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It’s been a decade since Prince died — though his words are with me every day.

The tattoo on my right biceps reads “rich in personality,” borrowed from the opening verse of 1984’s “Baby, I’m a Star.”

Tell me, do you like what you see?

Hey, I ain’t got no money

But, honey, I’m rich on personality

Growing up poor during the 1980s was like being in an upside down version of “The Wonder Years”: I wondered if the lights would be on when I came home from school; I wondered if we would have enough to eat that night; I wondered if poor was all there was.

As such, the songs about poverty I heard on the radio — John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” “The Message” from the Furious Five, Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money” — were more than hits. They were snapshots of different, yet familiar worlds. So naturally, a song with the line “I ain’t got no money” feels like home. And those same five words were the opening line of Prince’s first hit, in 1979, “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”

I was too young to understand sex, thus the full meaning of that song wasn’t clear to me until later — but I knew what it meant not to have any money. In fact, one winter it seemed everyone in school wore these black boots with a large white kangaroo logo on the side. Don’t ask me why, we just did. Anyway, the poorer kids — trying to keep up — often bought knockoffs, which usually came with a noticeably smaller logo. The really broke kids, the ones like me, well, we had an entirely different animal on our boots. I think I had a polar bear or a scorpion wearing a scarf or something. Whatever it was, it wasn’t right.

Even some of the teachers laughed.

We never really leave behind our early years. Even decades later, I tend to hear lyrics about poverty like an echo from nearby.

In the opening five words........

© Los Angeles Times