We were in our tour dirigible, traveling to yet another godforsaken, car-filled American city, (Minneapolis? Seattle? I don’t even know anymore), and passing the time surfing ARPANET—the name for the Internet before it was cool—when Colin yelled over to me,
“Hey Thom, check this video out. I’ll send you the link.”

“It’s not another one of your fucking Lol Catz montages, is it?”

“No, it’s even better. It’s this guy, ‘The Prince,’ covering Creep at Coachella.”

“‘The Prince?’” I said. I had never heard of the guy, unless he meant Bonnie Prince Billy, who would probably do an awesome version of Creep, by the way.

“Uh, yeah, I think he calls himself ‘The Prince’ or his band is ‘The Princes,’ or something. He’s sort of like a gay version of Lenny Kravitz, as far as I can tell.”

“Good god, that sounds terrible. Definitely send me the link,” I said.

So minutes later I clicked on the video, only to discover that it had been taken down by The Prince, who claimed it was a copyright violation. A copyright violation? Sounds like someone is stuck in 1993.

After spending a half hour on Google, I realized that this “Prince” fellow really had succeeded in taking the video of his performance off of ARPANET. I can understand that he wants to hide the evidence of that performance—it’s “I’m a creep,” not “you’re a creep,” that’s the whole point of the song—but his reasoning is so bizarre, it’s almost Bushian. By his logic, anyone who gets filmed doing something embarrassing can have it taken off of Youtube because the performer owns the performance. I’m sure the Star Wars Kid wanted his video taken down too, but did he make a big, girly fuss about it?

Perhaps The Prince really needs the money that the “theft” of his performance robbed him of. After all, his blouses do look quite expensive. And I don’t think he can make millions of pounds by trying to give his album away, like some of us can.

UPDATE: I just found the video on Youtube again. This reminds me why we don’t play this song anymore: