The Artist Currently Known As Prince Speaks!

Oh, Prince. In this week’s New Yorker, the magazine’s Claire Hoffman visits the singer at his 30,000-square-foot LA mansion. Inside, she finds purple paisley pillows, purple thrones, a Lucite grand piano with the “artist-formerly-known-as” symbol dangling overhead, a series of half-naked photographs of His Purpleness, and maybe most mysteriously, a TV cycling through images of bearded men playing flutes.

Anyway… Hoffman and the 50-year-old Prince—the later clad in "yoga pants and a big sweater, wearing platform flip-flops over white socks, like a geisha"—soon got to talking about religion and politics, gayness and straightness, and all that good stuff. Prince, who became a Jehovah’s Witness seven years ago ("I don’t see it really as a conversion. More, you know, it’s a realization. It’s like Morpheus and Neo in The Matrix."), related a conversation he had with Philip Anschutz, the Christian businessman who owns the Staples Center, that helped clarify the whole Red State/Blue State mumbo jumbo. "So here’s how it is: you’ve got the Republicans, and basically they want to live according to this," Prince said, pointing to the Bible. "And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, 'You can do whatever you want.' Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right."

So what is the right way to think about gay marriage? "God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever," Prince said, fingering his Bible again. "And he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.'" Hmm..

Predictably, Prince’s people have said the singer’s comments were misinterpreted. "We're very angry he was misquoted," Perez Hilton has a "Prince insider" saying. They even claim Ms. Hoffman didn’t use a tape recorder. God forbid…