It’s been fun knocking Prince this week for the unfortunate statements he made to London’s Daily Mirror. “The Internet’s completely over,” the diminutive funkster prophesied to correspondent Peter Willis. Said target — formerly known as cyberspace, a.k.a. the information superhighway, i.e., us all — hooted its derision.

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Hush, my baby, don’t you cry. The Go-Go’s are saying good-bye, and this time it’s forever. Sealing their legacy with a tear-streaked kiss. Frontwoman Belinda Carlisle — now crisscrossing the country with her memoir, “Lips Unsealed” — recently posted the tragic news on her Facebook page, along with the official dates for the “Happily Ever After” tour: 14 summer Stateside sunsets, to allow us swooning Moonies to pay our final respects. Revel in Belinda’s radiance. Worship the ageless Jane Wiedlin one last time. Sigh.

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“[Freedom’s] what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different things. . . . ’Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.”

— George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), “Easy Rider”

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“In ’72, we was born to lose

We slipped down snakes into yesterday’s news

I was ready to quit — ”

— Mott the Hoople, “Saturday Gigs”

Had David Bowie not intervened, that song might have ended there. Anticlimactic, to say the least. No triumphant blast of “But then we went to Croydon!” No ruminations on a Broadway tour. We wouldn’t remember the Saturday gigs with quite as much cathartic gusto.

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“Pac-Man” officially turned 30 last Friday — hardly a noteworthy milestone, but it made me feel old, anyway. Why, I remember the little chomper when he was a virgin upright (or tabletop!) belched fresh off the Midway assembly line, his belly yet unburdened by Young America coin.

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Mick Jagger was always a dandy among the swill. Jive strut, petulant kisser, a palate for caviar served on the hips of schoolgirls. In 1972, he straddled two worlds successfully: the tony aristocracy and its skeevy undercarriage, dangling those rock ’n’ roll legs over pearl-clutching swine desperate for a breath of the wild side. One day he’d join the elite for good, to sup on more sophisticated sleaze.

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“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” — Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”

“I’m a winner, I’m a sinner Do you want my autograph?” — Supertramp, “Breakfast in America”

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It’s hard to imagine a force capable of silencing THAT voice. Ronnie James Dio, one of the most epic belters in all of metal, died Sunday morning at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he was being treated for stomach cancer. He was 67.

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“I think this is a song about hope,” Robert Plant announced one night in 1973, in a moment captured for Led Zeppelin’s concert film, “The Song Remains the Same.” With that, guitarist Jimmy Page stepped gingerly into a tingling acoustic rainfall now long familiar to anyone with ears.

Today, “Stairway to Heaven” ranks as one of the finest rock songs of all time. Immaculate, it is, near perfect — the reason a lot of people first bought “Led Zeppelin IV” (though many are loathe to admit it now). On the other hand, thanks to its ubiquitous radio presence these last 30-plus years, “Stairway” also ranks as one of the most overplayed songs of all time. Even Plant, the man who set down its words and introduced it so proudly, began to bristle at its shadow. “I don’t consider there was anything particularly special about it,” he said in 1990. “The only thing that gives it any staying power at all is its ambiguity.”

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