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Prince Is Instagram’s Newest Star -- Now All He Needs Is A Symbol Emoji

No sefies -- yet -- but Prince memes aplenty on Princestagram.

Instagrammers, the Purple One is now among you.

Over the weekend, a verified account under the handle Princestagram began posting photos of Prince that spanned his entire career, from the Purple Rain days in 1984 ...

...to his more modern days with backing band 3RDEYEGIRL...

and plenty of Prince memes in between.

No selfies -- yet. Or maybe never. Prince's image is likely too precise, too cultivated for a spontaneous selfie with hair and eye makeup anything but exactly arranged. This is why his enigmatic presence (which Dave Chappelle famously parodied and Prince has since referenced) has translated well to Twitter, a medium that has always put images secondary to text, but also doesn't allow for too much text anyway (unlike Insta captions).

The best entry point to Prince's weird social media world is the series of posts from Tuesday (Oct. 27), where his modern three-eyed circular sunglasses sit atop a speaker blaring out funky tunes in front of a headline reading, naturally: "Prince Has Made A Triumphant Return To Instagram."

"GLAD U LIKE ?," he wrote in the caption.

It's meta as hell -- Prince commenting on the outlets who've commented on him falling in line with social media. Except he's not falling in line at all, choosing instead to preserve that same purple aura of mystery he's had for decades. Maybe he's using Princestagram as a new vehicle for releasing music? Instead of dozens of song teasers (like Ariana Grande with her "Focus" campaign), maybe our newest Prince songs are 15-second clips of funky chaos like this:

Of course, the whole thing could be just a bit of fun on Prince's end, and in all seriousness, that's probably what Instagram should be for everyone. It can be a cool mini hype machine or a way to open up a path to a wider audience or even the way you end up earning a living. But it should always be fun.

Prince knows that. Let's all take our next Insta cue from him. Or from our next full listen to Purple Rain.

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