Edgar Kruize is a freelance author, journalist and content creator based in the Netherlands. He is co-owner of communications agency buro33. He is specialized in music in general and specifically the entertainment industry. Kruize has been working for various (trade) magazines, concert and tour promoters, festival organizers and record companies for over two decades. He has written nine books on various musical subjects.

All it took was a cough in the Raspberry Beret video to have the young Edgar notice the artist he’d later found out to be Prince. Prince’s impressive body of work has been an inspiration in life and work. Kruize is the author of the book Prince: The Dutch Experience (2017), in which all of Prince’s steps in the Netherlands are retraced. Also, he co-hosts the Dutch Prince-blog PurplePicks.net, wrote the liner notes for the 2019 Sign “O” The Times deluxe DVD/Blu-ray set (along with appearing in the documentary about the making of that movie), and (co)hosted multiple Prince-themed lectures and live interviews. He is also the co-host of the #PrinceTwitterThread series.

It is often overlooked how ambitious the Love Symbol era was for Prince. Riding high on the wave of success that was the Diamonds And Pearls era, he created a so-called ‘rock soap opera.’ With a story that started out as a comic book plot and eventually also became the narrative of an album, a straight-to-video movie, a stage performance, and two tv specials.

Many artists have made concept albums throughout the decades, but thus far none of those projects has ever been so ambitious (and one could argue ‘so flawed’) as the story of the Prince, the princess, and three chains of gold.

But what exactly is the story? Essential segues have been cut from the album and what’s left doesn’t make any sense. The straight-to-VHS release omits the title track, the story as told during the stage performance has a totally different sequence and the comic book seems to be an entirely different story altogether.  And how do the tv-specials fit in the overall narrative? Like the way the four Gospels in the New Testament all tell the story of the Christ in a different way, the comic book, the album, the stage show, and the videos are in a way the four Gospels of the Three Chains.

This presentation attempts to reconstruct the story Prince tried to tell in the early 1990s by looking at the various ways it was presented and trying to make all the pieces fit.