable, slight New Girl guest shot, in which he offered romantic advice to Deschanel and then had her sing with his band at a party, didn’t wind up helping matters much in the end.)
    Yet a surprise announcement in April 2014 suggested a long-awaited change in Prince’s thinking about his own musical legacy. Just a few weeks after he revealed that he now controlled the publishing rights to all of his music, a new deal with Warner Bros. Records, his initial champions and longtime adversaries, was unveiled, which would lead to the release of “previously unheard material . . . a veritable gold mine,” while also giving Prince his hard-fought, long-desired “ownership of the master recordings of his classic, global hits.” A statement from Prince said that “both Warner Bros. and Eye [ sic ] are quite pleased with the results of the negotiations and look forward to a fruitful working relationship.”
    The deal is potentially a landmark in the recording community. An often overlooked change in copyright law allows musicians,