‘Otherworldly in the best possible way’: Key and Peele remember Prince

The comedy team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, best known from their sketch TV show “Key & Peele,” frequently explore ideas of identity, masculinity and race. Which are, of course, things that Prince frequently grappled with throughout his career as well.

The duo are busy promoting their upcoming film “Keanu,” directed by Peter Atencio, in which a pair of meek, nerdy cousins have to pretend to be drug-dealing gangster henchman to retrieve a lost cat. The movie’s unexpected intersection of the hard attitudes of an action movie with the soft cuddliness of a kitten in itself is something of a product of a joyful, jaunty post-Prince worldview.

Key and Peele were previously scheduled to get on the phone for separate interviews well before the startling news of Prince’s death shocked the world on Thursday. Each of them had individual connections to and insights on the musician, but with their shared language and perspective came shining through.

Keegan-Michael Key

“The first time I ever head ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and I heard the guitar solo, it just meant a lot to me. I was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s black and he’s playing guitar like that.’ And it was because of him that I really, really started getting into Jimi Hendrix. I was like, ‘Is there anybody else in the world, in this sphere of music, who is like this?’ And I had to go backwards in time to find it. It was Eddie Hazel from Funkadelic and Jimi Hendrix, and Prince was from that tradition.

“He was such a consummate, consummate professional. He was otherworldly in the best possible way. Absolutely one of the greatest. He defined so many different parts of my life, what I thought was cool, what I thought music should sound like. I’ve never seen anybody musically be so elegant and so raunchy and so adult and so playful all at the same time. He’s one of those guys. He’s like Bowie to me. Losing him is like losing Bowie.”

Jordan Peele

“It’s such a profound loss. Just really, really sad. He was really inspiring to artists everywhere, just because of his originality and his intense ability. I’m with everyone else processing this. And it does seem a linked tragedy that we lost Bowie and Prince in the same year. They had such an otherworldly spirit.”

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