No song has ever made me feel more comfortable in my skin than “Kiss.” From its opening “you don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on,” to all the words that follow, it’s disarmingly good at stripping away any inhibitions. There’s nothing like watching everyone around you scrunch up their faces as they stretch to reach Prince’s falsetto, and flail around “ain’t no particular type.” But what gets me every time is the palpable, unself-conscious energy it brings to a room with its lyrics, which, in typical Prince fashion, really fly in the face of conventional love songs.

I’m a sucker for a good dance-floor jam, and “Kiss” is the kind of song dance-floor dreams are made of. If you’re looking for me tonight, I’ll be screaming every word at peak volume and dancing so bad Prince will have no choice but to end me with his masterful side-eye, even in death. Prince is one of my mom’s favorite artists - he probably would’ve been my father in a different life, the love is that real - so of course she passed on the obsession with a song fittingly about fractured love. In fact, I was probably a toddler, in the early ‘90s, by the time it entered my music canon. I wasn’t even alive when this song reached ubiquity.

You know when you hear a song for the first time and it just feels like you’ve always known it? That’s “When Doves Cry” for me. As Prince himself said, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” It’s impossible to choose just one song from his oeuvre (and some of us didn’t), but what we wanted to do was simply remember what he gave us. How do you choose a favorite song? Do you go by structure and melody? Do you look at its scope and ambition? Do you think about its cultural impact on the world? Or do you, as we here at Vulture have done, simply pick the song that speaks to you? Prince died at the impossibly young age of 57, and he left behind a vast and varied musical legacy.

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