In 2010, at the New Morning, I finally understood what Prince meant by apocalypse. Four hours of concert to cross through the night. A humid night like a mystical waiting cave. And that phrase breathed out like a mantra from a madman: till the sun comes up, till the sun comes up…

It wasn’t a formula—it was a command. A collective ordeal. He’d decided to take us and drag us to the other side of the night, exhaust us until dawn to deliver us into a new light, brutal, redemptive.

Don’t worry, I won’t hurt U

That’s what echoed behind his tracks. No grand-guignol final judgment, no cardboard end of the world, but a stripping away. Prince sang apocalypse as a moment of truth, the crack that illuminates, the fall that saves. When he chewed his refrain at the New Morning, he wasn’t just delaying the concert’s end: he was creating a ritual, a dive into chaos to be reborn better at dawn.

May U Live 2 see the Dawn

Dawn for him wasn’t rest but detonation. It hit like white light burning your eyes. Crossing the night meant accepting fatigue, sweat, confusion. But at the end, always: Revelation.

He wasn’t announcing the world’s collapse, but the collapse of our illusions. Result: at seven in the morning, outside, drained, our hallucinated gazes met and we knew something in us had shifted. We’d recognize each other from then on as those who had trembled.

Sexuality is all U’ll ever need

Sex and spirituality, sex for spirituality: Prince abolished the frontier with blows of riffs and moans. Orgasmic and mystical ecstasy: one single trance. His liturgy was carnal, humid, heretical.

Apocalypse, for him, meant razing the old world of dualisms—flesh against soul, prayer against pleasure, black or white, straight or gay—to manufacture a new faith, built on sweat, desire and groove.

The Everlasting Now

Prince didn’t talk about tomorrow. He locked apocalypse inside the instant. Each concert became a succession of little ends of the world: ascent, explosion, silence, rebirth. Each song was a death followed by immediate resurrection.

In 2010 as in 1984, in 1982 like it’s 1999, it was always the same operation: plunge the listener into sonic chaos, bury them, then resurrect them in groove. No hollow futurism, no abstract prophecy: just the immediate burn of eternalized present.

I did not come 2 Funk around

Prince wasn’t there to amuse. He arrived armed with his contradictions like fatal weapons: sex and faith, lust and prayer, narcissism and total gift. Onstage, he was electric prophet, not dusty preacher: he manufactured live an intimate apocalypse inside each spectator. He didn’t promise an empty heaven: he forced us to cross the night, confront our own darkness, be reborn in his sound.

He’d started with an offering: 

All of this and more is for you.
With love, sincerity and deepest care.
My life with you, I share.

 The deal was clear. His whole life, unfiltered. Forty years later, he closed the loop: last phrase, dry, short, definitive: « That’s it ». Then silence. Like a cleaver.

Beginning: absolute gift.
End: final period.
Between the two: permanent apocalypse.

And that’s where I come back again to that damn New Morning concert. Because when it comes to writing a text on Prince, on his forty years of electric visions, after these crazy years of work for Violet, it’s not a chronology that surfaces, nor some pseudo-scholarly thesis that would flatter my ego by letting me stay at a distance from this train that hit me forty years ago. It’s that night, July 23, 2010. Because in four hours, he made us take the same route as his entire career. At breakneck speed, he gave us the complete journey: dusk to dawn, lust to sainthood, chaos to light. What he did in 40 years, he compressed into that one night in Paris.

Sexy Mother-Fucker shakin’ that ass

Here’s what remains. Prince taught us that apocalypse isn’t an end but a passage. Sex and faith, night and dawn, dance and prayer: nothing excludes, everything joins in the explosion of a chord, a cry, a groove, in a beat barely offset to cut our breath and suspend the shoulder, an eternal instant endlessly restarted. And that morning in 2010 leaving the New Morning, we knew he’d won: he’d carried us from the heart of night to the light.

From the baptismal offering of For You to the final silence of Big City, Prince made us a single promise: to make us cross the darkness and deliver us to dawn.

And in that posthumous silence still echo the words he threw at us in Paris: till the sun comes up.

Promise kep