An ode to Prince's personal tweets

But that's not what I want to talk about here. This is an ode to Prince's Twitter account (@Prince) — and the often bizarre, mysterious way he used it. Of course, he probably had an underling writing all his tweets. But that doesn't matter, because the feed was oh so very Prince.

It was often all-caps proclamations ("Hamilton" is "THE BEST HISTORY CLASS EVER!"). It was the first place to hear about surprise Paisley Park shows. It's where he shared his favorite reviews, usually with the link nonsensically placed in the middle of a sentence. It's also where he would retweet gushing fan comments in the strangest way — by copy-and-pasting a concertgoer's tweet, sometimes without attribution so it would look like he was talking about himself in the third person. (Example: "Prince is a quintessential artist. Truly amazing. I sat awestruck thru the whole concert.")

His Twitter account was a funny, weird, head-scratching portrait of how Prince wanted to promote himself to the world. And it will be missed.

TOM HORGEN