April 21: A City Born from Legend, The Night the Movies Began, A Purple Reign Ends
Every civilization begins with a story it tells about itself — and the best of those stories are so good that the question of whether they are literally true becomes almost beside the point. April 21 is a date built on the power of narrative: a founding myth so vivid it became a city, an invention so startling it became an industry, and a musician so singular that his death left the world momentarily unsure how to continue without him. Rome, the movies, and Prince — three stories about the human need to create something that outlasts the moment of its making, something that the world, once it has encountered, cannot quite do without.
Seven Hills, One Legend
According to Roman tradition — celebrated annually on April 21 as Natale di Roma, the birthday of the city — Rome was founded on this date in 753 B.C. by Romulus, who had killed his twin brother Remus in a dispute over which of the seven hills would become the site of the new city, and who then drew his plow in a furrow to mark its sacred boundary. The twins, the legend held, had been abandoned as infants, suckled by a she-wolf on the slopes of the Palatine Hill, and raised by a shepherd before discovering their royal birth and their destiny. Modern archaeology and historical scholarship place the actual emergence of Rome as a unified settlement somewhat later, and the founding story is understood today as myth rather than chronicle — but the Romans themselves took it seriously, tracking their calendar from the date ab urbe condita, "from the founding of the city," and erecting statues of the wolf and the twins that became the enduring symbol of Roman identity.
What grew from that legend — or from the actual settlements on the Tiber that preceded it — was one of the most consequential political and cultural enterprises in human history. At its height, the Roman Empire governed roughly 70 million people across territories stretching from Scotland to Mesopotamia. It produced a legal system that is the direct ancestor of the legal codes of most of Europe and Latin America, an architectural tradition whose vocabulary — the arch, the vault, the dome, the forum — still shapes how the Western world builds, and a Latin language that became the root of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian and the formal language of the Catholic Church for more than a millennium. The roads the Romans built are still, in some cases, in use. The calendar they reformed under Julius Caesar is, with minor modifications, the one by which the world still marks its days. To trace the founding of Rome is to trace the beginning of a thread that runs, unbroken, through nearly every institution of modern Western life.
Light on a Wall
On April 21, 1895, in a converted store on Broadway in lower Manhattan, Woodville Latham and his sons Gray and Otway gave the first public demonstration in the United States of a motion picture projector — their device, called the Panoptikon, projecting moving images onto a screen for a paying audience. It was a crude showing by later standards: the film was short, the image flickering and imprecise, the experience closer to a novelty than to what cinema would become. But the principle it demonstrated — that photographs taken in rapid sequence could be projected onto a surface and perceived by the human eye as continuous motion — was the seed of one of the most powerful art forms and industries the modern world has produced. Within months, the Lumière brothers in France and Edison's team in New Jersey would make their own landmark demonstrations, and the race to develop the medium would accelerate rapidly.
Within fifteen years of that Broadway demonstration, nickelodeons had spread to every American city and the first narrative feature films were being produced. Within thirty years, Hollywood had become the entertainment capital of the world and cinema had produced its first acknowledged masterworks. Within fifty years, the moving image had migrated from theaters to television sets in living rooms across the country. Within a century of the Lathams' demonstration, it lived in the pocket of nearly every person on earth. The transformation of storytelling that began with light flickering on a wall in Manhattan in 1895 is still accelerating — through streaming, through virtual reality, through formats not yet imagined — and shows no sign of reaching its conclusion. Every film ever made, every television series ever produced, every video ever uploaded traces its lineage, however distantly, to the darkened room on Broadway where a projected image first moved across a screen and an audience leaned forward to see what would happen next.
Nothing Compares
On April 21, 2016, Prince Rogers Nelson was found unresponsive at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota, and pronounced dead at the age of fifty-seven. The cause was an accidental overdose of fentanyl. The outpouring of grief that followed was immediate and global — landmarks around the world turned purple, radio stations played his catalog in continuous loops, and spontaneous memorials gathered outside Paisley Park within hours of the announcement. What the mourners were marking was not merely the death of a famous musician but the end of something that had felt, while it lasted, essentially inexhaustible: the creative output of a man who had released thirty-nine studio albums, written songs for dozens of other artists, played an estimated twenty-seven instruments, and performed with an intensity that left audiences struggling to describe what they had witnessed.
Prince's genius defied easy categorization, which was precisely the point. He had burst into popular consciousness with Dirty Mind in 1980 and reached a commercial and artistic apex with Purple Rain in 1984 — a soundtrack album that sold more than 25 million copies and produced some of the most recognizable songs of the decade — but the breadth of his work extended far beyond any single record or era. He was a ferocious guitarist whose technical command rivaled the acknowledged masters of the instrument. He was a songwriter of extraordinary prolificacy who gave away hits — "Nothing Compares 2 U," "Manic Monday," "I Feel for You" — that defined other artists' careers. He was a relentless advocate for artistic control who waged a public battle with his record label, changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, and wrote "slave" on his cheek in protest — and won, eventually, the ownership of his masters that he had always insisted was his right. He left behind a vault at Paisley Park estimated to contain thousands of unreleased recordings. The music did not end on April 21, 2016. It simply became finite — and therefore, for the first time, something to be rationed and savored.
