Dig If You Will the Picture
Ben Greenman's book is less a biography than a long, curious meditation on what made Prince's music work. Greenman, a longtime fan and writer, moves through Prince's catalog by theme rather than timeline, looking at how funk, sex, religion, and pure invention ran through the songs. He weaves in his own memories of discovering the music and the wider culture Prince came from and shaped. It is a fan's book in the best sense, smart and personal, written soon after Prince's death in 2016. Questlove, a friend and collaborator of Prince, named it among his favorite books.
What you might want to know about Dig If You Will the Picture
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A genre-jumping study of Prince's music, exploring how his influences, faith, and relationships shaped one of pop's strangest geniuses.
Not exactly. Ben Greenman organizes the book around themes in Prince's music and his own experience as a fan, rather than telling a straightforward life story.
Dig If You Will the Picture was written by Ben Greenman, published in 2017 by Henry Holt and Co..
Dig If You Will the Picture is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Dig If You Will the Picture takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Dig If You Will the Picture is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.