Read this excellent New Yorker article.

This is an interesting essay. I don’t think my deeply religious Mom ever really looked at me the same when I declared at 18 that I’d always rejected Catholicism and Christianity, and, actually, any “faith” in a higher being since I was about 7; I placated her for years after my Dad died and attended church with her though I was indifferent to the faith—I didn’t want to add to her pain.

Of course Mom still loved me, but at an arm’s length pretty much until the day Alzheimer’s stole her conscious being. She didn’t reject me as her son, but the fact I didn’t follow the faith of my Dad and her was never reconciled in her mind. During the early stages of Alzheimer’s she was incredibly mean to me, partly I think because in her altered state she expressed honest feelings she stifled for decades. I was lucky to have a mother who wasn’t that fanatically religious to “cast me out,” nor I so atheistically rigid to distance myself. Mom knew better from her own family history. I was sad she and I were never very close. I was a handful, of course, so it’s not like it was one-sided—I am indeed an arrogant and extremely difficult person lacking empathy and restraint. Still.

Religion can be—not always of course!—a powerfully myopic addiction in the faithful and can manifest itself with horribly irrational and illogical rabbit holes into which the faithful dive. My French grandfather was deeply Catholic and “cast out” my Aunt Marie after she came home in the early morning from a date when she was in her 20s, and Mom never saw her again. EVER. Only my brother Mike ever met Marie and her family. Tragic. Ironically, my grandfather’s brother, Marc Bernard, was one of the most famous atheists and anti-Catholic writers in French literature and journalism. I’ve no idea what grandfather thought of that fact as he died before I was born. The fact he never spoke to his daughter again was, to me, a fatal flaw in the man’s character that my Mom didn’t possess, luckily. But his powerful influence on her saddened me as we could hardly talk honestly to each other without her irrationality leading her to anger and hysterics when I presented facts SHE KNEW were correct.

I don’t slag people of faith. I’m just saying sometimes extreme faith can lead people down irrational paths in the face of reason, logic, and factual evidence. Believe your hearts out, but don’t lose touch with reality and reason. My difficult relationship with my Mom began and ended with my atheism. And I loved my mother dearly. She loved me, but I knew I could never be “good” in her eyes. And perhaps I wasn’t a very good person. Who knows what that even means? C’est la vie. I’m at peace.

In 1980 Disco was declared dead by mulleted white dorks. Along came Prince, who said, OK, right, this is Rock and Roll. He could play guitar like Hendrix and Clapton, bass like Bootsy, and keyboards like Emerson and Elton, plus he was an unapologetically black and funky front man like James Brown and Sly Stone. He was a one-man band (the other players are window dressing in this video–he played every instrument on the record) and the poet laureate of the sensual and sleazy. He made Minneapolis the epicenter of cool in Purple Rain. His opening salvo to superstardom was this 1980 masterpiece that encapsulated everything that made him a legend. Disco? Fuck Disco. This was Rock you could dance to. It took 3 years, two more albums, and MTV exposure for the general public to catch on, but in 80-81 he was already a brilliant Rock and Roll artist. Exhibit A is below. Dudes, there was nothing like this back then. Uptown. Dig it. Savor it.