A New Collection of Official, Authorized Prince GIFs!

Tech entre­pre­neur Anil Dash, pod­cast­er, music his­to­ri­an, and advi­sor to the Oba­ma White House’s Office of Dig­i­tal Strat­e­gy, knows his way around Prince’s cat­a­logue.

Less than a year after the icon­o­clas­tic musi­cian left the plan­et, Dash cre­at­ed a guide to help new­bies and casu­al lis­ten­ers become bet­ter acquaint­ed with his oeu­vre:

The nice thing about Prince’s work is that there are no bad start­ing points; if you don’t like what you hear at first, he almost cer­tain­ly made a song in the com­plete oppo­site style as well.

He assem­bled playlists for the Prince-resis­tant, reel­ing ‘em in by cater­ing to var­i­ous tastes, from “riff-dri­ven rock tracks” and elec­tron­i­ca to “Prince for Red­bone fans.”

(Those playlists are also a great ser­vice to those of us whose atten­tion wan­dered in the decades fol­low­ing Prince’s 80’s hey­day.)

Dash has also now done us a sol­id and high­light­ed an offi­cial archive of high-qual­i­ty Prince GIFs, tak­en from his music videos.

Prince was noto­ri­ous­ly pro­tec­tive of his image, and wild as it is, the GIF archive, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with GIPHY, Pais­ley Park and Prince’s estate, col­ors with­in those lines by steer­ing clear of unflat­ter­ing reac­tion shots culled from inter­views, live per­for­mances, or pub­lic appear­ances.

There’s still a broad range of atti­tudes on dis­play, though best get out of line if you’re look­ing for an expres­sion that con­veys “lack of con­fi­dence” or “the oppo­site of sexy.”

The archive is arranged by album. Click on a song title and you’ll find a num­ber of moments drawn from its offi­cial music video.

Any cap­tions come straight from the horse’s mouth. No back­seat cap­tion jock­eys can has cheezburg­er with Prince Rogers Nelson’s image, thank you very much.

Begin your explo­rations of the Prince GIF Archive here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Sum­mer­time” in a Can­did, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Prince Plays Gui­tar for Maria Bar­tiro­mo: It’s Awk­ward (2004)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day always stood at the back of the line, a smile beneath her nose. Ayun is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.