SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU

FALL, 2016

VOLUME THREE NUMBER TWO

ERIC DOLPHY

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

BOBBY HUTCHERSON
September 10-16

GEORGE E. LEWIS
September 17-23

JAMES BLOOD ULMER
September 24-30

RACHELLE FERRELL
October 1-7

ANDREW HILL
October 8-14

CARMEN McRAE
(October 15-21)

PRINCE
(October 22-28)

LIANNE LA HAVAS
(October 29-November 4)

ANDRA DAY
(November 5-November 11)

ARCHIE SHEPP
(November 12-18)

WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET
(November 19-25)

ART BLAKEY
(November 26-December 2)

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/prince-mn0000361393/biography

PRINCE ROGERS NELSON
(1958-2016)

Artist Biography by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Few artists have created a body of work as rich and varied as Prince. During the '80s, he emerged as one of the most singular talents of the rock & roll era, capable of seamlessly tying together pop, funk, folk, and rock. Not only did he release a series of groundbreaking albums; he toured frequently, produced albums, and wrote songs for many other artists, and recorded hundreds of songs that still lie unreleased in his vaults. With each album he released, Prince showed remarkable stylistic growth and musical diversity, constantly experimenting with different sounds, textures, and genres. Occasionally, his music was inconsistent, in part because of his eclecticism, but his experiments frequently succeeded; no other contemporary artist blended so many diverse styles into a cohesive whole.

Prince's first two albums were solid, if unremarkable, late-'70s funk-pop. With 1980's Dirty Mind, he recorded his first masterpiece, a one-man tour de force of sex and music; it was hard funk, catchy Beatlesque melodies, sweet soul ballads, and rocking guitar pop, all at once. The follow-up, Controversy, was more of the same, but 1999 was brilliant. The album was a monster hit, selling over three million copies, but it was nothing compared to 1984's Purple Rain.

Purple Rain made Prince a superstar; it eventually sold over ten million copies in the U.S. and spent 24 weeks at number one. Partially recorded with his touring band, the Revolution, the record featured the most pop-oriented music he has ever made. Instead of continuing in this accessible direction, he veered off into the bizarre psycho-psychedelia of Around the World in a Day, which nevertheless sold over two million copies. In 1986, he released the even stranger Parade, which was in its own way as ambitious and intricate as any art rock of the '60s; however, no art rock was ever grounded with a hit as brilliant as the spare funk of "Kiss."

By 1987, Prince's ambitions were growing by leaps and bounds, resulting in the sprawling masterpiece Sign 'O' the Times. Prince was set to release the hard funk of The Black Album by the end of the year, yet he withdrew it just before its release, deciding it was too dark and immoral. Instead, he released the confused Lovesexy in 1988, which was a commercial disaster. With the soundtrack to 1989's Batman he returned to the top of the charts, even if the album was essentially a recap of everything he had done before. The following year he released Graffiti Bridge (the sequel to Purple Rain), which turned out to be a considerable commercial disappointment.

In 1991, Prince formed the New Power Generation, the best and most versatile and talented band he has ever assembled. With their first album, Diamonds and Pearls, Prince reasserted his mastery of contemporary R&B; it was his biggest hit since 1985. The following year, he released his 12th album, which was titled with a cryptic symbol; in 1993, Prince legally changed his name to the symbol. In 1994, after becoming embroiled in contract disagreements with Warner Bros., he independently released the single "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," likely to illustrate what he would be capable of on his own; the song became his biggest hit in years. Later that summer, Warner released the somewhat halfhearted Come under the name of Prince; the record was a moderate success, going gold.

In November 1994, as part of a contractual obligation, Prince agreed to the official release of The Black Album. In early 1995, he immersed himself in another legal battle with Warner, proclaiming himself a slave and refusing to deliver his new record, The Gold Experience, for release. By the end of the summer, a fed-up Warner had negotiated a compromise that guaranteed the album's release, plus one final record for the label. The Gold Experience was issued in the fall; although it received good reviews and was following a smash single, it failed to catch fire commercially. In the summer of 1996, Prince released Chaos & Disorder, which freed him to become an independent artist. Setting up his own label, NPG (which was distributed by EMI), he resurfaced later that same year with the three-disc Emancipation, which was designed as a magnum opus that would spin off singles for several years and be supported with several tours.

However, even his devoted cult following needed considerable time to digest such an enormous compilation of songs. Once it was clear that Emancipation wasn't the commercial blockbuster he hoped it would be, Prince assembled a long-awaited collection of outtakes and unreleased material called Crystal Ball in 1998. With Crystal Ball, Prince discovered that it's much more difficult to get records to an audience than it seems; some fans who pre-ordered their copies through Prince's website (from which a bonus fifth disc was included) didn't receive them until months after the set began appearing in stores. Prince then released a new one-man album, New Power Soul, just three months after Crystal Ball; even though it was his most straightforward album since Diamonds and Pearls, it didn't do well on the charts, partly because many listeners didn't realize it had been released.

A year later, with "1999" predictably an end-of-the-millennium anthem, Prince issued the remix collection 1999 (The New Master). A collection of Warner Bros.-era leftovers, Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, followed that summer, and in the fall Prince returned on Arista with the all-star Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. In the fall of 2001 he released the controversial Rainbow Children, a jazz-infused circus of sound trumpeting his conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses that left many longtime fans out in the cold. He further isolated himself with 2003's N.E.W.S., a four-song set of instrumental jams that sounded a lot more fun to play than to listen to. Prince rebounded in 2003 with the chart-topping Musicology, a return to form that found the artist back in the Top Ten, even garnering a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance in 2005.

In early 2006 he was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, performing two songs with a new protégée, R&B singer Tamar. A four-song appearance at the Brit Awards with Wendy, Lisa, and Sheila E. followed. Both appearances previewed tracks from 3121, which hit number one on the album charts soon after its release in March 2006. Planet Earth followed in 2007, featuring contributions from Wendy and Lisa. In the U.K., copies were cover-mounted on the July 15 edition of The Mail on Sunday, provoking Columbia -- the worldwide distributor for the release -- to refuse distribution throughout the U.K. In the U.S., the album was issued on July 24.

LotusFlow3r, a three-disc set, arrived in 2009, featuring a trio of distinct albums: LotusFlow3r itself (a guitar showcase), MPLSound (a throwback to his '80s funk output), and Elixer (a smooth contemporary R&B album featuring the breathy vocals of Bria Valente). Despite only being available online and through one big-box retailer, the set debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart. A year later, another throwback-flavored effort, 20Ten, became his second U.K. newspaper giveaway. No official online edition of the album was made available. From mid-2010 through the end of 2012, Prince toured throughout Europe, America, Europe again, Canada, and Australia. During 2013, he released several singles, starting with "Screwdriver" and continuing with "Breakfast Can Wait" in the summer of that year. Early in 2014, he made a cameo appearance on the Zooey Deschanel sitcom The New Girl, appearing in the episode that aired following the Super Bowl. All this activity was prelude to the spring announcement that Prince had re-signed to Warner Bros. Records, the label he had feuded with 20 years prior. As part of the deal, he wound up receiving the ownership of his master recordings, and the label planned a reissue campaign that would begin with an expanded reissue of Purple Rain roughly timed to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

First came two new albums: Art Official Age and PlectrumElectrum, the latter credited to 3rdEyeGirl, the all-female power trio that was his new-millennial backing band. Both records came out on the same day in September 2014. (Two years later, the Prince reissue program and the expanded edition of Purple Rain had yet to appear.) Almost a year to the day, he released HITnRUN: Phase One, with contributions from Lianne La Havas, Judith Hill, and Rita Ora. A sequel, HITnRUN: Phase Two, was released online in December 2015, with a physical release following in January 2016. In early 2016, Prince set out on a rare solo tour, a run of shows he called "Piano and a Microphone." The tour was cut short in April due to sickness, however, and Prince flew home to Minneapolis. On April 21, 2016, police were called to Paisley Park, where they found Prince unresponsive; he died that day at the age of 57. His early death and incredible achievement prompted an outpouring of emotion from fans, friends, influences, and professional associates. On the following week's Billboard charts, he occupied four of the top ten album positions and four of the top singles positions.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/prince/biography

Prince Bio

Prince was one of the most naturally gifted artists of all time, and also one of the most mysterious. In the Eighties, at a time when other megastars such as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna, were delivering an album every three years or so, Prince remained prolific to an almost inhuman degree. A byproduct of his inexhaustible output was Prince's tendency toward wayward, self-indulgent career moves (like changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in the Nineties) that sometimes alienated even his most ardent supporters.

Yet his taut, keyboard-dominated Minneapolis Sound — a hybrid of rock, pop, and funk, with blatantly sexual lyrics — not only influenced his fellow Minneapolis artists the Time and Janet Jackson's producers (and ex-Time members) Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, but also impacted much of 1980s dance-pop music. No other pop star could match the range of his talents, which included not just singing and dancing but also composing, producing, and playing many, many instruments. In fact, Prince played nearly all the instruments on his first five albums, and has produced himself since signing with Warner Bros. at age 21.

Under the name "Prince Rogers," Prince's father John Nelson was the leader of a Minneapolis-area jazz band, in which his mother was the vocalist. Prince started playing piano at age seven, guitar at 13, and drums at 14, all self-taught. At 14 he was in a band called Grand Central, which later became Champagne. Four years later, a demo tape he made with engineer Chris Moon reached local businessman Owen Husney. In 1978 Husney negotiated Prince's first contract with Warner Bros.

Prince released his first album, For You, in April, 1978, to minimal fanfare. "Soft and Wet" (Number 92, pop, Number 12 R&B, 1978) introduced his erotic approach, while "I Wanna Be Your Lover" (Number 11 pop, Number One R&B) and "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" (Number 13 R&B) from subsequent album Prince (Number 22, 1979) suggested his musical range and significantly upped his profile.

Dirty Mind (Number 45, 1980)—a loose concept album including songs such as "Head," about oral sex, and "Sister," about incest—established Prince's libidinous image once and for all. One of its few songs that wasn't too obscene for airplay, "Uptown," went to Number Five R&B, while "When You Were Mine" became Prince's most widely covered song and a minor comeback hit for Mitch Ryder in 1983 (it was later covered by Cyndi Lauper, among others, as well.)

Controversy (Number 21, 1981) had two hits, the title cut (Number 70 pop, Number Three R&B, 1981) and "Let's Work" (Number Nine, 1982). Prince, Dirty Mind, and Controversy all eventually went platinum. For his second album, Prince had formed a racially and sexually mixed touring band that included childhood friend Andre (Anderson) Cymone on bass, Dez Dickerson on guitar, keyboardists Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink, and drummer Bobby "Z" Rivkin. By the Dirty Mind tour, Chapman had been replaced by Lisa Coleman. When Dez Dickerson left Prince's band to launch an abortive solo career, he was replaced by Wendy Melvoin. In concert Prince frequently wore black bikini underpants underneath a trench coat.

Prince broke through to a new level of pop stardon with his double album, 1999 (Number Nine, 1982), which went platinum, bolstered by the Top 10 singles "Little Red Corvette" (Number Six, 1983) and "Delirious" (Number Eight, 1983), and the title track (Number 12, 1982). "Little Red Corvette" was also among the first videos by a black performer to be played regularly on MTV.

Prince "discovered" another Minneapolis band, the Time, whose members were cherry-picked from extant local bands Prince had gone back with to high school. The Time's first two albums went gold (the third went platinum); in turn, they supplied in-concert backup for Vanity 6, a female trio that had a club hit with "Nasty Girl" (Vanity would leave Prince's fold in 1983 to launch an unsuccessful solo career). Prince denied that he was the "Jamie Starr" who produced albums by the Time and Vanity 6. He did take both bands on tour with him, however.

Prince vaulted to superstardom in 1984 with Purple Rain, a seemingly autobiographical movie set in the Minneapolis club scene and co-starring the Time and Apollonia 6 (Patricia "Apollonia" Kotero having replaced Vanity). It was an enormous hit, as was the soundtrack album, which spent 24 weeks atop the chart and sold over 13 million copies, yielding hit singles with "When Doves Cry" (Number One, 1984), "Let's Go Crazy" (Number One, 1984), "Purple Rain" (Number Two, 1984), "I Would Die 4 U" (Number Eight, 1984), and "Take Me With U" (Number 25, 1985). The album marked the first time in his career that Prince had recorded with, and credited, his backing band, which he named the Revolution.

The opening act on Prince's 1984 tour was another of his female protégés, Latin percussionist Sheila E., the daughter of Santana percussionist Pete Escovedo, who hailed from Oakland, California, and whose album The Glamorous Life Prince had produced that year (as Jamie Starr).

At the 1985 Grammy Awards, Prince and the Revolution won Best Group Rock Vocal for "Purple Rain" and R&B Song of the Year for "I Feel For You" (actually from Prince, and a hit cover for Chaka Khan in 1984). After the gala, Prince — who, for all his sexual exhibitionism onstage, was painfully shy offstage — declined to take part in the all-star recording session for "We Are the World" (he later donated the track "4 the Tears in Your Eyes" to the USA for Africa album).
That, and his fey demeanor at the 1985 Academy Awards show, where he won a Best Original Score Oscar for Purple Rain, were the first signals of Prince's personal eccentricities to his newfound mass audience. In 1985 Prince also wrote Sheena Easton's suggestive hit single "Sugar Walls," under the pseudonym "Alexander Nevermind." And Tipper Gore credited allusions to masturbation in the Purple Rain track "Darling Nikki" with inspiring her to form the Parents Music Resource Center and to launch the Senate hearings on offensive rock lyrics, which led to the record industry's "voluntary" album-stickering policy.

Prince followed up Purple Rain with the psychedelic Around the World in a Day, which topped the chart for three straight weeks but was considered a critical and commercial disappointment. Prince reportedly had to be persuaded to release singles from it, but the album did yield hits in the Beatlesque "Raspberry Beret" (Number Two, 1985) and the funky "Pop Life" (Number Seven, 1985). Upon the album's release Prince's management announced his retirement from live performance (which lasted less than two years), and the opening of his own studio and record label, both named Paisley Park—after a track on the new album (which also included a spiritual epic, "The Ladder," which Prince wrote with his previously estranged father).

Prince's next movie, Under the Cherry Moon, a romantic trifle shot on the French Riviera, with Prince replacing music video auteur Mary Lambert (Madonna's "Like a Virgin," among others) as director midway through production, bombed with critics and moviegoers. Its soundtrack album Parade (Number Three, 1986) yielded one chart-topper in the strippe-down funk number "Kiss" and two minor hits, "Mountains" (Number 23, 1986) and "Anotherloverholenyohead" (Number 63, 1986).

In 1987 Prince fired the Revolution (Wendy and Lisa would go on to record as a duo, scoring a minor hit single with "Waterfall," before settling into soundtrack work) and, retaining only Matt Fink, replaced them with a new, unnamed band featuring Sheila E. on drums. Prince alone would be credited on Sign 'O' the Times (Number Six, 1987), widely hailed by critics as a return to form — and, as time passed, as Prince's pinnacle. It yielded hit singles in the stark title track (Number Three, 1987), the rocking Sheena Easton duet "U Got the Look" (Number Two, 1987), and the poppy "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" (Number Ten, 1987). Prince toured Europe with his new band and a theatrically choreographed show, but rather than touring the U.S. released a film of a concert shot in Rotterdam, Holland (and extensively re-shot and overdubbed at Paisley Park's soundstage).

In late 1987 rumors circulated of a new Prince project, The Black Album, said to consist of musically and lyrically raw funk tracks. A number of copies were pressed for a secret release date (the album was unmarked apart from a serial number), but Prince changed his mind at the last minute. Before its eventual official release in late 1994, The Black Album became one of the most bootlegged LPs in pop history.

Prince's next official release was the mild Lovesexy (Number 11, 1988), which yielded only one hit, "Alphabet St." (Number Eight, 1988), but did prompt Prince's first U.S. tour in four years, performing on a rotating stage that the singer entered in a pink Cadillac.

In 1989 Prince had his first chart-topping album in four years with his soundtrack for director Tim Burton's big-budget film Batman. "Batdance" was Prince's first Number One since "Kiss." A year later, Prince — who'd already written and produced an album for Paisley Park signee Mavis Staples and undertaken productions for the Time's Morris Day and Jerome Benton and Batman star Kim Basinger — released Graffiti Bridge, a film that seemed to be a delayed sequel to Purple Rain, again pitting Prince against the Time on the Minneapolis club scene. Prince's love interest was played by Ingrid Chavez, who would gain greater fame for helping Lenny Kravitz write Madonna's hit "Justify My Love" (though she'd have to sue Kravitz to get a composing credit). The movie was another critical and commercial disaster; the soundtrack album (Number Six, 1990) yielded the hit "Thieves in the Temple" (Number six, 1990) and Tevin Campbell's Prince-penned "Round and Round" (Number 12, 1991).

In January 1991, at his recently opened Glam Slam nightclub in Minneapolis, Prince unveiled his new band, the New Power Generation, who would not tour the U.S. until 1993. The band included a rapping dancer (Anthony "Tony M" Mosely), in Prince's first nod to hip-hop, which had claimed a significant share of his black-pop audience and with which he never seemed comfortable musically. Eight months later he released his fifth album in five years, Diamonds and Pearls (Number Three, 1991), which spawned hits in the lascivious "Gett Off" (Number 21, 1991), "Cream" (Number One, 1991), and the title track (Number three, 1992). Warner Bros. made Prince a vice president when he re-signed with the label in 1992.

His next album (Number Five, 1992) was titled after an unpronounceable merger of the male and female gender symbols; its hit singles included "7" (Number Eight, 1992), "My Name Is Prince" (Number 36, 1992), and the profane "Sexy M.F." (Number 66, 1992).

In September 1993 Prince pulled the most eccentric move of his career: he changed his name to the unpronounceable symbol he had titled his last album. "Symbol Man," "Glyph," or "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" — shortened to "the Artist," as he was now known — suffered widespread ridicule followed by a business setback in February 1994 when Warner Bros. dropped its distribution deal with Paisley Park Records, effectively putting the label out of business. Two weeks later the Artist released a new single, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" (Number Three pop, Number Two R&B), not on Warners but on independent Bellmark Records, which had had a huge hit the previous summer with Tag Team's "Whoomp! There It Is"; Warners said it allowed this "experiment" at the Artist's request but would release his future product.

Come (Number 15 pop, Number Two R&B), released later that year, was credited to "Prince (1958-1993)," and drawn from the Artist's backlog of studio recordings. It spawned two singles, "Letitgo" (Number 31 pop, Number Ten R&B) and "Space" (Number 71 R&B). The legit Black Album (Number 47 pop, Number 18 R&B) was finally released two weeks before Christmas. As his relationship with the label continued to wane, the Artist began appearing with the word "Slave" scrawled on his cheek.
Warners released four more albums: The Gold Experience (Number Six pop, Number two R&B, 1995)—which scored a hit in "I Hate U" (Number 12 pop, Number Three R&B) but was more notorious for the racy track "P Control"—the soundtrack to Spike Lee's movie Girl 6 (Number 75 pop, Number 15 R&B, 1996), Chaos & Disorder (Number 26 pop), and the archival The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale (1999).
Meanwhile, the Artist issued the triple-CD set Emancipation (Number Two R&B, 1996) on his own New Power Generation (NPG) label, which was distributed through Capitol/EMI. The album went double platinum, and a remake of the Stylistics' 1972 hit "Betcha By Golly Wow" reached Number Ten on the R&B chart. The Artist also wed Mayte Garcia, a 22-year-old dancer and vocalist in his band. Their son died of a rare disorder called Pfeiffer's Syndrome shortly after birth in November 1996. Culling tracks from his archives, the Artist put out the four-CD compilation Crystal Ball (Number 62 pop, Number 59 R&B) in 1998, which he packaged in a clear plastic ball and marketed through his Web site by offering a fifth bonus disc, the acoustically-based The Truth. It sold 250,000 copies. Five months later came the more conventionally conceived single album New Power Soul (Number 22 pop, Number 9 R&B).

As the millennium loomed, so did the Warners rerelease of "1999" (Number 45 R&B, 1999) and the artist's own 1999 (The New Master) EP. That fall, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (Number 18 pop, Number Eight R&B) was released through a licensing arrangement with Arista. (Stating his displeasure with Arista's marketing of the album, the Artist would later declare his intention to release a new version through his Web site called Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic.) The album, which was produced by "Prince," featured guest appearances by folk-rock singer Ani DiFranco and rapper Chuck D, both performers whom the Artist admired for distributing their music independently. With the expiration of his Warner/Chappell publishing contract on December 31, 1999, the Artist announced the following May that he was reclaiming his given name.

The first album the again-named Prince released was 2001's The Rainbow Children, a jazz-inflected recording with lyrics heavily influenced by Prince's conversion to the Jehovah's Witness faith. It was heavily panned, as was 2003's N.E.W.S., an instrumental disc. Between them, he issued One Nite Alone . . . Live!, a three-disc set..

In February 2004, Prince appeared with Beyonce at the Grammy Awards, playing his own "Purple Rain," "Let's Go Crazy," and "Baby I'm a Star," along with Beyonce's "Crazy in Love." A month later, he was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on his first try. During the closing ceremony he played the song-ending solo on George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," wowing the assembling with his feroscious virtuosity. Together, these performances made Prince the talk of pop music again. (Something similar would occur when he played the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show.)

He capped this newfound interest with the pleasantly old-school Musicology (Number Three, 2004) and a sold-out concert tour. 3121 (Number One, 2006) was a more polished, bigger-sounding variation on the prior album, and along with Planet Earth (Number Three, 2007), and the 3-CD set LOtUSFLOW3R (Number Two, 2009), it suggested that Prince would be capable of creating a string of comfortable, eclectic, well-turned albums for the rest of his career.

The prolific musician continued unusual record releases with the 2010 album 20Ten, which came out in Europe as a free release with the German edition of Rolling Stone and other publications. In recent years, he put out albums as companion pieces. The rock and funk–focused Plectrumelectrum, which found him fronting the otherwise all-girl trio 3rdEyeGirl, came out in 2014 along with the R&B solo LP Art Official Age, both of which charted in the Top 10. In 2015, he issued HitnRun Phase One and HitnRun Phase Two, the latter of which came out only via Jay Z's streaming service Tidal (the rare streaming service Prince approved of).

Prince died from a fentanyl overdose at his Paisley Park recording studio and home in Chanhassen, Minnesota on April 21st, 2016, at the age of 57. After his sudden death, there was a global outpouring of grief and disbelief, with many fans and collaborators sharing memories. With the fate of his estate and unpublished music in doubt, many were left wondering how Prince's legacy would continue. But his sister Tyka Nelson said in a statement issued by Bremer Trust, the current managers of the late legendary artist's estate, that Paisley Park would be opened for public tours since it was "something that Prince always wanted to do and was actively working on. ... Only a few hundred people have had the rare opportunity to tour the estate during his lifetime. Now fans from around the world will be able to experience Prince's world for the first time as we open the doors to this incredible place."

Portions of this biography appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Evan Serpick and Kory Grow contributed to this article.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/remembering-prince

Culture Desk

April 22, 2016
Remembering Prince
by The New Yorker

This post will be continually updated with tributes to the pop artist Prince, who died on Thursday, at the age of fifty-seven.

SUNDAY, APRIL 24th

Miles Davis, in his autobiography, compared Prince to Duke Ellington; one might be tempted to add Miles himself to that comparison. When we discuss artists so transcendently brilliant and impossibly prolific, their rarities and deep cuts offer profundities that dwarf the entire catalogues of lesser musicians. While standard radio play and popular consciousness constantly focus on the hits—the “Kind of Blues,” the “Mood Indigos,” the “Purple Rains” (it seems there is a particular corner of the color wheel reserved for musical genius)—obsessive and completist fans search out the bootlegs, loudly proclaiming their obscure favorites to be equal, if not superior, to the more famous albums. The record labels have learned to exploit this kind of obsessiveness, especially posthumously.

In his typically iconoclastic manner, Prince bypassed the labels well before his tragically premature death, selling albums of unreleased tracks directly to his most loyal listeners. (Always a canny businessperson, he realized that direct sales to a few hundred thousand die-hards would earn him more than royalties from a multi-platinum hit on a major label.) While this later, independent output cannot rival the run of masterpieces that he produced between 1980 and 1988 for Warner Brothers, the best of it holds its own (and, not surprisingly, often consists of previously unreleased material from those peak years). On a weekend when we’re all thinking of our favorite Prince song, when pundits are debating whether “1999” or “Kiss” best represents his vision, let me offer a dark horse to the race, the eleven minutes of freak-pop perfection that make up “Crystal Ball.”

“Crystal Ball” was originally going to be the title track of what later became 1987’s “Sign ‘O’ the Times”—in an early preview of his major-label frustrations, Prince wanted to put out a three-album set, but Warner Brothers forced him to a two-album maximum. So the song went back on the shelf, and became a sought-after bootleg for years. It was finally made available legally in 1998, part of a four-disc collection of rarities plus new material, also called “Crystal Ball,” that Prince self-released. Many critics and fans consider “Purple Rain” to be Prince’s career highlight, but for me the period from “Sign ‘O’ the Times” to 1988’s “Lovesexy” is the deepest compositionally. You can hear why Davis compared him to Duke Ellington. Like Ellington’s “Reminiscing in Tempo” or “Ad Lib on Nippon,” songs like “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” “Positivity,” and “Crystal Ball” exist in a pop context but follow their own rules; they are extended compositions that tell long-form narratives through unique song structures.

“Crystal Ball” is particularly operatic in scope. It opens with a minimalist heartbeat on the bass drum, with Prince’s great orchestrator, the late Clare Fischer, providing washes of cinematic color, from overblown flutes to lush strings. (Fischer was to Prince as Gil Evans was to Miles Davis.) After a minute and a half of slow-building tension, Prince’s whispered voice is finally ushered in with a siren, an impossibly funky synth bass waiting until the second iteration to join in. The groove expands as the lyrics turn darker (“As bombs explode around us and hate advances on the right / The only thing that matters, baby, is the love that we make tonight”), drums filling out the kit, a little scratchy rhythm guitar coming on board. The story is impenetrable, a mélange of Christian spirituality and unquenchable sexuality, full of Prince’s personal mythologies and references, but the passion is irresistible, a post-apocalyptic gospel. Five minutes in, another siren signals a transition into something that could be on a Sly and the Family Stone album, if Sly ever danced on a vibraphone. Like James Brown, Prince screams each instrument into its solo, but the funk stays futuristic rather than referential, and Prince is playing every solo himself. By the eighth minute, as the orchestra peaks, we could be in the weirdest James Bond movie ever made. After Prince demonstrates why his drumming might be the only underrated element of his instrumental virtuosity, the song floats back down, reprising the initial groove though a final crescendo before an exhausted collapse.

There is an undeniable power to crafting pop hits so catchy that hundreds spontaneously gather in the streets to sing them in mourning their author. It is also overwhelming to think of a creative mind so fertile that something like “Crystal Ball” could sit almost unheard for over a decade. Both are marks of a genius so rare, an artistry so unique, that it is difficult to imagine a future without it. Searching out hidden treasures helps dull the pain, but never erases the fact that we are no longer graced with the next idea. Somehow creative music managed to survive Ellington’s death, and Davis’s, and in some unimaginable way, it will survive Prince’s. So in celebrating the irreplaceable and immortal inspiration of Prince’s music, let us also prepare our ears for the next artist who will join this exalted pantheon, the next artist who will exist, as Ellington would say in his highest praise, “beyond category.”

—Taylor Ho Bynum

SATURDAY, APRIL 23rd

Amid the bewildered flurry of clips and videos that were screened, in tribute, after the unexpected death of David Bowie, in January, one of the most interesting was from an interview he gave on MTV, in 1983. Bowie tells the host, Mark Goodman, that, having watched the network for a few months, he is “just floored by the fact that there are so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?” He adds, “the only black artists one does see are on about two-thirty in the morning, till around six.” By way of explanation, a surprised Goodman says that the network has to think about audiences not just in New York and L.A. but in places like “Poughkeepsie or some town in the Midwest,” where, he seems to think, people are “scared to death” of Prince, whom MTV has played. Bowie is clearly dismayed, but just smiles and says, “That’s very interesting.”

Now Prince, too, is suddenly gone. In fairness, Goodman wasn’t entirely wrong about him—he certainly enjoyed piercing the conventions of popular culture. That was something that Prince and Bowie shared. They both created substantial and eclectic bodies of work while presenting themselves in ways that challenged all categories. They were the kind of people whom, as you walk down the street going about your daily business, you wish there were many more of. I don’t know if they ever met, but Prince sang “Heroes,” in a tribute to Bowie, at a concert in Toronto last month. He sang it again on the night of his last show, in Atlanta, as an encore.

I was once in the same room as Prince. A friend invited my husband and me to an impromptu party for him at a restaurant in Harlem. There was no rush, the friend said, Prince wouldn’t be there before eleven. We arrived fashionably late, at 11:30, and were led to a room upstairs, where there was food and drink and Prince playing on the box, and we waited—for one hour, then two. The d.j. switched the soundtrack to Sinatra. But then, Prince was there. He was ushered to a chair in a corner of the room, protected by a velvet rope, and, after a while, an assistant began summoning people to meet him. First up was Salma Hayek, who sat with him (I thought) for a rather long time. We began to realize that, by the time they got around to calling us, it would be lunchtime, so we left. We didn’t meet Prince, but we were with him, in a sort of spiritual way that I think he might have appreciated. In that sense, it was a disappointing but not unsatisfactory New York encounter with the eccentric genius from the Twin Cities.

It was a little sad that he seemed so isolated, even in a small room. But that didn’t jibe with other stories you heard about Prince. Another friend had seen him late one night at a bar on Avenue A, where he gamely tried to teach a guy how to dance to reggae, until the project proved futile, and he was forced to abandon it. (Prince had some disappointments, too, I guess.) Then there was his charming and hilarious cameo two years ago on Zooey Deschanel’s show, “New Girl,” in which he showed a healthy and amused understanding of his own image.

Not that his universe was all red Corvettes and raspberry berets. He lived in the real world, too. Last year, at the Grammys, he made the simple but elegant statement, “Albums, like books and black lives, still matter.” He wrote a memorial song, “Baltimore,” after the death of Freddie Gray, which he performed at a free concert in that city, and he donated to a jobs program there for young people. On Thursday night, the dome of the Baltimore City Hall was lit up in purple.

And he certainly seemed at home in his hometown. People in Minneapolis spoke of seeing him riding his bike and visiting record shops and jazz clubs. On the city’s streets, there is as much graffiti devoted to him as to onetime Dinkytown resident Bob Dylan. I happened to be in Minneapolis with my son last weekend. On Sunday morning, I read about Prince’s illness, with some alarm, in the Star Tribune. But there was a deep general sense of relief that he had appeared to be all right at the dance party he threw the previous night, at Paisley Park. I later learned that he had sent out an invitation on Twitter—anyone willing to spend ten dollars was welcome. I wish I had known. It would have been nice to be in a room with him again.

—Virginia Cannon

FRIDAY, APRIL 22nd

Before I knew you could dress that way; before I knew it was called “funk,” and before I learned what a synthesizer did; before I knew that love songs could sound solitary and weird, and before I figured out that Minneapolis must be on another planet; before the sound of computer blues and militant drum machines, of sex dressed up as lullaby; before “Kiss” unnerved me, and before I reasoned that it was because of the falsetto; before I understood the value of “an intellect and a savoir-faire”; before my mother bribed me into transcribing the lyrics of “Nothing Compares 2 U” for her, and before I understood the devilry of binding contracts; before I understood what “Gett Off” meant or who “critics in New York” were, and before I discovered that you could drop the long version of “Erotic City,” go to the bar for a drink, and still be fulfilling your obligations as a d.j.; before I understood that you could just keep making art in your own special language, well past the point where all eyes trained on you, and that it was just for those who had loyally stayed until the end: before all of that, I saw purple.

Not sound, but vision. As a kid in the mid-eighties, the color palette of my imagination was washed-out and dull. And then, one day, there was radiance. It was the audacity of all that purple that first drew me to Prince, the pure hubris of a man with an unusual name draping himself in an unloved color. Purple not just as a color, I would soon discover, but purple as a philosophy and worldview, as a shade of night they didn’t want you to know about. The sky was blue, red was the color of passion and rage, trees and money were green, but what was purple? Purple was mystery. It was erotic, whatever that meant. Purple was imperious and arrogant, neither masculine nor feminine. Purple as a shade of black. Before I knew the word “transgressive,” I knew what it felt like to sit with a stranger’s weirdness, and reckon with inscrutability by basking in it.

The representative, late-career Prince anecdote involves him showing up, laying waste to all in his vicinity, whether onstage or on the basketball court, and then vanishing. The thing about Prince was always the sheer effortlessness of his swagger. He arrived in my imagination fully formed, as a figure so certain of who he was and what his music was supposed to sound like, that I felt compelled to believe in him and his purple inertia, even if it at first confused me. That color baffled me, until I grew to love it myself, and it prepared me for everything else: a symbol that couldn’t be pronounced, the thinness of the line separating one person’s body from another, a path that you made by flying.

—Hua Hsu

Prince overlapped with my adolescence, and he was better than a lot of other sex ed. I listened to “Erotic City” and took notes. Some of the details were confusing: Why would a woman carry Trojans in her pocket, “some of them used”? It took me years to realize that Darling Nikki wasn’t literally masturbating with a magazine.

But the over-all message was mind-blowing, particularly in the Safe Sex era: for Prince, sex was at the center; it was funk and freedom, not fear. It was neither male nor female; it was intimacy and power; it was important and, best of all, funny and fun. He liked women, not girls. You didn’t need experience to turn him out. My favorite song, “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” begins with the wedding march. Then it gets so deeply funky that it glides straight into a nervous breakdown. A man is crooning to his girlfriend, begging her to be as close with him as she’d be with a female best friend, to let him make her breakfast, let him wash her hair—and much more. “If I was your girlfriend / Would you let me dress you? / I mean, help you pick up out your clothes / Before we go out? / Not that you’re helpless / But sometimes, sometimes / Those are the things that being in love’s about.” It’s a seduction, but so sincere: a groan of desire from a man who feels locked out precisely because he’s a man, jonesing so hard for intimacy that his “PLEE-EE-EESE” is a different kind of climax. It’s also, like a lot of his songs, a conversation. (Even in the dance songs: “What was that?” “Aftershock!”)

I know that Prince made other great music, but for me he is a pungent flashback to the eighties and early nineties. The song I knew best was the enormous single “Raspberry Beret,” because the loudspeakers played it over and over at the worst job I ever had, putting anti-shoplifting tags on clothing at a J. C. Penney. But although there have been plenty of recent shows that capture those decades, from “The Americans” to “The People vs. O. J. Simpson,” the truth is that TV could just as well play “Sign ’O the Times.” It begins with a stripped beat. Then “OH, YEAH.” And then a tiny poem of the period: “In France, a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name / By chance his girlfriend came across a needle and soon she did the same.” The words go on, in a tone that is newspaper-deadpan: gangs, guns, crack, “Star Wars,” the Challenger explosion—a country that puts a man on the moon but lets a woman be so poor that she kills her baby. It ends, as many Prince songs do, with a remark that is both serious and silly, a wry punch line to the devastation. First comes the romance: “Hurray, before it’s too late / Let’s fall in love, get married, have a baby!” And then the twist: “We’ll call him Nate / If it’s a boy.” I laugh every time I hear it; it’s so random, so personal, so conversational, a joy in the unexpected.

—Emily Nussbaum

I know there’s only so much you can do to conjure up a long-ago concert, and that it’s only so much fun to read about it when you can’t hear or see it. But, for a lot of people, there’s That Show, the one you were lucky or fleetingly cool enough to somehow get tickets to, the one you might tell your kids you saw, eliciting a flicker of envious respect. Mine happens to have been a Prince concert, on Valentine’s Day, 1982, at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. I was a junior in college. Prince was touring for his album “Controversy.”

As white kids, my boyfriend George and I were in a minority in the audience, and as straight white kids, we were in an even smaller one. Prince was still mostly known as a funk performer and hadn’t crossed over in a big way. He had a disco fandom: black and gay and club-wild. It was the first time, and one of the best times, that I felt that kind of Dionysian boundary-melting you’re supposed to feel at concerts, with “I Wanna Be Your Lover” pounding in my chest cavity like an enlarged heart, and stranger’s hands pulling me into an ecstatic scrum of dancers near the stage. Prince was spry and androgynous, leaping around the stage in ankle boots like a sexed-up Peter Pan. Afterward, some drag queens in gleaming spandex we had met at the show invited us to a gay bar in Oakland, where we danced to Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester on the jukebox till 4 A.M.

The next morning I had an interview for a summer internship at Newsweek, and I botched it. I was hungover; I couldn’t find any whiteout to correct the sample column I was supposed to bring; my only pair of tights were extravagantly shredded. I knew I wouldn’t get the job, and I didn’t. I can remember thinking that I’d made a conscious choice in favor of abandon, and though I told myself I’d been irresponsible and should be full of chaste regret, I could not summon it up. And I was right not to: from the vantage point of middle age, I can say this is not the sort of excess one ever regrets. Prince was a pied piper of polymorphous perversity, of the commingling of psychedelia and funk, gay and straight, black and white. I would go on to see him in a much bigger venue, when he was a much bigger deal. But it was that February night in 1982 that mattered, when I watched him sing: “Life is just a game / We’re all just the same / Do you wanna play?” and said, Yes.

—Margaret Talbot

THURSDAY, APRIL 21st

It’s hard to imagine Prince not in this life; he was the epitome of live. I loved his records, his sweetness and strangeness, his genius as a seer of sexuality and performance. The greatest gift was to see him onstage. Live, emerging from the dry-ice clouds, he was unforgettable, unstoppable, a weather system all his own. If there’s any way to alleviate the awfulness of the news—Prince’s life cut short at fifty-seven—it’s to recall some of his greatest moments onstage. Miles Davis had it right: Prince was some otherworldly blend of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and Charlie Chaplin. “How can you miss with that?” Miles asked.

So here are four performances of a man gone far too soon.

—David Remnick

A surprise appearance by Prince, a month ago, for a memoir announcement at a Manhattan night club, had the satisfying elements you might imagine: brilliance, humor, otherworldliness, tardiness, costume changes, funkiness, eccentricity. He stood on a glass balcony above us, as if he’d descended to earth as an act of generosity. And, in fact, he had. “I literally just got off the plane,” he told us. “I’m going to go home and change and put some dancing clothes on.” He was already wearing what I’d consider dancing clothes: a purple-and-gold striped pajama suit. He put a huge pair of sunglasses on. “Now I can see,” he said.

Because of that strange and magical night, and because of the miracle that was Prince, it’s very hard to believe today’s news that he has died. His genius was hard enough to comprehend as he walked among us. Unlike other pop stars and celebrities—unlike other humans—he seemed not to have aged. And his apparent youthfulness, at age fifty-seven, didn’t appear to be because of effortful vanity. He seemed to actually not have aged—as if life’s usual rules didn’t apply to him.

—Sarah Larson

This morning, the news came that paramedics were responding to a “fatality” at Paisley Park, the sprawling, modern studio and fairyland in Chanhassen, Minnesota, built by Prince Rogers Nelson as a monument to both his legacy and his eccentric personality. The name that followed was chilling for Prince’s world-spanning collection of fans. The musician was dead at fifty-seven. Last Friday, reports described Prince being ill and forcing his private jet to make an emergency landing in Illinois following a concert in Atlanta; he appeared at a dance party the next day to reassure the public that he was healthy. The enigma proved confounding even in his final scenes.

Prince’s run of stardom during the mid-eighties spawned several hits, films, commercials, collaborations, and what seemed like a limitless trove of recordings. And he’d risen again in the public eye in recent years: in 2014, Prince released “Art Official Age,” and he followed that in 2015 with a pair of albums, “Hit n Run Phase One” and “Hit n Run Phase Two,” which stepped warmly into the soft-thump funk, inventive, borderless jazz, and rallying sentiments that have been taken up by pockets of younger R. & B. acts. He took to singers like Janelle Monáe, Esperanza Spalding, and Lianne La Havas as muses, as well as touring regularly with his band 3rd Eye Girl, and would routinely summon local Minnesota artists to his estate. Presenting at last year’s Grammy Awards, he offered, “Like books and black lives, albums still matter,” denouncing the digital and bureaucratic oligarchies that he’d spoken out against throughout his career.

Fans grew accustomed to an adult version of the Prince they’d seen so mythically in his youth: less a deified king lording over his dominion and more an aged doyen, insulated from the rules and norms of common society but still watching transfixed from his wing, poking at the center at will: a master still at play. “When you’re twenty years old, you’re looking for the ledge,” Prince told Arsenio Hall in 2014. “You want to see how far you can push everything . . . and then you make changes. There’s a lot of things I don’t do now that I did thirty years ago. And then there’s some things I still do.”

Now we begin the collective, active experience of remembering Prince. New corners of his cavernous catalogue and stories of impressions from those that met him will be unearthed, shared. His is one of the handful of pop legacies whose broadness cannot be simplified in even its most romantic, famous moments, and now we must work to enjoy and adore that legacy as it warrants.

—Matthew Trammell

“Here I go again, falling in love all over,” Prince squeals at the beginning of “Pink Cashmere,” a one-off, gloriously careening six-minute rhythm-and-blues jam he recorded in 1988, at his own Paisley Park studios, for his girlfriend at the time, the British model and actress Anna Garcia (or Anna Fantastic, to crib Prince’s gilded, glamorizing parlance). The song’s opening lyric is preceded by an ecstatic “Oooh!” that contains, as far as I can tell, everything there is to know about the deeply hysterical moment in which a person suddenly recognizes that—oh, God—he or she is really done for. Maybe you were doing all right yesterday—maybe you had yourself together—but now? Someone’s got you fully in his or her grip. When love hits like that, it can feel brutal, violent, like getting grabbed from behind on a street corner. Then, on the other side of that terror: bliss, wonder. Something like happiness.

This, of course, is merely the situation of being alive, Prince suggests; glory and anguish are always present in everything, and often in equal parts. The paradox of love—how it’s both the kindest and the cruelest thing a person can inflict on someone else—exists in almost all of Prince’s songs, animating them. “The cycle never ends, you pray you don’t get burned, OW!” is how he figures it on “Pink Cashmere.”

Although the song didn’t make it onto a proper LP until 1993, when it was included on the “The Hits/The B-Sides” boxed set, I’ve long thought “Pink Cashmere” is one of the most intoxicating and almost inexplicably multitudinous rhythm-and-blues songs ever recorded. Prince, like all our best singers, had a cornucopia of voices awaiting deployment, each communicating a separate but essential emotional state. On “Pink Cashmere” he exhibits a staggering range, from a nearly feral-sounding falsetto to a deeper, more guttural alto. It is hard to accept, sometimes, that they were all born from the same body.

The title refers to an actual garment, a gift: a pink cashmere coat, with a contrasting black mink collar and cuffs. Prince had it made for Anna by his personal tailor. Her name was embroidered on the sleeve; an “89” was festooned on the back. I have never seen a photograph of it, but I imagine it to be a kind of bespoke masterwork, a literal manifestation of love’s strange, supple, mollifying embrace. I am certain that she looked incredible with it curled around her shoulders. I am certain almost anybody would.

—Amanda Petrusich

At two-thirty this afternoon, about eighty people were standing outside First Avenue, the club in Minneapolis that figures in “Purple Rain.” Outside the club is a wall with stars painted on it. Embedded in the stars are the names of various acts. Beneath the one for Prince was a collection of those bouquets that florists make with flowers and paper and cellophane and ribbon. Several held purple tulips. Beside the flowers someone had leaned a black Fender guitar. Men and women came around the corner in twos and threes, as if summoned, many having walked from their offices and wearing their ID tags around their necks. In the morning there had been rain, but the sky had cleared and the sun was out.

“Fifty-seven, he’s younger than my mom,” a tall young man with a corona of black hair said. His name was Tom Steffis, and he worked at the University of Minnesota, he said. He stood between Ryan Thompson, a student at the university who was in class when he heard, and Merv Moorhead, who said, “I was working at my computer when I heard, and I knew I had to come down.”

“He means a lot to the city, because he never really left,” Steffis said. “Minneapolis is small enough that everybody has a story about him.” The three of them shared several, mainly revolving around surprising gestures or acts of kindness.

Then one of them said, “My best friend’s mom in high school was in the opening shot of ‘Purple Rain.’ She waited three hours for the club to open.”

“Little-known fact,” Thompson said. “The movie wasn’t filmed in here. Everybody thinks it was.”

“It was the first place he played the song,” Steffis said.

Thompson has blond hair and a beard. He held a fancy-looking camera. “I worked on one of his videos,” he said. “It was seventeen-hour days, and he came out in these glory heels and from the back I thought it was an attractive woman, and he turned around, and I’m like, That’s Prince.”

“He really came out of his shell these last five years,” Steffis said, and they all nodded. He said that Prince gave parties at his estate, Paisley Park. “It’s this really unique place that’s by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere,” Thompson said.

Steffis said that Prince charged fifty dollars at the door, and sometimes he played. “There was never a guarantee he would play,” Steffis said.

“Sometimes he’d play two or three songs with the band, and he wouldn’t feel it, and he’d quit. Then he’d come back later and play for two or three hours,” Thompson said.

“First time I saw him he came on at four-thirty in the morning,” one of them said.

“It was all spontaneous.”

“That would discourage people from turning out.”

“They didn’t want to drive out there, and pay fifty bucks and have him not play, I guess.”

“There was no alcohol, and if they saw you using a cell phone they’d throw you out.”

“One time he served pancakes at five in the morning.”

Beside the three young men stood a woman with tears on her cheeks. A number of people held phones toward the flowers and the wall. A reporter and a cameraman from a Minneapolis station threaded their way among them. Hardly anyone spoke.

“My first Prince memory is a couple of my friends and I stayed up all night and when it came to sunrise we ran into Lake Minnetonka,” Steffis said finally.

“That’s the line in ‘Purple Rain,’ ” Thompson said, and then all three of them said, “Purify yourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.” Then they said maybe that wasn’t exactly the line, but it was pretty close.

After a moment, Thompson said, “A lady at the coffee shop told me that he used to have forty-hour Tantric-sex sessions back in the day.”

“There are so many rumors about him,” Steffis said. They agreed that this was the case, and then the three of them fell silent, too.

—Alec Wilkinson

There will be longer pieces written, and better ones, about the death of Prince, but the main point is that there will be many, and each will demonstrate purely and powerfully how deeply he connected with those of us who loved his music, his spirit, his playfulness, his petulance, his bravery, his youth, his wisdom, his weirdness, his virtuosity, and his vision.

Other articles will go through it all: his family, his father, 94 East, First Avenue, “Dirty Mind,” “Purple Rain,” the coughing on the extended “Raspberry Beret,” every second of every Sign O the Times show, the rest. I’m just making lists here to keep from sinking, just thinking to keep from feeling. “1999” was about the apocalypse, back in 1982. When the real 1999 came, people looked back seventeen years and laughed that nothing had ended. Seventeen years later, we’re all wrong.

We all discovered Prince at different times, but with the same sense—that he had discovered us. Tell your own stories about when you heard a song on the radio, or on a cassette, and how it lit you up from inside. The stories will be surprisingly similar.

Writing to mourn Prince doesn’t seem to make sense. Dreiser said, “Words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.” Prince said, “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand.” But we understood at least that. The lyric is from “I Would Die 4 U,” of course. Messianism turns to memorial.

Everyone will carry at least one song with him today. I’m carrying “Still Would Stand All Time,” the gospel ballad from “Graffiti Bridge.”

—Ben Greenman

Read more: David Remnick on Prince’s live persona; Sarah Larson on dancing to Prince; and our Prince remembrance cover and cartoon. From the archive, see Sasha Frere-Jones on Prince in Las Vega s, Claire Hoffman on visiting Prince’s L.A. home, and Sarah Larson on seeing him perform live last month.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Prince-singer-and-songwriter

Prince

American singer, songwriter, musician, and producer

by Robert Walser

6-3-2016

Also known as

the Artist
the Artist Formerly Known as Prince
Prince Rogers Nelson

born

June 7, 1958
Minneapolis, Minnesota

died

April 21, 2016
Chanhassen, Minnesota

Prince, original name Prince Rogers Nelson, later called the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, the Artist, and

(born June 7, 1958, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.—died April 21, 2016, Chanhassen, Minnesota) singer, guitarist, songwriter, producer, dancer, and performer on keyboards, drums, and bass who was among the most talented American musicians of his generation. Like Stevie Wonder, he was a rare composer who could perform at a professional level on virtually all the instruments he required, and a considerable number of his recordings feature him in all the performing roles. Prince’s recording career began with funk and soul marketed to a black audience; his early music also reflected the contemporary musical impact of disco. Later records incorporated a vast array of influences, including jazz, punk, heavy metal, the Beatles, and hip-hop, usually within an overall approach most informed by funky up-tempo styles and soulful ballads; the latter often featured his expressive falsetto singing.

Prince. © Dave Hogan—All Action/Retna Ltd.

Taking an early interest in music, Prince began playing the piano at age 7 and had mastered the guitar and drums by the time he joined his first band at age 14. With very few African American residents, his hometown, Minneapolis, Minnesota, was an unlikely site for the development of a major black star, but Prince even managed to lead other local musicians, most notably Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, to major success.

Mirrored by correspondingly intense music, Prince’s lyrics often address sexuality and desire with frankness and imagination. Much of his work, in its lyrics and imagery, struggles with the constriction of social conventions and categories. As one of his biographers put it, “The whole thrust of Prince’s art can be understood in terms of a desire to escape the social identities thrust upon him by simple virtue of his being small, black, and male.”

Prince explored typographical oddities in his song titles and lyrics as another way of evading convention. In 1993 he announced that he had changed his name to a combination of the male and female gender signs—

. There is also a strong religious impulse in some of his music, sometimes fused into a kind of sacred erotic experience that has roots in African American churches.

“Little Red Corvette” (1983) was Prince’s first big crossover hit, gaining airplay on MTV at a time when virtually no black artists appeared on the influential new medium. Purple Rain (1984) made him one of the major stars of the 1980s and remains his biggest-selling album. Three of its singles were hits: the frenetic “Let’s Go Crazy,” the androgynous but vulnerable “When Doves Cry,” and the anthemic title cut. Thereafter, he continued to produce inventive music of broad appeal; outside the United States he was particularly popular in Britain and the rest of Europe.

Prince. PRNewsFoto/Ethan Miller—3121/AP Images

Throughout most of his career, Prince’s prolific inventiveness as a songwriter clashed with his record company’s policy of releasing only a single album each year. As a backlog of his completed but unreleased recordings piled up, he gave songs to other performers—some of whom recorded at and for Paisley Park, the studio and label he established in suburban Minneapolis—and even organized ostensibly independent groups, such as the Time, to record his material. His 1996 album Emancipation celebrated the forthcoming end of his Warner Brothers contract, which enabled him to release as much music as he liked on his NPG label. Later he explored marketing his work on the Internet and through private arrangements with retail chains as a means of circumventing the control of large record companies. In 1999, however, he released Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic under the Arista label; a collaboration with Sheryl Crow, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, and others, the album received mixed reviews and failed to find a large audience. Prince (who, following the formal termination of his contract with Warner Brothers in 1999, stopped using the symbol as his name) was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. That year he also released Musicology, an album that both sold well and was much praised by critics.

Prince. PRNewsFoto/42 West/AP Images

Prince’s later albums include Lotusflow3r (2009), a triple-disc set that included a record by Bria Valente, a protégé. In 2014 he returned to Warner Brothers, releasing Art Official Age and PlectrumElectrum, the latter of which featured backing by the female trio 3rdEyeGirl. They also appeared on HitnRun: Phase One and Phase Two (both 2015).

Prince was found dead at his Paisley Park estate on April 21, 2016. An autopsy later revealed that he had died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a powerful opioid.

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/30/arts/prince-s-parade-stakes-a-claim-to-popularity.html

PRINCE'S 'PARADE' STAKES A CLAIM TO POPULARITY

by JOHN ROCKWELL

March 30, 1986

Prince became a big star with the 1984 release of his first film, ''Purple Rain,'' and its attendant soundtrack LP and hit singles. But it's sometimes easy to forget that he's only 25 years old. Even though he's a practiced pop-music veteran, having released an album a year since 1978, he's still coalescing as an artist. Unlike a student or a garret-dwelling Bohemian, however, his maturation is taking place in the glare of modern celebrity publicity - an exposure likely to distort as much as it reveals.

Now we have the 1986 Prince release, ''Parade'' (Warner Bros. WB25395, LP and cassette due out tomorrow, with the CD scheduled for April 28). It comes in the wake of his guardedly received 1985 album, ''Around the World in a Day,'' which was widely criticized for a false and over-ornate 1960's psychedelic feeling. But more than a corrective for any stylistic misstep - there is plenty of 60's atmosphere in ''Parade,'' too - the new album is an attempt to recoup ground lost by the negative publicity surrounding Prince personally.

It is likely to succeed in that aim for three unrelated reasons. One, it's very good. Two, as the soundtrack for Prince's forthcoming second film, ''Under the Cherry Moon,'' it may win a wider audience in the same way as the ''Purple Rain'' soundtrack. Three, given the increasing volatility of the pop music star-making and star-breaking apparatus, it's about time for public taste to swing back in Prince's favor.
Stars today are rapidly, almost instantaneously inflated into mass phenomena, sell millions of records and appear on every magazine cover. Then, suddenly, grievous character flaws are discovered - which may or may not exist, or may exist in lesser measure than eager exposes imply -and the public mood swings into dismissiveness.
The public perception of Prince swung from a sly charmer to surly misogynist paranoid between 1984 and 1985 - just as, the year before, Michael Jackson had fallen from boy genius to androgynous eccentric. In Prince's case, a few luridly reported incidents of snooty public behavior combined with overzealous body-guards certainly fueled the backlash. He hardly helped his cause with last year's ''Around the World'' album, in which a not very convincing approximation of McCartneyesque Beatles innocence clashed egregiously with his own image of defensive arrogance.

The irony was that his entire early reputation was of an aggressive kid obsessed with explicit sexuality (typical song-themes included incest, fellatio, onanism and bondage). ''Purple Rain,'' aside from being a musically more diverse and assured album than most of his earlier efforts, also represented a softening of that image. Thus the uglier behavior that provoked last year's ''backlash'' might be seen as a reassertion of the ''real'' Prince.

But reality in this case seems considerably more interesting and complex; Prince is a talented, still-evolving musician capable of far more challenging work than a mere facile pop trickster with a dirty mind (the title of his 1980 album, and one of his best).

When he signed with Warner Bros. Records at the age of 17, Prince was a prodigiously gifted provincial loner who created most of his albums by himself in his Minneapolis studio, overdubbing all the instruments. This is a situation conducive to self-aggrandizing fantasies. And the mere presence of striking musical gifts -for composing, singing, instrumental playing and studio manipulation -can cover up an unsure, half-formed sense of artistic direction.

With Prince, sexuality seems to have been both a publicity ploy - one hardly unprecedented in the raunchy world of rock-and-roll - and a genuine reflection of his adolescent interests, or so he's said in interviews. This sexuality, coupled with a less-than-sure gift for lyric writing - his texts are often prosaic and naive -made his other themes, like God, the apocalypse and political injustice, seem hollow.
And yet the outrageousness did serve a musical purpose, aside from its positive and negative marketing aspects. As with David Bowie, with his glitter image and constant ''changes,'' Prince's arresting persona enabled his public to accept (until ''Around the World,'' at least) his restless stylistic experimentation, his often brilliant attempts to blend black and white musical influences and every manner of rock, soul and disco.

Indeed, Prince's success in overcoming musical and racial boundaries has not just directly (through his many proteges) and indirectly (through those he influenced) affected 1980's popular music. He has also done much to lessen the de facto segregation of black artists that had arisen in the early 80's on radio and in the televising of music videos.
''Under the Cherry Moon,'' Prince's second feature film and the first he's directed himself, is scheduled for release July 2, and until then, certain aspects of the lyrics will remain obscure. The new soundtrack album begins with ''Christopher Tracy's Parade'' and ends with ''Sometimes It Snows in April,'' a ballad with a lovely chromatic chorus, maudlin verses and ''sincere'' acoustic instrumentation in which Prince seems to be lamenting the death of ''Tracy'' in an overtly homoerotic manner. When one learns that Prince's character in the film is Tracy himelf, however, homoeroticism turns into narcissism, with Prince lovingly crooning his own valedictory. The film is also set on the Cote d'Azur, with a French female star, which explains the occasional French lyrics, moaning French female love-talk and accordion-flavored chanson arrangements.

Apart from the chanson flavorings, there is psychedelia here, too - most overtly in the ''Sgt. Pepper''-like opening of ''Christopher Tracy's Parade'' - as well as continued examples of Prince's tendency toward busy studio clutter overlaying a dance beat. There are also two songs co-written with his musician/ father, John L. Nelson, who once performed under the name Prince Rogers; Prince's full name is Prince Rogers Nelson, and he has apparently had a complex relationship with his father - depicted in part in ''Purple Rain.'' The two co-written songs are the most psychedelic ones, suggesting that Mr. Nelson, who also co-wrote two songs on ''Around the World,'' may have helped point Prince in that direction.

But the most striking songs here are the tougher ones, those in which Prince chooses to play up the black side of his multifaceted musical sensibility. There's the catchy ''New Position'' and the single, ''Kiss,'' with its stripped-down instrumentation and falsetto vocal. But above all there are two songs, the clear highlights of this album. ''Anotherloverholenyohead'' has an irresistible chorus, as sexy and kinetic and ingratiating as anything in ''Purple Rain.'' ''Girls and Boys'' is even better, full of delicious instrumental touches capped by a grunting, honking baritone saxophone solo.

In the future, such songs may conceivably slip into the minority of Prince's output. From the first, sentimental ballads have seemed closer to his true spirit than the uptempo dance numbers. Prince may turn out to be a latter-day Elvis in more ways than one, renouncing the sexual flamboyance that won him his first success.
No doubt he will take more false steps - there can be no experimentation without them - and no doubt he will continue to annoy people who could, in the short run, help him along. Sometimes, like Stevie Wonder, he'll put out second-rate music, and sometimes he'll seem sentimental and dopey. But as a source of vernacular musical invention and deserving pop hits, he's as good as we have. And ''Parade'' certainly succeeds in another of its intentions: it makes one eager to see the movie.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/25-greatest-prince-songs-20160421/kiss-1986-20160421

25 Essential Prince Songs

The best of the Purple One's world-changing, genre-defying hits

Rolling Stone

April 21, 2016

"Kiss" (1986)

It was 1986, post-Purple Rain, when Paisley Park sound engineer David Z got a call from Prince to join him in Los Angeles. When he arrived at Hollywood's Sunset Sound studios, Z was handed a cassette-recorded demo — a verse, a chorus and a little acoustic guitar — intended for the band Mazarati. Z would later tell Mix Magazine it sounded like a Stephen Stills song. He and the band tinkered with it for a few hours, recorded a version and called it a day. When Z returned to the studio the next morning, Prince had stripped off the bass and hi-hat, added the iconic riff and recorded his own vocals. "This is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back," Z recalled Prince saying. Warner Brothers begged to differ; they said the track sounded unfinished, but Prince won the ensuing fight, and the single ultimately slingshotted to Number One.

"I Wanna Be Your Lover" (1979)

A "restrained, carefully crafted funk exercise" is how The Los Angeles Times described Prince's first hit single in a review of the singer's L.A. debut at the Roxy in November 1979. In retrospect, that's a cautious assessment, but it's understandable: Prince was but 21 at the time, and his brash, flamboyant style still hadn't fully distinguished itself from the disco landscape. But the seeds were there. After the weak showing of his first album, 1978's For You, Prince wrote "I Wanna Be Your Lover" with a vengeance, intended for R&B singer Patrice Rushen. Where one might hear "carefully crafted," the song actually packs a boldly sculpted beat, the singer's spine-tingling falsetto and a sleek revamping of the disco template. With "I Wanna Be Your Lover," Prince threw down his glittery gauntlet – from there on out, the world had to meet his challenge.

"When You Were Mine" (1980)

According to legend, the greatest New Wave song ever written about a bisexual love triangle came to Prince at a Florida hotel room after he'd declined a band Disney World excursion. Or, according to another story, it came to him in a Birmingham, Alabama hotel room while listening to John Lennon. Either way, the second track on 1980's Dirty Mind, is a tense and tight New-Wave-funk masterpiece that's as much Blondie as James Brown. Cyndi Lauper covered it three years later on her breakthrough album She's So Unusual, and would say she "loved the way the story in the song read, and the sound was that synthesizer sound with the stick-drum on one-three – it was a different herky-jerky sound." Mitch Ryder and Crooked Fingers delivered stripped-down rock and folk versions, but nobody captured the spirit of Prince's original, which has the feel of a Roman Bacchanal taking place at CBGB's.

"Controversy" (1981)

The Moral Majority was on the rise in 1981, emboldened by the January inauguration of Ronald Reagan. By November, a funky reaction appeared in the form of "Controversy." With an airtight beat and synthetic, P-Funk-esque grooves, Prince's 13th single counterbalanced the conservative backlash against anything – music, movies, TV, books, sex – that threatened to liberate America from the post-Seventies doldrums. Aiming a rolled eye at all the rampant public speculation about his preferences and politics, Prince offers more questions than answers – "Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?"; "Do I believe in God? Do I believe in me?" – while potentially baiting the Jerry Falwells of the world by reciting the Lord's Prayer. It's the sound of Prince hijacking American morality and making it his plaything

"1999" (1982)

When Prince recorded 1999 – the album lead by this single – he would go all day and all night without rest, turning down food since eating would make him sleepy. Prince's apocalyptic anthem was released in 1982, just as Cold War tensions were reaching absolute zero. Nuclear war, it seemed, was only a matter of when, not if. Into that atmosphere Prince detonated a song so brazen, it stares into the abyss and winks: "But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last." The end of the world has never sounded so sexy.

"Little Red Corvette" (1983)

The chorus of Prince's first Top Ten hit suggests it's a straightforward car song. But look beneath the hood and it's all supercharged sex (the flipped wordplay on "Trojan horse" is especially inspired). Despite the bedroom allusions and those more straightforward ("Girl, you got an ass like I never seen"), the song resonated on mainstream pop radio, thanks mainly to its irresistible sing-along chorus. The story goes that Prince came up with the lyrics while riding in Revolution member Lisa Coleman's hot-pink Edsel, but in the spring and summer of '83, there was nothing flashier than Prince's 'Vette.

"Delirious" (1983)

"Delirious," Prince's second Top 10 single is a loose, funky romp updated with new sounds – the Linn drum machine (popularized by Devo, Gary Numan and Michael Jackson) and a synthesizer for the buzzy, addictive hook. It all walked a fine line between commercial and experimental; between pop, R&B and New Wave. Said Matt Fink, keyboardist in Prince's band the Revolution: "To some extent, he was trying to make the music sound nice, something that would be pleasing to the ear of the average person who listens to the radio, yet send a message.

"When Doves Cry" (1984)

The heart of the Purple Rain soundtrack and the biggest hit of 1984, "When Doves Cry" showed how experimental pop music could get, making the most mainstream moment in America conform to the avant-garde. With no bass line and Prince wailing over guitar, synth and drum machine, "When Doves Cry" sounds as cold as a tense relationship can feel. His engineer recalls that the artist, who played every instrument on the track, instantly knew the impact the single would have on music. "Nobody would have the balls to do this," the Purple One reportedly told the engineer. "You just wait – they'll be freaking."

"Let's Go Crazy" (1984)

After "When Doves Cry" dominated pop radio throughout the late summer and early fall of 1984, the Number One smash "Let's Go Crazy" was as much a victory lap as an advertisement for the Purple Rain feature film. The full-bodied funk rock flourishes and allusions to Jimi Hendrix were made with the help of the Revolution, who briefly became the most famous backing unit in America. "Some of the band members came up with their own parts," engineer Susan Rogers told Billboard, noting Matt Fink's jazzy piano solo in the middle of the track. "Matt, knowing Prince so well and knowing what he liked, got that solo on the third take and we kept replaying it over and over again, because it was just great to listen to."
When the enormous success of Purple Rain generated murmurs that Prince was selling out to the AOR crowd, he told MTV in 1985, "I was brought up in a black and white world. Yes, black and white, night and day, rich and poor, black and white. I listened to all kinds of music when I was young… I always said that one day I was gonna play all kinds of music, and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work, and hopefully that will continue."

"Erotic City" (1984)

The "Let's Go Crazy" B-side was not only one of Prince's funkiest jams but also the world's introduction to Sheila E. Carried by a slithering bass line and sweetly simple keyboard riff, Prince fluctuates his voice on one of his nastiest songs – though the use of "fuck" or "funk" has been contested. In the late Nineties, when inducting Parliament-Funkadelic into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Prince revealed that he had recorded the song immediately after seeing the group live at the Beverley Theatre in California. "It was frightening," Prince said. "14 people singing 'Knee Deep' in unison. Clinton later returned the love with a cover

"Purple Rain" (1984)

In an interview with Mojo in 2013, Stevie Nicks revealed that Prince had originally given her a demo of "Purple Rain" and asked her to contribute. She turned him down, saying, "Prince, I've listened to this a hundred times, but I wouldn't know where to start. It's a movie, it's epic." The entire genre of power balladry met its match with "Purple Rain." The title track of Prince's signature album, it's performed at a climactic point in the film, which lends it even more gravitas. As if it needed it. Cradled in strings, echoes, and a gospel chorus, then topped with a sky-splitting guitar solo, it's a culmination of all the influences Prince had been absorbing throughout his rise to fame in the early Eighties, from rock to pop to soul.

"I Would Die 4 U" (1984)

On "I Would Die 4 U," Prince tossed aside gender roles, societal standards and mankind in general – "I am not a human, I am a dove," he proclaimed – in the name of love. It didn't hurt that he swaddled his mission statement in silk, courtesy of his Revolution backing band, because the quickest way to the heart is often through the hips. Neither Revolution keyboardist Dr. Fink nor Prince could play the bass line manually, so they rigged up an interface to lock a sequencer up to the drum machine. "We did some groundbreaking technological things that day," Fink remembered.

"Darling Nikki" (1984)

One of the Parents Music Resource Center's "Filthy 15," "Darling Nikki" is supposedly the song that inspired Tipper Gore to form the PMRC in the first place. Never released as a single, the Purple Rain track nonetheless found itself blasting out of the stereos of fans (including Gore's then-11-year-old daughter) when the album became a massive hit in 1984. "I knew a girl named Nikki/I guess you could say she was a sex fiend/I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine," sang Prince in the first verse, leaving nothing to the imagination. Later, the Foo Fighters recorded their own version and Prince wasn't too happy. "I don't like anyone covering my work," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2004. "Write your own tunes!

"Take Me With U" (1985)

Though only the fifth biggest single off Purple Rain, the elegant, crystalline duet with Apollonia Kotero – originally intended for Apollonia 6's self-titled album – transcends both the album and the decade that birthed it. From the arresting drum-solo intro (which doubles as an equally stunning bridge) to the breathless exchanges between the two singers ("You're sheer perfection"; "Thank you."), the song instantly earned a place in the pantheon of classic love jams. "I don't have an expiration date," Prince said in an interview with The Word in 2004. "Take Me With U" is proof.

"Raspberry Beret" (1985)

When it first debuted in Spring of 1985, with Purple Rain's earth-moving electro-funk guitar-epic success mere months earlier, "Raspberry Beret" sounded way too … simple. Prince as a part-time counter-boy seducing a customer with great chorus, one could dig; but after Bobby Z's crazy electronic drums opened the account, why retreat into plain acoustic guitar and simplistic keyboard strings? Compared to its now almost-as-legendary B-side, "She's Always in My Hair," "Raspberry Beret" felt like a drop-step. Now, it seems obvious that it was a chance to explore more psychedelic pop songwriting. That too became part of Prince's arsenal – the same one that would manifest itself in the Bangles' hit "Manic Monday" – not deep personal thoughts, but a day's diary set to music. After the seemingly limitless aspirations of Purple Rain, it was this simpler poetry that actually proved that maybe Prince's creativity had no limits.

"Sign O' the Times" (1987)

"Sign O' The Times" may be the oddest of Prince's lead singles. The man was at the height of his commercial and critical success, and his previous album Parade – a delirious tour into French jazz-pop that yielded the all-time funk classic "Kiss" and the cinematic debacle in Under the Cherry Moon – had taught his audience that Prince could be wonderfully unpredictable. Yet "Sign O' The Times" sounded like nothing he had done before. The starkly minimalist track found him playing blues guitar over a Fairlight synthesizer, and wailing over the world's troubles. "Man ain't happy truly until a man truly dies," he sings. Engineer Susan Rogers, who worked on the track along with keyboard programmer Todd Harriman, told Billboard, "He was coming down from the headlines of his huge success and he was aware that his audience was changing and things were changing for him. So it may have been a little bit darker in that respect." Peaking on the Billboard Hot 100 at Number Three and topping the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll for single of the year, "Sign O' The Times" was an affirmation that Prince's audience would follow him anywhere, no matter where he led them.

"U Got the Look" (1987)

In his sped-up, androgynous "Camille" voice, Prince introduces this hard-slamming funk number as the ultimate battle of the sexes: "Boy versus girl in the World Series of love." The girl was Sheena Easton, who recalls that he'd already finished the track before contacting her. "He said, 'Do you want to just come in and sing some backup vocals on the choruses?'" according to Easton. "So I went into the studio, and because I didn't know I was singing against him... I was all over the place – and he said he kind of liked that, so he expanded it into a duet." The boy, of course, was Prince himself, cooing with self-assured, flirtatious aplomb.

"I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" (1987)

At a certain point, Prince's formidable gifts as a polymath began being taken for granted. In addition to his skills as a singer, songwriter, performer, mogul and multi-instrumentalist, though, there's one role he's never gotten enough credit for: storyteller. "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" was released in 1987, when Prince had cemented his place as a funk icon. But he turned his ninth album Sign O' the Times into a smorgasbord of sounds and approaches – including this short story in power-pop form whose narrative is a poignant, sharply etched portrait of a would-be lover who doesn't want to be a rebound. "Everyone has their own experience," he told the NME in 1996. "That's why we are here, to go through our experience, to learn, to go down those paths and eventually you may have gone down so many paths and learned so much that you don't have to come back again.

"Diamonds and Pearls" (1992)

A sultry ballad of a title track off Prince's 1991 album, "Diamonds and Pearls" was a Number Three hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and, more importantly, one of the most prominent instances in which the Purple One's new backing band, the New Power Generation, stepped to the forefront. With NPG singer Rosie Gaines providing backing vocal support atop seductive synthesizer, Prince sings: "If I gave you diamonds and pearls/Would you be a happy boy or girl?" echoing the nearly-identical lyrics he'd sung a decade earlier on 1982's "International Lover." The album was largely panned as Prince's response to hip-hop, but Diamonds and Pearls' title track intricately wedded the singer's love of glitz and glamour with a distinct, ever-evolving pop-R&B sensibility.

"7" (1992)

In the midst of his rebranding as an unpronounceable symbol, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince expanded his sonic palette on "7," tapping into tablas and sitars, widescreen multi-tracked vocals and a sample of Lowell Fulson's "Tramp." Of course, given his out-there status at the time, Prince may have also been dabbling in numerology– seven represents the seeker and the searcher of truth, though it's also entirely possible the seven he rails against are folks at Warner Bros. Records. Was he fighting for freedom? Searching for respect? Looking for easy access to your boudoir?

"The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" (1994)

In 1993, Prince had changed his name to a symbol, was in a creative rut and was fighting with Warner Bros. over creative control. He realized he didn't need help from a major label when he released "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," on indie label Bellmark. Prince reportedly spent $2 million out of his own pocket to promote the single. It turned out to be his biggest hit in years. The gorgeous falsetto-steeped ballad has clean funk guitar touches and keyboards, but Prince lets his gift for melody do most of the work. It was originally written for his future wife, choreographer, Mayte Jannell Garcia. She later recorded her own version, "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.

"Alphabet Street" (1988)

The lead single from 1988's Lovesexy shows how Prince could create fully realized funk from bare-bones elements. Jagged funk guitars and Levi Seacer Jr.'s bouncing bass line combine with Prince's street-corner cool for a track that sounded absolutely bracing in the increasingly cacophonous context of late-Eighties pop radio. An extended breakdown featuring horns and an exhilarating rap by Prince protégé-choreographer Cat Glover turn up the heat and extend the party. The legacy of "Alphabet St." continued through samples – hippie-hop collective Arrested Development's much-lauded 1992 single "Tennessee" caused them to pay Prince $100,000 for their unauthorized repurposing while beloved weirdos Ween used Prince's song-opening "No!" to mask the naughty words in their breakthrough "Push The' Little Daisies."

"Thieves in the Temple" (1990)

Graffiti Bridge, the sequel to 1984's iconic Purple Rain was Prince's final film role. But unlike its heralded predecessor, the accompanying soundtrack would far outshine the film. "Thieves in the Temple," a brooding, spiritual meditation on lies, rejection and soul-searching that hit Number Six on the Billboard Hot 100, was a last-minute addition. With a Middle Eastern flavor, almost operatic vocals and an agitated feel, it was a decidedly new vibe for Prince. And one in which he didn't feel comfortable residing for long. "I feel good most of the time, and I like to express that by writing from joy," he told Rolling Stone in 1990. "I still do write from anger sometimes, like in 'Thieves in the Temple.' But I don't like to. It's not a place to live."

"Cream" (1991)

Legend has it, Prince wrote "Cream" while standing in front of a mirror, and, really, is there any doubt? Why else would he sing, "You're so good/Baby there ain't nobody better" on this impossibly slinky Diamonds and Pearls hit — his last Hot 100 Number One

"Black Sweat" (2006)

Released as the lead single from his 2006 album 3121, "Black Sweat" may be the best of Prince's late period singles. Reminiscent of "Kiss," it's nothing but drum machine rhythms, glorious falsetto and a noodle-y synthesizer melody that hearkens to the Ohio Players' "Funky Worm." "I don't want to dance too hard, but this is a groove," he sings. "I'm hot and I don't care who knows it... I've got a job to do." "Black Sweat" may have only simmered on the charts, peaking at Number 60 on the Hot 100, but it helped 3121 debut at the top of the album charts, and earned a handful of Grammy nominations. More importantly, it was a timely reminder that Prince will always have the funk.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/waiting-for-prince-to-be-prince-again

Culture Desk

April 24, 2014

Waiting for Prince to Be Prince Again

by Ben Greenman

Prince’s “The Breakdown,” a lean and sinuous ballad released this week, is the most promising thing he’s put out in a while, even without the accompanying fake viral video starring Robert De Niro. But the appearance of “The Breakdown” was overshadowed by the disappearance of The Breakup: the decades-long feud Prince has had with his former label, Warner Bros. Prince patched up the vexed relationship this week by announcing a deal that will involve both a new record and deluxe reissues of some old albums.

Prince rose to stardom on Warner Bros. His celebrity peak in the eighties was inseparable from the label, the same way that Aretha Franklin’s peak was inseparable from Atlantic. Warner Bros. is where Prince made “Purple Rain” and the albums that surrounded it: “Dirty Mind,” “Controversy,” and “1999” before, and “Around the World In a Day,” “Parade,” and “Sign O’ The Times” after. Warner was where he cooked up the “Black Album,” judged it to be devil’s music (though there were always suspicions that maybe people just didn’t hear a single), and replaced it with “Lovesexy.” Warner was where he signed up for the “Batman” soundtrack and delivered his last No. 1 single, “Batdance.”

But there were rumblings of trouble. Prince’s movies after “Purple Rain” didn’t perform well at the box office, in part because they were increasingly arty and disjointed affairs. (In “Under the Cherry Moon,” he killed off his character, the film’s protagonist; and the less that’s said about “Graffiti Bridge” the better.) Warner responded by withdrawing support for Prince’s music, not only his own albums but the records released through his imprint, Paisley Park. Prince remained a marquee talent, but in the early nineties, after reupping with Warner for big money, he finally decided that he couldn’t endure the label’s behavior any longer—the half-hearted promotion, the way that intellectual-property laws functioned or malfunctioned, depending on your perspective.

He protested by writing “Slave” on his face, famously changing his name to a squiggly glyph, and telling Rolling Stone that “If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.” The resulting break from Warner sent him on a long, winding odyssey as the world’s top indie artist. He put out “The Most Beautiful Girl In the World” on his own NPG label, and briefly partnered with EMI for the almost preposterously incontinent triple album “Emancipation.” Relentlessly prolific and devoted to remaining that way, he released albums at a blazing pace that didn’t always serve his broader purposes, sometimes on his own (“The Rainbow Children,” 2001), sometimes with corporate help (“Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic,” 1999, on Arista, which included the highly publicized personal support of Clive Davis, a move that got the album exactly nowhere). In 1999, Prince made his most direct and tortured statement by rerecording “1999” as “1999 (The New Master),” reproducing the song note-for-note in an attempt to do an end run around Warner’s ownership of the song.

During that period, Prince was the strangest thing imaginable: his own bootlegger (there were live sets that never would have seen the light of day under Warner), his own worst enemy (there were half-baked or unbaked experiments that would have been better served as highly prized bootlegs), and his own digital-music consultant (he pioneered various forms of distribution, from single-song purchases to subscription models, which seemed to collapse as quickly as they were established, often leaving fans in the lurch). Along the way, he occasionally, fitfully made new music of note: the single “Black Sweat” (2006), which appeared on the album “3121,” was the kind of lean, undeniable funk that had come with ease twenty years earlier. But the hits were in shorter and shorter supply. In 2009, he released three albums at once—“Lotusflo3r,” “MPLSound,” and a disc by one of his many female protégés, Bria Valentine—and sold them somewhat successfully through an exclusive partnership with Target. (He moved more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies in the first week, which landed him at No. 2 on the Billboard chart.) Yet somehow Prince seemed less relevant than ever.

Still, he was—he is—Prince, and counting him out always seemed like a mistake. In recent years, he’s started to make noise about making noise once again. He put together an all-female band, 3rd Eye Girl, that kicked up a garage-rock ruckus, releasing songs like “Screwdriver.” His appearance on the Fox sitcom “The New Girl” directly after the Super Bowl included a snippet of a song called “Fallinlove2nite,” which was then released with a vocal contribution by the “New Girl” star and indie-folk singer Zooey Deschanel. He announced an imminent album called “Plectrum Electrum,” though details on when it would appear and what it would include were a little fuzzy. And then, this week, he fired up the time machine and returned to Warner Bros. According to the deal, whose financial terms were not announced, Prince will release a new album with the label and also coöperate in a campaign to put out deluxe and expanded versions of his most famous albums, starting with a thirtieth-anniversary edition of “Purple Rain” this year.

“The Breakdown” isn’t formally a part of that Warner deal, but in some ways it is. The song has a sense of pace and space, which are two things that seemed to elude Prince as he rushed headlong into the uncharted waters of self-distributed music. More significant, of course, is what the new arrangement says about artists’ control of their back catalog. The deal turns in large part on the copyright recapture, or a provision that lets artists reacquire their copyrights thirty-five years after an album’s release. Prince’s first album for Warner, “For You,” was released in 1978, which means that its recapture window is open now, and other albums will quickly follow: his self-titled second release is up this year, with “Dirty Mind” to follow in 2015 and “Controversy” in 2016. It appears as though the Warner agreement will allow those albums to flow back to Prince with minimal interference, though only time will tell if the two sides can continue to work together. For now, it’s just a matter of waiting on new music, thinking about old music, and considering the oddity of a world where Prince is once again a Warner artist.

Ben Greenman is the author of ten books, including the novel “The Slippage” and the best-selling memoir “Mo’ Meta Blues” that he co-wrote with Ahmir-Khalib Thompson.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/18/arts/pop-view-prince-may-be-too-musical-for-the-music-business.html

POP VIEW

Prince May Be Too Musical For the Music Businessby Jon Pareles
September 18, 1994
New York Times

Prince Rogers Nelson doesn't care who thinks he's weird. He dresses like a millionaire bellhop; his hair looks as if it contains more chemical residues than the Cuyahoga River. When he's on stage or in a video clip, his every move seems stylized, as if already slowed down for instant replay.

And if his presence alone hasn't been peculiar enough, this year he managed to amuse and flabbergast large segments of the pop public by dropping the name that has carried his career since the 1970's -- Prince -- in favor of an unpronounceable symbol that merges male and female symbols with a horn.

He has announced that he will no longer perform music from his days as Prince. As he began his most recent New York concert, he mumbled what may have been the words "Prince is dead." What is he up to?

Cynics have suggested that the name change may be a ploy to let Prince finish his exclusive contract with Warner Brothers Records while putting out music, as the symbol, elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first thing Prince learned from the funk mastermind George Clinton, who during the 1970's recorded with the same band as both Parliament and Funkadelic, on two different labels. But trying to shed both the Prince name and his past may not be a mere business gambit. A rare interview in the August issue of Vibe magazine suggests there's more to the metamorphosis.

Prince, or the post-Prince symbol, has a problem: he's too musical for the music business. For years, he has tended to follow his arena concerts with a club date the same night, as if the big show had just got him warmed up for a jam session. He's just as productive in the recording studio as songwriter, producer and one-man band. One album a year -- even if it's a 75-minute CD with more than a dozen songs -- is only a fraction of his work.

Like Anthony Trollope or Joyce Carol Oates, Prince runs in creative overdrive; he told Alan Light of Vibe that he records enough for three or four albums a year. He also writes hits for other singers. Under the rules of the current recording business, he's so prolific that he threatens to flood his own market.

Dead or not, Prince (under that name) has a new album, "Come," on Warner Brothers; its cover shows dates, 1958-1993, like an obituary. The lyrics are designated for adults only, including aural sexual encounters complete with sound effects. But the album isn't simply a throwback to Prince's 1980 album, "Dirty Mind," which had one catchy taboo-breaker after another. On "Come," the music is often experimental and open-ended.

Perhaps Prince calculated that if the lyrics were distracting enough, he could toy with musical ideas, which may be his truest passion. With all his hours in the studio and on stage, it's hard to believe Prince has enough time for the sexual exploits he sings about.

Meanwhile, he has had his biggest hit of the 1990's with his first single as the post-Prince symbol, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." It was released on his own N.P.G. label and distributed by Bellmark, an independent company. A sampler album, "1-800-New-Funk," on N.P.G. uses the symbol as a selling point. A sticker on the album erroneously states that he wrote and arranged all the songs, though he did contribute songwriting, production and (for one song) backup vocals. It's a scattershot album and largely unmemorable. Maybe he's saving better material for himself.

He'll need it to change the commercial timetable. Jazz musicians often put out multiple albums in a year; they can record quickly, and the financial stakes aren't high. Country singers still make albums that contain a few singles plus filler, and many put out two albums a year. Hip-hop, too, is a singles market, with most albums as timely and disposable as magazines. In alternative rock, there's an exception to every formula.

But by and large, the music business prefers that major stars ration themselves. One album should last fans and radio stations at least a year, as each potential hit slowly percolates through radio and video saturation. The star should tour and then vanish.

Such limitations can be useful. They force stars to winnow their output and take every song and every concert seriously, since both they and their fans will have to live with it for a while. But music doesn't always thrive when it's treated as a polished artifact. It can also give great pleasure and illumination when it's made casually, for a moment or an occasion or no reason at all. Music doesn't have to be caviar; it can be pasta too.

"I want to just let it go," Prince sings on "Come." Before recording technology, composers would probably have laughed at the notion of writing only 75 minutes a year, and audiences craved premieres. In saying he's through with Prince's songs, the post-Prince symbol obviously prefers not to repeat himself; why waste time on old material in concert, when new tunes are fresher?

Similarly, why try to eke blockbuster sales out of every album? True, a million seller is more profitable than two half-million sellers, each of which has to be recorded, packaged and promoted. But for a longtime star, fulfilled creativity may mean more than total earnings.

Call it egomania or generosity, or both. And call him Prince or a symbol, but he's going to make himself heard.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his-world-and-himself.html?_r=0

A Re-Inventor of His World and Himself
by JON PARELES
November 17, 1996
New York Times

PAISLEY PARK, THE STUDIO COMPLEX Prince built in this Minneapolis suburb, is abuzz. On a 10,000-square-foot sound stage, workmen are rolling white paint onto a huge runway of a set, preparing it for a video shoot later in the day. In a mirrored studio down the hall, two dozen dancers are rehearsing. Upstairs, an Olympic gymnast, Dominique Dawes, is trying on a wispy lavender costume. A sound engineer is editing a promotional CD; a graphics artist is putting the final touches on a logo. Through it all strolls the man in charge, attentive to every detail. A hole in the gymnast's leotard? A bit of choreography that needs broadening? As songwriter, video director and record-company head, he takes responsibility for everything, makes all the final decisions and couldn't be happier about it.

The 38-year-old musician who now writes his name as a glyph is gearing up for the release on Tuesday of ''Emancipation,'' a three-CD, 36-song, three-hour album intended to return him to superstardom. Over a recording career that stretches nearly two decades, the musician who was born Prince Rogers Nelson earned a reputation for unorthodox behavior long before he dropped his name. Just in time for the music-video explosion, he invented himself as a larger-than-life figure: a doe-eyed all-purpose seducer for whom the erotic and the sacred were never far apart. Outlandish clothes, sculptured hair and see-through pants made Prince a vivid presence, but behind the costumes was one of the most influential songwriters of the 1980's.

He toyed with every duality he could think of: masculine and feminine, black and white, straight and gay. While he made albums virtually by himself, like an introvert, his concerts were in the grand extroverted tradition of rhythm-and-blues showmen like James Brown. His music pulled together rock and funk, gospel and jazz, pop ballads and 12-bar blues. His most distinctive rhythm -- a choppy, keyboard-driven funk -- has permeated pop, hip-hop and dance music, while his ballad style echoes in hits like TLC's ''Waterfalls.''

His only guide seemed to be a musicianship that drew admiration from many camps. Peter Sellars, the revisionist opera director, once compared Prince to Mozart for his abundant creativity. Yet for much of the 1990's, the quality of his output has sagged -- a result, he says, of his deteriorating relationship with his longtime record company, Warner Brothers.

''He's one of the greatest ones,'' says George Clinton, himself an architect of modern funk. ''He's a hell of a musician; he has really studied everything. And he's working all the time. Even when he's jamming he's recording that. He gets to party; he listens to everything on the radio; he goes out to clubs, and then he goes to the studio and stays up the rest of the night working. He has more stuff recorded than anybody gets to hear.

''Sometimes I think he puts too much effort into trying to take what's out now and put his own thing on it. To me, ain't none of the pop stuff happening that's half as good as what he can do.''

''Emancipation'' is a make-or-break album. It will inaugurate a new recording deal with a gambit that may turn out to be bold and innovative or utterly foolhardy; will the 3-CD set be received as an act of generosity or a glut of material? For a major performer in the 1990's, releasing a three-CD set of new material is unprecedented; even double albums are rare and commercially risky. And ''Emancipation'' is financed and marketed by the songwriter himself. ''All the stakes are higher,'' he says as he picks a few berries from a plate of zabaglione in the Paisley Park kitchen. ''But I'm in a situation where I can do anything I want.''

His day's project is to direct the video for the first single from ''Emancipation,'' a remake of the Stylistics' 1972 hit ''Betcha by Golly, Wow.'' At the same time, he's making last-minute marketing decisions and doing a rare interview. Ever the clotheshorse, he's wearing a long, nubby gray-and-black sweater and a shirt with lace tights. A chevron is shaved into his hair next to one ear, with glitter applied to it. Clear-eyed and serious, he speaks in a low voice, in a conversation that veers between hard-headed practicality, flashes of eccentricity and professions of faith in God. He is businesslike one moment; the next, he invokes his self-made spirituality, in which musical inspiration and carnality are both links to divine creativity.

For all the music he has put out since the first Prince album in 1978, he has remained private. The songs on ''Emancipation'' take up his usual topics -- sex, salvation, partying all night long -- along with new ones like cruising the Internet. But a few have hints of the personal. On Valentine's Day he married Mayte Garcia, who had been a backup singer and dancer in his band. A few months ago, he announced that she was pregnant and that the child was due in November. Since then he has refused further comment. ''I'm never going to release details about children,'' he says. ''They'll probably name themselves.''

On the album, he proposes marriage in ''The Holy River,'' a rolling midtempo song akin to Bruce Springsteen's quieter side. Later, a sparse, tender piano ballad begs, ''Let's Have a Baby.'' Asked about that song, he talks about the couple's wedding night. ''I carried her across the threshold and gave her many presents,'' he says. ''The last one was a crib. And we both cried. She got down on her knees in that gown, and I did next to her, and we thanked God that we could be alive for this moment.''

Marrying Mayte, he says, seemed inevitable. Her middle name is Jannelle; his father is John L. Her mother's name was Nell; he was born Prince Rogers Nelson: ''Nell's son,'' he says. ''Am I going to argue with all these coincidences?'' he asks, at least half seriously. Like a man in love, he adds: ''She really makes my soul feel complete. I feel powerful with her around. And she makes it easier to talk to God.''

''Emancipation'' includes shimmering ballads and fuzz-edged rockers, bump-and-grind bass grooves and a big-band two-beat, Latin-jazz jams, and dissonant electronic dance tracks. ''People will say it's sprawling and it's all over the place,'' he says. ''That's fine. I play a lot of styles. This is not arrogance; this is the truth. Because anything you do all day long, you're going to master after a while.''

On the new album, keys change and rhythms metamorphose at whim. One tour de force, ''Joint 2 Joint,'' moves through five different grooves and ends with all its riffs fitting together. The seeming spontaneity is more remarkable because nearly all the instruments are played by the songwriter himself. The toil of constructing songs track by track is worth it, he says, for the unanimity it brings. ''Because I do all the instruments, I'm injecting the joy I feel into all those 'players.' The same exuberant soul speaks through all the instruments.''

''I always wanted to make a three-record set,'' he adds. '' 'Sign o' the Times' was originally supposed to be a triple album, but it ended up as a double. For this one, I started with the blueprint of three CD's, one hour each, with peaks and valleys in the right places. I just filled in the blueprint.''

WHILE MOST songwriters are hard-pressed to come up with enough worthwhile material for an album a year, he has never had that problem. He can't stop writing music; his backlog includes at least a thousand unreleased songs and compositions, and new ones are constantly pouring out, all mapped in his head.

''You hear it done,'' he says. ''You see the dancing; you hear the singing. When you hear it, you either argue with that voice or you don't. That's when you seek God. Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don't forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It's like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain't right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.''

Commercially, ''Emancipation'' hedges its bets. There are straightforward groove songs and lush slow-dance tunes alongside the more idiosyncratic cuts, and there are remakes of other people's hits, including ''One of Us'' from Joan Osborne and ''La, La (Means I Love You)'' from the Delfonics. An associate producer, Kirk A. Johnson, punched up the rhythm tracks, giving some of them the crunch of hip-hop. The album is priced under $30, like a two-CD set.

''Emancipation,'' produced by the performer's own label, NPG Records, is his first album to be distributed by EMI. The album title is a pointed reference to the end of the reported six-album deal, potentially worth $100 million, that he made in 1992 with Warner Brothers. He had been making albums for the label since 1978 and sold millions of copies in the 1980's; the soundtrack for his 1984 movie, ''Purple Rain,'' sold more than 10 million copies. He continued to release No. 1 singles as late as 1991, with ''Cream.''

But once Warner Brothers had committed such a large investment, the label wanted to apply proven hit-making strategies: putting out just one album a year, packing it with potential singles, issuing various trendy remixes of songs and following the advice of in-house experts on promotion and marketing. Rationing and editing his work grated on Prince, and he began wrangling with Warner Brothers over control of his career.

''The music, for me, doesn't come on a schedule,'' he says. ''I don't know when it's going to come, and when it does, I want it out. Music was created to uplift the soul and to help people make the best of a bad situation. When you sit down to write something, there should be no guidelines. The main idea is not supposed to be, 'How many different ways can we sell it?' That's so far away from the true spirit of what music is. Music starts free, with just a spark of inspiration. When limits are set by another party that walks into the ball game afterward, that's fighting inspiration.

THE BIG DEAL WE HAD made together wasn't working,'' he says of Warner Brothers. ''They are what they are, and I am what I am, and eventually I realized that those two systems aren't going to work together. The deeper you get into that well, the darker it becomes.''

In 1993, he adopted an unpronounceable glyph as his name, ignoring warnings that he was jettisoning the equivalent of a well-known trademark. His associates now refer to him as the Artist, a merciful shortening of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. He knows the name change caused confusion and amusement, and he doesn't care. ''When the lights go down and the microphone goes on,'' he says, ''it doesn't matter what your name is.''

As an experiment, Warner Brothers gave him permission in 1994 to release a single, ''The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,'' through NPG Records on the independent Bellmark label. It was an international hit, further straining his relations with Warner Brothers. He began performing with the word ''slave'' written on his cheek.

''We never were angry; we were puzzled,'' says Bob Merlis, senior vice president of Warner Brothers Records. ''He evinced great unhappiness at being here. He wanted to release more albums than his contract called for; he wanted a different contract, which ran contrary to good business practices. Eventually, we agreed that his vision and ours didn't coincide on how to release his output.''

People familiar with the Warners contract say that it called for Warner Brothers to pay an advance for each album submitted and that speeding up the schedule and submitting more albums meant more payments in a shorter time. There were rumors of bankruptcy in Paisley Park, that the entertainment empire (which for a short time also included a Minneapolis nightclub, Glam Slam) was too expensive to maintain. Eventually, Warner Brothers agreed to end the contract. Warner Brothers still has rights to one album of previously unreleased material, and it owns the master recordings of the Prince back catalogue, a situation that rankles the performer. ''If you don't own your masters,'' he says, ''your master owns you.''

Under the new arrangement, he finances all his albums and videos and puts them out when he wishes. He pays EMI to manufacture the albums, and the company provides its distribution system and overseas marketing clout. He describes EMI as ''hired hands, like calling a florist to deliver some flowers to my wife.'' (Other NPG albums, including his ballet score, ''Kamasutra,'' and Mayte's debut album are for sale through a Web site: www.thedawn.com.)

Once he explains his business arrangements, he shows a visitor through Paisley Park, which is the size of a small shopping mall. In the recording studio, a half-dozen guitars are lined up, each with specific qualities: the leopard-patterned one is ''good for funk''; the glyph-shaped one is ''the most passionate.'' Paisley Park was once painted all white, inside and out, but after he got married he decided that the place needed some color. Now there are carpets with inset zodiac signs, a mural of a tropical waterfall behind the water fountain, walls of purple, gold and red and a smiley face in Mayte's office.

Past a birdcage holding two white doves named Divinity and Majesty is his office. A photograph of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker is by his desk. He shows the visitor an inch-thick worldwide marketing plan, with sales targets and promotion strategies, just like an executive. But as he plays the album, he gets caught up in the music.

''Sometimes I stand in awe of what I do myself,'' he says. ''I feel like a regular person, but I listen to this and wonder, where did it come from? I believe definitely in the higher power that gave me this talent. If you could go in the studio alone and come out with that, you'd do it every day, wouldn't you?''

''It's a curse,'' he concludes. ''And it's a blessing.''

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-prince-archive-19960714-story.html

From the Archives: Los Angeles Times

Prince: 'If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldn't be in the music industry'

by Elysa Gardner
Los Angeles Times

Editor's note: Prince, one of the bestselling pop artists of all time, died April 21, 2016, in his recording studio in Chanhassen, Minn..

In the past, the few reporters who have gained access to Prince Rogers Nelson had to submit to measures more befitting the secrecy of a covert military operation.
He insisted that interviewers not use tape recorders or take notes. Lots of topics were declared off limits, and the location of the encounter was always subject to a last-minute change.

Now, though, the elusive star has at least relaxed the rules enough to allow a little scribbling. And as he enters a plush hotel suite in midtown Manhattan--after a security guard has inspected the joint--his poker face slowly cracks into a gentle, disarming smile."Nice to meet you," says the singer, his doe eyes warming. He sits on a sofa, looking a bit stiff in his impeccably tailored black suit as he waits to begin what he says will be his only U.S. interview in connection with his new "Chaos and Disorder" album.

"So, um, how much time we got?" he asks.
Like a lot of eccentrics, this diminutive icon, 38, turns out to be a rather shy, self-conscious fellow. His remarks during the interview are often painfully terse, sometimes willfully vague and on occasion petulant. But in general, he's polite and earnest.

Prince, master of rock, soul, pop and funk, dies at 57

And while he's predictably less than forthcoming on most personal matters, part of the reason he's here today is to announce his impending divorce.

No, he's not leaving Mayte, the dancer he married earlier this year and who is expecting their first child in the fall. Those subjects fall into the off-limits category anyway. This split is from Warner Bros., his record company for 18 years.
"Chaos and Disorder" will be his final effort for Warner Bros., he vows, without going into legal details. And despite his much publicized differences with the label, he claims to bear no real grudges.

"I was bitter before, but now I've washed my face," he says. "I can just move on. I'm free."
::
Tensions between artist and label first came to a boil in early 1994, when he decided to drop the name Prince and asked that people start identifying him by an unpronounceable symbol--thus disassociating himself, in a most burdensome way, from the guy who recorded some of the most popular and acclaimed albums of the '80s.

To further express his frustration, he stopped performing Prince-era material in concert and began appearing in public with the word "slave" written on his cheek. In 1994, he also released "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," a successful single that was distributed not by Warner Bros. but by the independent company Bellmark Records.
Bob Merlis, senior vice president of publicity at Warner Bros., confirms that "Chaos and Disorder" is expected to be the artist's final album of newly recorded material for the label--although the company may continue to dip into Prince's back catalog.

"Fulfilling the terms of his contract included delivering this new album and whatever the vault records will be," Merlis says. "So I think it's safe to say that he's in a position now to make a new deal with another record company. We've come to a point where we feel that if he's happier somewhere else, we don't have any beef with him. At present, the artist hasn't determined what his next step will be--or at least doesn't wish to go on the record with it.For all his maddening guardedness, the star--who has no plans to promote "Chaos and Disorder" with a tour, limiting his appearances to recent spots on David Letterman and "The Today Show"--seems genuinely torn about what his future will be beyond this album.

In one breath, he'll say, "If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldn't be in the music industry." In the next, he'll talk about his craft with such passion that it's impossible to imagine him working in any other field.

What's clear is that his experiences in the music industry have made him more sensitive to the travails and tantrums of other artists. He followed George Michael's legal war to free himself from Sony Music and has also been keeping track of the plight of the hip-hop trio TLC, which last year declared bankruptcy in an effort to get out of the low royalty rate written into its contract.

"TLC is a very talented group," he says. "Talent can't be bottled up or contained. . . . We gotta wake up to that. Why should somebody else be making $100 million when they're making $75,000? It will continue, too--that's the sad truth."

Prince's history with Warner dates back to the late '70s, when he was signed to the label while still a teenager. After achieving his commercial breakthrough with 1982's "1999" album, the androgynous, charismatic performer quickly became a pop sensation--many even considered him the foremost artist of his generation.

A one-man musical movement whose fiercely innovative blend of funk, rock and soul crossed racial and cultural boundaries, Prince reached his commercial peak with "Purple Rain," the 13 million-selling soundtrack album for the semiautobiographical film in which he starred.

As the years passed, Prince produced and wrote hit singles for other artists, and his "Minneapolis sound" had an enduring impact on contemporary R&B. Meanwhile, the star himself continued to release his own albums--some breathtaking, others spotty--at a breakneck pace

Prince | 1958 - 2016

With his sales declining, Warner began questioning his game plan.

Prince argued that his record company, fearing that his pace would undercut his profitability, was trying to stifle him by not allowing him to release albums as frequently as he wanted to. He dismisses the label's concern as "having nothing to do with a man's soul or his need to express himself."

Matters grew worse when Warner decided in 1994 to drop its distribution deal with Paisley Park Records, the Minneapolis-based label that Prince had established more than a decade earlier. The label had been losing money since its inception, but Prince says it was a lack of corporate support that did the project in.

"I was under the assumption that [Paisley Park] was a joint effort with lawyers and businessmen," he explains, a little obliquely. "All we do as artists is make the music. I didn't think I'd have to be marketing the records, or taking them to the [radio] station. If Michael Jordan had to rely on someone to help him dunk, then there would be some trouble."

While the artist insists that his problems with Paisley Park and Warner in general haven't had a traumatic impact on his bank account ("I'm not in financial straits") and never will be," he says firmly), they clearly haven't had a positive effect on his career.

"Diamonds and Pearls," which has sold 2.3 million in this country since its release in 1991, was his last genuine smash among his new studio collections. Last year's "The Gold Experience" hasn't broken the 500,000 sales mark and this year's "Girl 6," the soundtrack collection which combined new and old Prince recordings, has sold less than 100,000 units, according to SoundScan.

So he could use a hit album right now, to remind folks that there's a reason we all began suffering his antics in the first place.

True to its title, "Chaos and Disorder" rocks hard, but it's also typically eclectic, with passages of wistful guitar-pop and lithe funk. The artist cites a rather unexpected point of reference in explaining his approach to the album.

"Someone told me that Van Halen did their first record in a week," he says. "That's what we were going for--spontaneity, seeing how fast and hard we could thrash it out. It was done very quickly, and we achieved what we wanted to achieve in that period of time."

In speaking about his songwriting, he actually expresses a greater feeling of being misunderstood than he does in his accounts of the music business. He's particularly disturbed by this wacky theory that he's obsessed with sex.

It seems that the man who evoked the ire of rock music watchdog groups with a graphic account of masturbation, and who later designed a cave for his stage show as a replica of female sex organs, is a little frustrated by the fact that some people focus chiefly on the carnal elements in his lyrics--which, to be fair, have also addressed the subtler aspects of relationships, as well as larger social issues.

"You know, there are people who view positivity, rather than sex, as the biggest factor in my writing," he points out. "But then, they're more sexual, I guess."
He adds that he's always "had good relationships with women--much better than I have with men." He continues to populate his band with female musicians, and he repeatedly brings up the name of R&B maverick Me'Shell Ndegeocello, with whom he seems to have formed a sort of mutual admiration society.

"Me'Shell and me are like this," he says, holding two fingers together. "She's really quiet and soft-spoken, but when she picks up an instrument. . . . Musicians, when they really communicate, don't have to talk. They just play."

He pauses, then adds, a touch mysteriously: "The people who are supposed to understand do understand. You learn that more and more as you grow older. After I'm free from Warner Bros., it'll either be very quiet or very exciting. But it won't be in the middle. It'll be extreme. Life, I mean. It'll all be extreme."

MORE ON PRINCE

Celebrities react to Prince's death: 'And just like that ... the world lost a lot of magic
What did Prince mean to you?
Review: Prince dazzles and baffles on two new releases
From the Archives: Just how princely is Prince's Warner Bros. deal?

Copyright © 2016, Los Angeles Times

IN TRIBUTE TO AND APPRECIATION FOR THE CREATIVE LIFE AND WORK OF PRINCE ROGERS NELSON (b. June 7, 1958--d. April 21, 2016)

All,

What follows is part one of a much longer essay that I am currently writing about the creative work and legacy of Prince, one of the undisputed giants of popular music over the past 50 years, and what his prolific singular contributions to American and global culture actually were and really means...Stay tuned...

Kofi

"I recognize an individual when I see his contribution, and when I know a man's sound, well to me, that's him, that's the man. That's the way I look at it. Labels I don't bother with"

--John Coltrane (1926-1967)

"Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery"

--Miles Davis (1926-1991)

THE QUINTESSENTIALLY BLACK ARTIST KNOWN AS PRINCE; Or How the Extraordinary African American Vernacular Cultural Tradition(s) in Art in General and in Creative Music in Particular Deeply Informed and Guided Every Single Thing that He Did and Accomplished

by Kofi Natambu
The Panopticon Review

I. ONLY IN AMERICA

A (not so) strange thing has happened in the endless American media accounts, analyses, homages, critiques, and celebrations of the life and artistic work of Prince Rogers Nelson (1958-2016) since his untimely and painfully tragic death on April 21, 2016 given what kind of society and culture we not only presently live in but have historically always lived in. For starters, far too many of these contemporary journalists, editors, op-ed specialists, self proclaimed pundits, gossip-mongers, academicians, hobbyists, groupies, and scholars have written their articles, tributes, and mini-treatises as though PRINCE one of the most seriously conscientious and triumphantly and self-consciously BLACKEST musicians composers singers songwriters and cultural avatars in American history was primarily a relatively isolated and singularly individual artist-savant whose creatively innovative extensions, variations, subversions, transgressions, and revisionist manipulations of pop, funk, rock, soul, Jazz, blues, and gospel musics were something that sprang already fully formed from the head of Zeus that was Prince’s special uncanny talent alone. Or we are being told that the music he composed and played and the songs that he wrote and sang were utterly unique to his own idiosyncratic genius quite apart from the many musical and aesthetic traditions that clearly shaped and informed it. From the pages of every major so-called “mainstream" national publication (and more than a few from the often equally clueless “alternative independent press” as well), from the New York Times to Slate, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and Time, to the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Variety, and the Atlantic Monthly (to name a few) it is asserted that Prince was simply someone like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and Bruce Springsteen (and please notice here that all of these famous and iconic popular music figures are white males) who took American popular music by storm and stubbornly and willfully imposed their own individual stamp on the various genres that make up these traditions and thus personally created a new paradigm of what was possible. But absolutely nothing could be further from the truth--even for an authentically bona fide individual musical genius like Prince. Because in doing so they deny Prince’s highly significant role in the indispensable creative continuum of African American music in all of its many idiomatic genres, styles, permutations, and philosophical/expressive dimensions.

In that light and within the larger historical and thus contemporary parameters of various black popular music forms in the United States where he learned both the craft and art of music making Prince was, like his many creative predecessors, mentors, and peers of the post WW2 period, heavily influenced and guided by both the traditional and innovative aspects and legacies of Jazz, blues, gospel, and rhythm and blues (which never forget is by far not only the major but most important source of all formal and expressive styles of what became popularly known via the media in the 1950s as “rock and roll”) and funk. More specifically the music that Prince studied and played throughout not only his early youth and adolescence but for the his entire adult career was largely created within a cultural milieu and social sensibility that was directly informed by the black vernacular cultural aesthetic. Which is to say in his mastery of various identifiably black singing styles (from deep baritone and smooth tenor sonorities to high falsetto inflections), to extremely fluid and dynamic vernacular dance rhythms and general corporeal movement on stage, to a wide and highly creative range of modes of dress steeped in black vernacular Prince embodied and represented what was most innovative, dynamic, unique, and transformational in African American art.

The reasons why this is so are blatantly obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention at all to the extraordinarily fertile, dynamic, and prolific traditions that have utterly dominated and creatively informed U.S. culture in general, and North American music in particular for well over a century now. That cultural aesthetic—and thus by extension its many varied musical traditions—is the African American Vernacular Cultural Tradition (AAVCT) which has clearly been the dominant structural, technical, and philosophical paradigm as well as creative/expressive model of every major American music genre since at least the 1890s when first Ragtime (a black vernacular piano aesthetic form that was a brilliantly hybrid synthesis of blues, black dance rhythms, classical music, and melodic/harmonic improvisation) and then later what was called ‘jazz’ (a larger musical ensemble and improvisational aesthetic that encompassed not only piano but brass, percussion, string, and reed instruments as well) became the most popular and commercially successful musical genres in the United States. Along with traditional gospel, various local black folk styles and the rapid commercial rise and popularity as well as the dynamic creative expansion of the blues from 1920 onward, the African American vernacular cultural lexicon became the lingua franca of what American popular and avant-garde musics are and have been since music became a major social/cultural force and economic commodity in the early 1900s. For example consider this: What have the following extraordinary shortlist of 110 revolutionary artists WHO ALL HAPPEN TO BE AFRICAN AMERICANS contributed to musical creativity and innovation in the areas of both instrumental and vocal musicianship on a global scale since the late 19th century and what do their contributions have to do more specifically with exactly who and what Prince was (and is) as an artist, as a cultural and artistic innovator, as a citizen of a discrete and very influential national community, and as a human being?:

Robert Johnson
Bessie Smith
Ma Rainey
Ethel Waters
Scott Joplin
Charlie Patton
James P. Johnson
Willie “the Lion” Smith
Don Redman
Jelly Roll Morton
Fats Waller
Charlie Patton
Elmore James
T- Bone Walker
Billie Holiday
Ella Fitzgerald
Duke Ellington
Count Basie
Sarah Vaughan
Mary Lou Williams
Muddy Waters
Howlin’ Wolf
Lightenin’ Hopkins
Lester Young
Coleman Hawkins
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Thelonious Monk
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Bud Powell
Charles Mingus
Max Roach
Kenny ‘Klook’ Clarke
Charlie Christian
Fats Navarro
Dexter Gordon
Sonny Stitt
Wardell Gray
Sonny Rollins
Kenny Dorham
Jackie Wilson
Ray Charles
Sam Cooke
Albert King
B.B. King
Jimi Hendrix
Sly Stone
Curtis Mayfield
George Clinton
Al Green
Blind Tom Wiggins
Blind Boy Blake
Blind Boy Fuller
Blind Willie McTell
Blind Willie Johnson
Blind Lemon Jefferson
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Son House
Buddy Guy
John Lee Hooker
Louis Jordan
Wynonie Harris
Big Joe Turner
Big Boy Crudup
Big Mama Thornton
Big Bill Broonzy
Willie Dixon
Mississippi John Hurt
Chuck Berry
Little Richard
Bo Diddley
Memphis Minnie
Otis Rush
Junior Wells
Little Walter
Hubert Sumlin
Bobby Blue Bland
Dinah Washington
Sonny Boy Williamson
Sister Rosetta Tharp
Mahalia Jackson
Charles Brown
Ruth Brown
Nat King Cole
Earl Hines
Erroll Garner
Betty Carter
Abbey Lincoln
Nina Simone
Nancy Wilson
Aretha Franklin
James Brown
Chaka Khan
Etta James
Stevie Wonder
Herbie Hancock
Wayne Shorter
Joe Henderson
Eric Dolphy
Otis Redding
Donny Hathaway
Marvin Gaye
Michael Jackson
Smokey Robinson
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Ahmad Jamal
Albert Ayler
Cecil Taylor
Anthony Braxton
Roscoe Mitchell
Henry Threadgill
Bill Dixon
Julius Hemphill
Sun Ra
Mary Wells
Maceo Parker
Issac Hayes
Sam and Dave

For the sake of intellectual clarity, honesty, and analytical accuracy in making these assertions about the clearly leading hegemonic role of African American art and artists in music creation and innovation generally I must emphatically emphasize that I am NOT asserting or even remotely suggesting that 'other artists and cultural traditions' from anywhere in the larger United States be they white, Latino, Asian, or Native American or anywhere else on this planet are somehow incapable of understanding, playing, and/or creating and innovating in the same general area of musical and vocal expressions, values, attitudes, and ideas that black artists have historically contributed to and continue to do so. Nor am I even remotely interested in any shallow or corny self serving arguments about anyone’s “identity” be it rooted in anyone’s specific ‘racial', ethnic, gender, or sexual preference definition, status, or individual/psychological “sense of self". So we can immediately dispense with the myopia, ignorance, stupidity, evasions, aporias, denial, and simpleminded HUBRIS that far too often mar, pervert, and distort our knowledge, perception, and insight into what ART actually is and how/why it is created and shared (or not). This stance is particularly germane and significant with respect to determining who and what Prince himself was (and is) as an artist and human being.

HOWEVER, at the same time I also want it to be equally clear that I am also NOT stupidly or reductively asserting or suggesting that music as either art, philosophy, social/political/aesthetic force or science is or can be simply “colorblind” or “universal.” The obvious empirical absurdity and infantilism of that position is as ultimately mindless and delusional as the idea that one’s personal or group identity (however that is defined) is what determines what the relative quality or importance of someone’s contribution is or means vis-a-vis others. Thus it is especially important to examine Prince and his creative work and legacy from the analytical standpoint of precisely who and what influenced him to be the individual artist that he was (and is).

(TO BE CONTINUED)...

PHOTO: (from top to bottom): James Brown, Prince, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Duke Ellington, Little Richard:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/princes-hot-rock-the-secret-life-of-americas-sexiest-one-man-band-19830428

All,

The following article was written by someone named 'Debby Miller' and appeared as the featured story in support of Prince’s triumphant appearance on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine (with his latest prodigy whom he personally renamed VANITY appearing with him). The publication date is April 28, 1983. Check this out. The article is more than a little cheesy as befits the time and utterly commercial context it appeared in but overall the piece is actually pretty good. What a fuckedup and truly morally confusing time the ‘80s were, just teeming with blatant corruption, rank hypocrisy, sneering cynicism, thoroughly reactionary politics (led by a ex-B- level phony baloney Hollyweird actor appropriately named Ronnie da RAYGUN) and a wildly schzoid and desperately public conflict between both the most licentious and simultaneously repressive forms of sexual identity/activity EVER. It was a period that spawned New Wave, Punk, HipHop, and a contemporary dance heavy genre of Rhythm and Blues known as "new jack swing"

Kofi

"Prince is from the school of James Brown but Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly [Stone] in him, also, even Little Richard," Davis wrote in his autobiography. "He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington. He reminds me, in a way, of Charlie Chaplin, he and Michael Jackson ... I think Prince's music is pointing toward the future...He can be the new Duke Ellington of our time if he just keeps at it,”

—Miles Davis, from his 1989 autobiography

PRINCE ROGERS NELSON
(1958-2016)

MILES DEWEY DAVIS III
(1926-1991)

Prince's Hot Rock: The Secret Life Of America's Sexiest One-Man Band

What does a twenty-two-year-old musical wizard in bikini briefs have that other rock stars don't? Whatever it is, it makes him the world's sexiest and most influential one-man band

**Prince on the cover of Rolling Stone. Richard Avedon**

by Debby Miller

April 28, 1983

Rolling Stone

Good Evening, this is your pilot, Prince, speaking" comes out of the loudspeakers, all softness and breath, full of welcome. It's a flight you may not have taken before. Brace yourself, he ought to say. This is "International Lover," something the globe-conquering Prince claims to be, and this is his live act, which takes place on a grand, two-tiered stage hung with gigantic Venetian blinds. In high-heeled boots, a flouncy ruffled blouse and a purple quasi-Edwardian suit, Prince begins to climb to the higher level, taking long strides that end in a hip-locking sway, a Rita Hayworth sort of walk. "You are flying aboard the Seduction 747," he rasps. "To activate the flow of excitement, extinguish all clothing materials." Standing alone on the upper riser, Prince simply points a finger, and – you imagine this happens every time Prince extends his long index finger – a brass bed materializes. Stripping off his jacket, his shirt, unbuckling his belt so that a long strap hangs between his legs, Prince climbs onto the mattress and begins to undulate over the bed. "We are now making our final approach to satisfaction. Please bring your lips, your arms, your hips into the up and locked position for landing," he says, panting, and lets out a piercing scream that seems to announce the sudden fall from the sky of the flight of Seduction 747 – and Prince and the bed disappear.

All cocky, teasing talk about sex, that's Prince. Forget Mr. Look So Good; meet the original Mr. Big Stuff. He's afraid of nothing onstage: ready to take on all the desires of a stadium full of his lusty fans, ready to marry funky black dance music and punky white rock music after their stormy separation through the Seventies, ready to sell his Sex Can Save Us message to anybody who'll give his falsetto a listen. Nor does anything scare him when he's at home alone, composing. Out comes a paean to incest called "Sister," a song called "Head" about a bride who meets Prince on her way to be wed and says, "I must confess, I wanna get undressed and go to bed," and a song called "Jack U Off." He even advised the president, "Ronnie Talk to Russia." So bold that half of his material is radio-censored, Prince is wailing, "Guess I should have closed my eyes when you drove me to the place where your horses run free/Cuz I felt a little ill when I saw all the pictures of the jockeys that were there before me" (in "Little Red Corvette"), while Lionel Richie is everywhere on the radio with "Truly, I love you truly."

100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Prince

His music, a technofunk and rock blend that many have started to call "the Minneapolis sound" because of the way the Minnesota native's influence is spreading, is the freshest thing around. So Kraftwerk made The Man Machine? This is the Man Sex Machine. He usually plays every instrument on his albums, even sings his own backup most of the time. His upper register can give you goose flesh when he's singing gospel-style, and he can turn around and hiccup his way through rockabilly like a perfect descendant of Elvis. There just don't seem to be any bounds to Prince's nerve or talent – each album is better than the last (he's made five), each stage show more outrageous.

A tour begun in November of last year had grossed almost $7 million before the end of March. Prince's new double album, 1999, has sold almost 750,000 copies, with its hottest single, "Little Red Corvette," closing in on the Top Twenty on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. And two groups he helped form made the black chart's Top Ten this winter: Vanity 6, a coquettish trio that performs in lingerie and whose "Nasty Girls" was a disco smash, and the Time, the tightest, funkiest live band in America.

Prince, just twenty-two, is the father of it all. But just try checking out the lineage. There isn't just a private side to Prince, there's an almost mysterious aspect. While the art of self-promotion has never been alien to rock & roll, it seems only to frustrate Prince. He was fairly outspoken until last fall, when, after his first interview to promote 1999, he walked out of the room and announced that he would never talk to the press again. "He's afraid he might say something wrong or say too much," says a former aide-de-camp.

When he did talk, he often contradicted himself. Rumors started to spread, and now his silence feeds them. Is Prince his real name? Is he black or white, straight or gay (questions he himself raised on his 1981 hit-cum-Lord's Prayer recitation, "Controversy")? Is he the Jamie Starr who produced albums by the Time and Vanity 6? Is he a shy little Prince or a despotic king?

"Prince controls the whole scene in Minneapolis," says a local musician who has worked with him. Others who've lived with him or worked alongside him say he loves to surround himself with an air of mystery, to create false identities to tangle the clues that lead to him. Cutting off all but a few close friends, Prince tends to hole up at his huge home, with its modern basement-studio, on a lake twenty miles west of Minneapolis. One member of his band says he's had just one personal conversation with Prince in all the years he's known him. "He's a real 'to himself' kind of person," says Morris Day, the Time's frontman and a longtime friend.

"He doesn't like to talk," says Vanity, the awesomely beautiful leader of Vanity 6, who accompanied Prince to the Grammys in February.

"Sir Highness," says another friend, "has a way of secluding himself."

Prince, the Pauper

Piece together Prince's story from his own partial accounts, and you come up with sort of a musical Wild Child, an untamed loner who raised himself and taught himself how to survive among the wolves. Patch together the history told by the people close to him, and you get a version like this:

The first notes of the Minneapolis sound were heard in a big brick house in North Minneapolis, an aging, primarily black section of town that draws outsiders only to the Terrace Theater, a movie house designed to look like a suburban backyard patio, and the Riverview Supper Club, the nightspot a black act turns to after it has polished its performance on the local chitlin circuit. North Minneapolis is a poor area by local standards, but a family with not too much money can still afford the rent on a whole house. It was there that Bernadette Anderson, who was already raising six kids of her own by herself, decided to take in a doe-eyed kid named Prince, a pal of her youngest son, André.

The thirteen-year-old Prince had landed on the Anderson doorstep after having been passed from his stepfather and mother's home to his dad's apartment to his aunt's house. "I was constantly running from family to family," Prince has said. "It was nice on one hand, because I always had a new family, but I didn't like being shuffled around. I was bitter for a while, but I adjusted."

His father, John Nelson, was a musician himself – a piano player in a jazz band by night, a worker at Honeywell, the electronics company, by day. Nelson is black and Italian; his ex-wife, says Prince of his mother, "is a mixture of a bunch of things." Onstage, the father was called Prince Rogers, and that is what he named his son, Prince Rogers Nelson.

John Nelson moved out of the family home when Prince was seven. But he left behind his piano, and it became the first instrument Prince learned to play.The songs he practiced were TV themes – Batman and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. "My first drum set was a box full of newspapers," he has said, explaining how he came to play a whole range of instruments. "At thirteen, I went to live with my aunt. She didn't have room for a piano, so my father bought me an electric guitar, and I learned how to play." But the aunt wasn't keen on the noise, and she threw him out. It was then that Prince turned up at André's.

Hardly into their teens, Prince and André (who uses the surname Cymone) had already formed their first group. Prince recalled, "I got my first band. I wanted to hear more instruments, so I started Champagne, a twelve-piece band. Only four of us played. Eight were faking. André and I played saxophone. I also played piano. I wrote all the music. The songs were all instrumentals. No one ever sang. When I got into high school, I started to write lyrics. I'd write the really, really vulgar stuff."

André, on the other hand, claims the first band had Prince playing lead guitar, André himself on bass guitar, his sister Linda on keyboards and the Time's Morris Day on drums. The group was called Grand Central, later renamed Champagne. The musicians all wore suede-cloth suits with their zodiac signs sewn on the back (Prince, born on June 7th, 1960, had Gemini, the twins, on his). For a time, they were managed by Morris' mother, which didn't make Prince very happy. "She wasn't fast enough for Prince," says Mrs. Anderson. "He wanted her to get them a contract right away."

100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time: Prince

The band practiced in André's basement, where Prince had established a bedroom of his own. "It sounded like a lot of noise," says Bernadette Anderson. "But after the first couple of years, I realized the seriousness of it. They were good kids. Girls were crazy about them."

André – whose father had played bass in the Prince Rogers Band – says that although the family was poor, Prince "dug the atmosphere. It was freedom for him." There wasn't enough money to buy records, but there was a family friend – a reclusive black millionaire, says one source – who gave the kids the money to go to a local studio to record a few songs. The studio they picked was called Moon Sound.

Moon Sound was an eight-track studio that charged about thirty-five dollars an hour back in 1976, when Prince and André and the rest of Champagne walked in the door. The owner, Chris Moon, was a lyricist looking for a collaborator. "Prince always used to show up at the studio with a chocolate shake in his hand, sipping out of a straw," Moon remembers. "He looked pretty tame. Then he'd pick up an instrument and that was it. It was all over."

Prince soon agreed to work with Moon, and the studio owner handed the seventeen-year-old a set of keys to the studio. "He'd stay the weekend, sleep on the studio floor," Moon says. "I wrote down directions on how to operate the equipment, so he'd just follow the little chart – you know, press this button to record and this button to play back. That's when he learned to operate studio equipment. Pretty soon, I could sit back and do the listening."

One person who heard Prince's early recordings was Owen Husney, who became his first manager. Husney put together an expensive package that included a demo tape of three twelve-minute songs on which Prince sang and played all the instruments, and he went off to L.A. to make a pitch to the record companies. Three labels – CBS, Warner Bros, and A&M – eventually made offers. Prince finally signed with Warner Bros., where, says an executive, they "were taken with the simplicity of his music and a future that looked wide open," and where he was offered a firm three-LP contract, unheard of for a new artist.

Lenny Waronker, then head of A&R and now president of the label, was impressed enough to allow Prince to act as producer of his debut album. "I met him when we first signed him," Waronker recalls. "[Producer] Russ Titelman and I took him into the studio one day, much to his chagrin. So we said, 'Play the drums,' and he played the drums and put a bass part on, a guitar part. And we just said, 'Yeah, fine, that's good enough.'"

Sales of the first Prince album, For You, released in 1978, weren't so hot, but the fact that the kid was a one-man band – and his own producer – got a lot of attention. Then, in 1979, the single "I Wanna Be Your Lover" from his eponymous second LP went to Number One on the soul charts. But the age of innocence was almost over. Prince was back in Minneapolis putting together a new band, a straggly mix of blacks and whites, all recruited locally. His old friend André Cymone was among them, playing bass.

"There was a lot of pressure from my ex-buddies in other bands not to have white members in the band," Prince has said. "But I always wanted a band that was black and white. Half the musicians I knew only listened to one type of music. That wasn't good enough for me."

The band, with its double keyboards, learned to reproduce the music Prince had been creating alone in the studio. The synthesizers, often playing horn lines, are a hallmark of the Minneapolis sound. The guitar signature is edgy rock, but the beat reins in any long guitar solos. "Around here, if it's not synthesizers, it's nothing," says a local Minneapolis musician. "This is a keyboard town. It's simplicity. If you listen to a lot of Prince or the Time, it's simple. It's direct and straight to the point. And it feels so good."

With a band to spread the word on the road, Prince was ready, in 1980, to unleash Dirty Mind, his bawdy third album. 1999 wasn't very far away.

Black Lace Bikini Underwear

Prince does not dress like your average rock star. Not for him the futuristic, stretchy costumes of the Commodores, or the raggedy jeans of the Bruce Springsteen types. He wears bright eye makeup, and his hair seems a cross between Little Richard and neorockabilly styles. He dresses in his own rococo street-kid fashion. Last year, when Prince won an award from a Minneapolis weekly newspaper for Minnesota Musician of the year, he showed up in his most formal clothes – black trench coat and white go-go boots (his acceptance speech: "When do they give the award for the best ass?").

And he's been known to perform in nothing but boots and a pair of bikini underpants. It's quite an act – that lean, almost nude body singing no-holds-barred lyrics. "How come you don't call me?" he wails in gospel falsetto in one song. "Don't you wanna play with my tootsie roll?" And he entreats his audiences into the singalong to "Head" – "I'll give you head, love you till you're dead."

It's sexy, sure – girls screech whenever he tosses black lace bikini underwear into the audience – but it's also very funny. Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye and Richard "Dimples" Fields are all out of the same school of seduction, but Prince seems to have been off studying with Mae West, learning high camp and low-rent vamping. He's developed a great sense of humor, even if he takes his sex-is-liberation politics very seriously. And from the giddy "Gotta Stop Messin' About" to "Let's Work," nobody has so well expressed the exhilarating freedom of adolescent sexual energy since Michael Jackson yelped "I Want You Back."

100 Greatest Singers of All Time: Prince

"Prince has brought a boldness out of black entertainers again," says Alexander (O'Neill – there's a penchant for first names only in this crowd), a Minneapolis singer who fronted an early version of the Time. "Jimi Hendrix and Little Richard – they always dressed bizarre. Now Prince is doing it in a new era. He's making a lot of entertainers wake up to things. You're making a statement in life. It's all about being your own self. Like Prince says, 'It's all about being free.'"

Why so much sex? someone asked him once. "My songs are more about love than they are about sex," he answered. "I don't consider myself a great poet, or interpreter à la Moses. I just know I'm here to say what's on my mind, and I'm in a position where I can do that. It would be foolish for me to make up stories about going to Paris, knocking off the queen and things of that nature."

Prince was just seventeen when he co-wrote, with studio owner Chris Moon, the single from his first LP, a song called "Soft and Wet." Already, they had considered the commercial potential of an innocent sexuality. "That was the original concept," says Moon, "and it's stayed true to that. I had a conversation with him on the phone about a year ago, and I said, 'I see you're still staying with the "Soft and Wet" theme. But you're making it a little more blatant. What is this I hear about "Head"?' And he goes, 'Yeah, well, I decided to make it a little more straightforward so that everyone would get it.'"

Everyone does seem to be getting it these days, including Prince's dad. "When I first played the Dirty Mind album for him," Prince has said of his father, "he said, 'You're swearing on the record. Why do you have to do that?' And I said, 'Because I swear.'"

Prince, apparently, is not a character played out in the music. "His persona is Prince, onstage and offstage," says his friend and personal manager, Steve Fargnoli. "He's just as outspoken and outrageous offstage, in his business dealings." But he is shy, Fargnoli adds, and he says what he has to say about his politics and music on his records, not in conversation. And soon, he'll be saying it all in a movie: Prince has written the film treatment and most of the score for a musical that he'll also act in. "He is demanding of himself and of everyone who works around him," says Fargnoli. "You always have to be on your toes. He doesn't play by the rules."

The rules he plays by, instead, are his rules. He comes on strong. Is he – with his androgynous look, his royal name and his sex-mad lyrics – scarier to white audiences than Mr. T? Album-oriented radio is certainly skittish about playing Prince, saying that funk doesn't cut it with their heavy-metal-loving listeners. On the other hand, his videos are popular with MTV viewers. Prince's audience actually seems to be as integrated as that of the old soul stars (Prince's management company estimates his concert audiences to be forty percent white). People who like, say, James Brown have found Prince, and they like the way he uses elements of rock & roll while keeping an R&B backbone in the music.
And although armchair sociologists might suggest that a really outrageous performer has a better chance of succeeding in conservative times like these and may cite Little Richard's reign in the Fifties as an example, neither Little Richard nor Prince would have made a dent in the music market without talent. Prince, whose refusal to speak to the press has made him less visible than other musicians, probably is popular in spite of, not because of, his image. After all, he has a following of people caught up in the visceral charge of his music, not an audience of voyeurs.

He can count among his fans John Cougar, who was so impressed on hearing Prince's "Little Red Corvette" that he started touting Prince to his own concert audiences. Before 20,000 fans in Tulsa, he ran backstage to get his cassette deck, then played a tape of Prince's hit single into his microphone. For the LP Cougar is producing for Mitch Ryder, the first 45 is likely to be Ryder's recording of Prince's "When You Were Mine." And Cougar has – unsuccessfully, so far – been trying to get a message to Prince: would he sing on Cougar's new album?

What Time Is It?

Joni Mitchell songs blare out of the PA between the sets of Prince's road show, at his request. Vanity 6, three women in lacy camisoles, open the concert. "I love lingerie," explains Vanity, the leader of the group. "I used to sneak into my mother's closet and try to wear her lingerie to school." She picked her nickname because "a girl's best friend is her pride," she says. Like her cohorts, Brenda and Susan, Vanity gave a demo tape of her songs to Prince a year ago. "He said there were a couple other girls whose minds seemed to run alongside mine," she says. Prince then arranged to bring Vanity, a twenty-two-year-old former model from Toronto, to Minneapolis to meet the other two, flying Brenda in from Boston. Soon, the three were writing songs like "Drive Me Wild" and "Nasty Girls," in which Vanity coos, "I can't control it/I need seven inches or more."

It all seems a figment of Prince's imagination, a living fantasy. "Prince and I happen to think alike," says Vanity.
On their record, Vanity 6 is backed by the Time; onstage, they're followed by the Time (who, in turn, are followed by Prince). At one point in the Time's set, frontman Morris Day, a terrific dancer, calls out his valet. The valet – who often follows Morris' own dance steps like a shadow – brings out a table, sets it with a white cloth and a vase of flowers, and uncorks a bottle of champagne. Morris, meanwhile, in his trademark two-tone Stacy Adams shoes, waltzes with a girl chosen from the audience. This sort of classy deportment was the starting point for the Time, as organized by Morris. "The image was cool. That's the key word," he says. "That's what we built the Time around. Cool is an attitude, a self-respect thing."

Morris didn't exactly put the group together – all but guitarist Jesse Johnson had been playing around Minneapolis in a band called Flyte Tyme (known familiarly as the Tyme even then). But it is Morris who has led the band to the point where it now often steals the show from the scantily clad Vanity 6 and even from Prince. Morris, the former drummer, has stayed closer to traditional R&B but, by injecting his good humor, has developed one of the best live acts in the country.

Happy Birthday, Prince!

Prince, says Morris, helped the band get its Warner Bros. contract in 1981. Asked why the Time shares the same teenage-sex themes as Prince, Morris says, "Sex is present in everybody's life. I don't think anybody owns the rights to that." Asked if Prince influenced their sound, Morris says what Vanity says: "We believe in the same things." Asked about Jamie Starr, an icy tension descends.

Although Morris Day and one Jamie Starr are credited as producers on the Time's first record, there is reason to believe that the record was, in fact, produced by Prince. One source very close to the situation says that not only is all the material written by Prince (mysteriously, there are no writing credits on the LP), but that the instruments are played by Prince and the voice is Prince's doubled with Morris Day's. This insider claims that the record – a more commercial, more straightforward R&B album – is a project Prince offered Warner Bros. because his own bolder stuff wasn't selling impressively. So, goes this theory, Prince set the Time in motion – and created a pseudonym, Jamie Starr, for his new project.

Prince did tell a reporter in an early interview with the Minnesota Daily, when he was just seventeen, that someday he would make jazz recordings under an alias. (In that same interview, Prince claimed not to be averse to choreography, but he drew the line at spins – "I get nauseated.") So the idea of working with a fictitious name had occurred to him at the beginning of his career.

And although Morris says that he and the band wrote the songs on their first LP, The Time, a call to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), with whom the songs are registered, casts some doubt. The composer of the hits "Get It Up" and "Cool" is Prince Rogers Nelson (with Dez Dickerson on "Cool"), says an ASCAP spokesman. Prince's manager says that the fact that Prince's name is registered for the Time's record is "a filing mistake."

"Let me clear up a few rumors while I have the chance," Prince told the Los Angeles Times. "One, my real name is Prince. Two, I'm not gay. And three, I'm not Jamie Starr."
"Jamie Starr is an engineer, the coproducer of our record. Of course he's real," says Morris Day, whose band now outplays whoever it was on the first Time record.

But if there is a Jamie Starr, why can't he be reached? Manager Steve Fargnoli says it's because he's "in and out of Minneapolis," because he's "a reclusive maniac" (like Prince) and because "it could be months before I see him." Can he be reached by phone? "No."

Well, you wouldn't need to call him over to Prince's home studio if he's already there. "Prince is Jamie Starr," says former Warner Bros. artist and fellow Minneapolitan Sue Ann (Carwell), who has been a friend of Prince's for years – ever since he wrote and produced her first demo tape. Others who are close to Prince also say that he is Jamie Starr, but they refuse to be quoted in print. But, says one, "everybody knows who's the main man behind everything."

Testing

"We could be this Generation's Yardbirds," Prince's guitarist Dez Dickerson boasted to a reporter about the way everybody was splintering off Prince's musical family tree and making solo records.

Dickerson himself wrote "He's So Dull" for Vanity 6 and has done some solo recording. André Cymone, since leaving Prince's band a year and a half ago, has signed a CBS contract and released an LP, Livin' in the New Wave, on which he plays all the instruments and produces himself. Alexander has released a twelve-inch dance record, "Do You Dare." Sue Ann, who had a hit in "Rock Me" a few years ago, has finished a new album, Inside Out. And the Time's bassist, Terry Lewis, and keyboardist, Jimmy Jam, recently wrote and produced a couple of songs for the all-girl group Klymaxx.

"Minneapolis is a mini-Motown", says Alexander, summing it up. "We'll have a hell of a lot to do with the musical direction of the Eighties."

But Minneapolis offers a kind of calm within the music industry, and they all stay on there, honing their acts. And while they're working, they're left alone. There's no chasing limousines there. There aren't any limousines carrying celebrities to the nightspots.

So nobody made a big deal of it when Prince walked into First Avenue, a club in downtown Minneapolis last summer, a rock club where images of Grand Master Flash, the Human League, the Clash and others flash in montage on the walls. What's new? somebody asked Prince. Sheepishly, he held up a test pressing of 1999 that he had tucked under his arm. Later on, he asked the DJ to throw his new song, "Delirious," on the turntable. And then, with his hottest record filling up the enormous room, Prince took Vanity out onto the middle of the dance floor to give his own record the ultimate test. They wiggled around, they strutted, they dipped. And Prince looked happy. It had a good beat. It was easy to dance to.

This story is from the April 28th, 1983 issue of Rolling Stone.

THE MUSIC OF PRINCE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. NELSON:

Prince - Full Concert - 01/30/82 - Capitol Theatre (OFFICIAL):

Recorded Live: 1/30/1982 - Capitol Theatre (Passaic, NJ)

Setlist:

0:00:00 - The Second Coming
0:02:00 - Uptown
0:04:50 - Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?
0:12:24 - I Wanna Be Your Lover
0:29:14 - Dirty Mind
0:35:42 - Do Me, Baby
0:45:45 - Controversy
0:53:01 - Let's Work
1:00:55 - Encore Applause
1:02:55 - Jack U Off
1:07:42 - Applause

More Prince at Music Vault: http://www.musicvault.com

Prince MTV Unplugged - The Art of Musicology--2004:

Prince Greatest Hits Songs || --Best Songs of Prince [HQ/HD]:

PLAYLIST:

00:00 01.Purple Rain
07:23 02.When Doves Cry
13:34 03.Little Red Corvette
18:51 04.Kiss
22:48 05.1999
26:36 06.Cream
31:01 07.The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
35:39 08.Im Yours
40:54 09.I Wanna Be Your Lover
44:00 10.When You Were Mine
47:58 11.Sometimes It Snows In April
55:07 12.Breakfast Can Wait
59:23 13.Funknroll
1:03:32 14.Diamonds And Pearls
1:08:04 15.Way Back Home
1:11:18 16.Raspberry Beret
1:15:00 17.Do Me, Baby
1:19:07 18.This Could Be Us
1:24:34 19.Illion $ Show
1:27:54 20.Thieves In The Temple
1:31:24 21.LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT U
1:35:01 22.Givin Em What They Love
1:39:39 23.Partyman
1:42:59 24.ROCKNROLL LOVEAFFAIR
1:47:12 25.You Got The Look
1:51:10 26.Get Off

Prince— "Erotic city":

Prince In The 1980's - Full Movie:
Documentary

PRINCE ROGERS NELSON, 1958-2016-- VIDEO FROM: Prince - 36th NAACP Image Awards (2005) :

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others -- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps”:

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others perform "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the 2004 Hall of Fame Inductions. http://rockhall.com/

Prince “Cream”:

Prince - "Baby, I'm a star”-- [LIVE]—1984:

Exclusive Video Prince's Welcome 2 America Tour:

Prince -- "Housequake":

Housequake from 'Sign O the Times'--1987 (The movie) by Prince.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)

Prince (musician)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prince
Prince performing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2008
Born	Prince Rogers Nelson June 7, 1958 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died	April 21, 2016 (aged 57) Chanhassen, Minnesota, U.S.
Nationality	American
Other names	as performer: Camille (Love Symbol) The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (TAFKAP) The Artist^[1] as songwriter: Jamie Starr Joey Coco Tora Tora Alexander Nevermind Christopher Tracy
Occupation	Singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist record producer
Years active	1976–2016
Spouse(s)	Mayte Garcia (m. 1996; div. 1999) Manuela Testolini (m. 2001; div. 2006)
Musical career
Genres	Funk pop R&B rock
Labels	Warner Bros. Paisley Park NPG EMI Columbia Arista Universal
Associated acts	The Revolution Wendy & Lisa The New Power Generation The Time Morris Day Sheila E. Sheena Easton Vanity 6 Apollonia 6 Mazarati The Family 94 East Madhouse Anna Fantastic Andy Allo 3rdeyegirl Janelle Monáe Judith Hill
Notable instruments
Hohner MadCat Telecaster Model C Cloud Symbol ("Habibi") G1 Purple Special

Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958–April 21, 2016) was an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. He was a musical innovator and known for his eclectic work, flamboyant stage presence, extravagant dress and makeup, and wide vocal range. His music integrates a wide variety of styles, including funk, rock, R&B, new wave, soul, psychedelia, and pop. He has sold over 100 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time.^[2] He won seven Grammy Awards,^[3] a Golden Globe Award,^[4] and an Academy Award for the film Purple Rain.^[5] He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, his first year of eligibility.^[6] Rolling Stone ranked Prince at number 27 on its list of 100 Greatest Artists—"the most influential artists of the rock & roll era".^[7]
Prince was born in Minneapolis and developed an interest in music as a young child.^[8] He signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. at the age of 18, and released his debut album For You in 1978. His 1979 album Prince went platinum, and his next three records—Dirty Mind (1980), Controversy (1981), and 1999 (1982)—continued his success, showcasing Prince's prominently sexual lyrics and blending of funk, dance, and rock music.^[9] In 1984, he began referring to his backup band as the Revolution and released Purple Rain, which served as the soundtrack to his eponymous 1984 film debut and was met with widespread acclaim. After releasing the albums Around the World in a Day (1985) and Parade (1986), The Revolution disbanded, and Prince released the double album Sign o' the Times (1987) as a solo artist. He released three more solo albums before debuting the New Power Generation band in 1991.
In 1993, while in a contractual dispute with Warner Bros., he changed his stage name to

, an unpronounceable symbol also known as the "Love Symbol", and began releasing new albums at a faster pace to remove himself from contractual obligations. He released five records between 1994 and 1996 before signing with Arista Records in 1998. In 2000, he began referring to himself as "Prince" again. He released 16 albums after that, including the platinum-selling Musicology (2004). His final album, Hit n Run Phase Two, was first released on the Tidal streaming service on December 12, 2015. Prince died from a fentanyl overdose at his Paisley Park recording studio and home in Chanhassen, Minnesota, on April 21, 2016, at the age of 57.

Early life

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, the son of Mattie Della (née Shaw; 1933–2002) and John Lewis Nelson (1916–2001). His parents were both African-American and his family ancestry is centered in Louisiana; all four of his grandparents came from that state.^[10] Prince's father was a pianist and songwriter, and his mother was a jazz singer. Prince was named after his father, whose stage name was Prince Rogers, and who performed with a jazz group called the Prince Rogers Trio. In a 1991 interview with A Current Affair, Prince's father said, "I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do".^[11] Prince's childhood nickname was Skipper.^[12]^[13] Prince has said he was "born epileptic" and "used to have seizures" when he was young. He also said: "My mother told me one day I walked in to her and said, 'Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore,' and she said, 'Why?' and I said, 'Because an angel told me so'."^[14]
Prince's sister Tika Evene (usually called Tyka) was born in 1960.^[15] Both siblings developed a keen interest in music, and this was encouraged by their father.^[16] Prince wrote his first tune, "Funk Machine", on his father's piano when he was seven.^[16] When Prince was 10, his parents separated. Prince subsequently repeatedly switched homes, sometimes living with his father and sometimes with his mother and stepfather.^[16] He then moved into the home of neighbors named Anderson and befriended their son Andre Anderson, who later became known as André Cymone.^[17]
Prince attended Minneapolis' Bryant Junior High and then Central High School, where he played football, basketball, and baseball. He played on Central's junior varsity basketball team, and continued to play basketball recreationally as an adult.^[18]^[19] Prince met Jimmy Jam in 1973 in junior high, and impressed him during music class with his musical talent, his early mastery of a wide range of instruments, and his work ethic.^[20]

Career

1975–84: Beginnings and breakthrough

In 1975, Pepe Willie, the husband of Prince's cousin, Shauntel, formed the band 94 East with Marcy Ingvoldstad and Kristie Lazenberry, hiring André Cymone and Prince to record tracks.^{[citation needed]} Willie wrote the songs, and Prince contributed guitar tracks, and Prince and Willie co-wrote the 94 East song, "Just Another Sucker".^{[citation needed]} The band recorded tracks which later became the album Minneapolis Genius – The Historic 1977 Recordings.^{[citation needed]}
In 1976, Prince created a demo tape with producer Chris Moon, in Moon's Minneapolis studio.^{[citation needed]} Unable to secure a recording contract, Moon brought the tape to Owen Husney, a Minneapolis businessman, who signed Prince, age 17, to a management contract, and helped him create a demo at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis (with producer/engineer David Z).^{[citation needed]} The demo recording, along with a press kit produced at Husney's ad agency, resulted in interest from several record companies including Warner Bros. Records, A&M Records, and Columbia Records.^[21]
With the help of Husney, Prince signed a recording contract with Warner Bros. The record company agreed to give Prince creative control for three albums and ownership of the publishing rights.^[22]^[23] Husney and Prince then left Minneapolis and moved to Sausalito, California, where Prince's first album, For You, was recorded at Record Plant Studios. The album was mixed in Los Angeles and released on April 7, 1978.^[24] According to the For You album notes, Prince wrote, produced, arranged, composed, and played all 27 instruments on the recording, except for the song "Soft and Wet", whose lyrics were co-written by Moon. The cost of recording the album was twice Prince's initial advance. Prince used the Prince's Music Co. to publish his songs. "Soft and Wet" reached No. 12 on the Hot Soul Singles chart and No. 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song "Just as Long as We're Together" reached No. 91 on the Hot Soul Singles chart.

Ticket to Prince's first performance with his band in January 1979

In 1979, Prince created a band with André Cymone on bass, Dez Dickerson on guitar, Gayle Chapman and Doctor Fink on keyboards, and Bobby Z. on drums. Their first show was at the Capri Theater on January 5, 1979. Warner Bros. executives attended the show but decided that Prince and the band needed more time to develop his music.^[25]^{[page needed]} In October 1979, Prince released the album, Prince, which was No. 4 on the Billboard Top R&B/Black Albums charts and No. 22 on the Billboard 200, and went platinum. It contained two R&B hits: "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover". "I Wanna Be Your Lover" sold over a million copies, and reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 for two weeks on the Hot Soul Singles chart. Prince performed both these songs on January 26, 1980, on American Bandstand. On this album, Prince used Ecnirp Music – BMI.^[26]
In 1980, Prince released the album Dirty Mind, which contained sexually explicit material, including the title song, "Head", and the song "Sister", and was described by Stephen Thomas Erlewine as a "stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock."^[27] Recorded in Prince's own studio, this album was certified gold, and the single "Uptown" reached No. 5 on the Billboard Dance chart and No. 5 on the Hot Soul Singles charts. Prince was also the opening act for Rick James' 1980 Fire It Up tour.
In February 1981, Prince made his first appearance on Saturday Night Live, performing "Partyup". In October 1981, Prince released the album, Controversy. He played several dates in support of it, at first as one of the opening acts for the Rolling Stones, on their US tour. He began 1982 with a small tour of college towns where he was the headlining act. The songs on Controversy were published by Controversy Music^[28] – ASCAP, a practice he continued until the Emancipation album in 1996. By 2002, MTV News noted that "[n]ow all of his titles, liner notes and Web postings are written in his own shorthand spelling, as seen on 1999's Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, which featured 'Hot Wit U.'"^[29]
In 1981, Prince formed a side project band called the Time. The band released four albums between 1981 and 1990, with Prince writing and performing most of the instrumentation and backing vocals (sometimes credited under the pseudonyms "Jamie Starr" or "The Starr Company"), with lead vocals by Morris Day.^[30]^[31] In late 1982, Prince released a double album, 1999, which sold over three million copies.^[32] The title track was a protest against nuclear proliferation and became Prince's first top 10 hit in countries outside the US. Prince's "Little Red Corvette" was one of the first two videos by black artists (along with Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean") played in heavy rotation on MTV, which had been perceived as against "black music" until CBS President Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull all CBS videos.^[33]^[34] The song "Delirious" also placed in the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. "International Lover" earned Prince his first Grammy Award nomination at the 26th Annual Grammy Awards.^[35]

1984–87: The Revolution, Purple Rain, and subsequent releases

During this period Prince referred to his band as the Revolution.^[36]^[37] The band's name was also printed, in reverse, on the cover of 1999 inside the letter "I" of the word "Prince".^[38] The band consisted of Lisa Coleman and Doctor Fink on keyboards, Bobby Z. on drums, Brown Mark on bass, and Dez Dickerson on guitar. Jill Jones, a backing singer, was also part of the lineup for the 1999 album and tour.^[38] Following the 1999 Tour, Dickerson left the group for religious reasons.^[39] In the book Possessed: The Rise and Fall of Prince (2003), author Alex Hahn says that Dickerson was reluctant to sign a three-year contract and wanted to pursue other musical ventures. Dickerson was replaced by Coleman's friend Wendy Melvoin.^[36] At first the band was used sparsely in the studio, but this gradually changed during the mid-1980s.^[38]^[39]^[40]

"When Doves Cry" (1984)

0:00

A lead single from Purple Rain, "When Doves Cry" became a signature song of Prince's. It features an intro to a guitar solo and a Linn LM-1 drum machine, followed by a looped guttural vocal.

Problems playing this file? See media help.

According to his former manager Bob Cavallo, in the early 1980s Prince required his management to obtain a deal for him to star in a major motion picture, despite the fact that his exposure at that point was limited to several pop music hits and music videos. This resulted in the hit film Purple Rain (1984), which starred Prince and was loosely autobiographical, and the eponymous studio album, which was also the soundtrack to the film.^[37] The Purple Rain album sold more than 13 million copies in the US and spent 24 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The film won Prince an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score^[41] and grossed over $68 million in the US.^[42]^[43] Songs from the film were hits on pop charts around the world; "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy" reached No. 1, and the title track reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.^[44] At one point in 1984, Prince simultaneously had the No. 1 album, single, and film in the US;^[45] it was the first time a singer had achieved this feat.^[46] The Purple Rain album is ranked 72nd in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time;^[47] it is also included on the list of Time magazine's All-Time 100 Albums.^[48] The album also produced two of Prince's first three Grammy Awards earned at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards—Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.^[35]

Prince performing in Brussels during the Hit N Run Tour in 1986

After Tipper Gore heard her 11-year-old daughter Karenna listening to Prince's song "Darling Nikki" (which gained wide notoriety for its sexual lyrics and a reference to masturbation), she founded the Parents Music Resource Center.^[49] The center advocates the mandatory use of a warning label ("Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics") on the covers of records that have been judged to contain language or lyrical content unsuitable for minors. The recording industry later voluntarily complied with this request.^[50]

2000–07: Turnaround, Musicology, label change, and 3121

On May 16, 2000, Prince stopped using the Love Symbol moniker and returned to using "Prince", after his publishing contract with Warner/Chappell expired. In a press conference, he stated that, after being freed from undesirable relationships associated with the name "Prince", he would revert to using his real name. Prince continued to use the symbol as a logo and on album artwork and to play a Love Symbol-shaped guitar. For several years following the release of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, Prince primarily released new music through his Internet subscription service, NPGOnlineLtd.com (later NPGMusicClub.com).^[96]
In 2002, Prince released his first live album, One Nite Alone... Live!, which features performances from the One Nite Alone...Tour. The 3-CD box set also includes a disc of "aftershow" music entitled It Ain't Over!. During this time, Prince sought to engage more effectively with his fan base via the NPG Music Club, pre-concert sound checks, and at yearly "celebrations" at Paisley Park, his music studios. Fans were invited into the studio for tours, interviews, discussions and music-listening sessions. Some of these fan discussions were filmed for an unreleased documentary, directed by Kevin Smith.
On February 8, 2004, Prince appeared at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards with Beyoncé.^[97]^[98] In a performance that opened the show, they performed a medley of "Purple Rain", "Let's Go Crazy", "Baby I'm a Star", and Beyoncé's "Crazy in Love".^[99] The following month, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.^[100] The award was presented to him by Alicia Keys along with Big Boi and André 3000 of OutKast.^[101] As well as performing a trio of his own hits during the ceremony, Prince also participated in a tribute to fellow inductee George Harrison in a rendering of Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", playing a two-minute guitar solo that ended the song.^[102]^[103]^[104] He also performed the song "Red House" as "Purple House" on the album Power of Soul: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix.^[105]
In April 2004, Prince released Musicology through a one-album agreement with Columbia Records. The album rose as high as the top five on some international charts (including the US, UK, Germany, and Australia). The US chart success was assisted by the CDs being included as part of the concert ticket purchase, thereby qualifying each CD (as chart rules then stood) to count toward US chart placement.^[106] Three months later, Spin named him the greatest frontman of all time.^[107] That same year, Rolling Stone magazine named Prince as the highest-earning musician in the world, with an annual income of $56.5 million,^[108] largely due to his Musicology Tour, which Pollstar named as the top concert draw among musicians in US. He played 96 concerts; the average ticket price for a show was US$61. Musicology went on to receive two Grammy wins, for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Call My Name" and Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for the title track. Musicology was also nominated for Best R&B Song and Best R&B Album, and "Cinnamon Girl" was nominated for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Rolling Stone magazine has ranked Prince No. 27 on their list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.^[7]
In April 2005, Prince played guitar (along with En Vogue singing backing vocals) on Stevie Wonder's single "So What the Fuss", Wonder's first since 1999.^[109]
In late 2005, Prince signed with Universal Records to release his album, 3121, on March 21, 2006. The first single was "Te Amo Corazón", the video for which was directed by actress Salma Hayek and filmed in Marrakech, Morocco, featuring Argentine actress and singer Mía Maestro. The video for the second single, "Black Sweat", was nominated at the MTV VMAs for Best Cinematography. The immediate success of 3121 gave Prince his first No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 with the album. To promote the new album, Prince was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on February 4, 2006, 17 years after his last SNL appearance on the 15th anniversary special, and nearly 25 years since his first appearance on a regular episode in 1981.^[110]
At the 2006 Webby Awards on June 12, Prince received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his "visionary use of the Internet to distribute music and connect with audiences", exemplified by his decision to release his album Crystal Ball (1997) exclusively online.^[111]^[112]
In July 2006, weeks after winning a Webby Award, Prince shut down his NPG Music Club website, after more than five years of operation.^[113]^[114] On the day of the music club's shutdown, a lawsuit was filed against Prince by the British company HM Publishing (owners of the Nature Publishing Group, also NPG). Despite these events' occurring on the same day, Prince's attorney stated that the site did not close due to the trademark dispute.^[113]
Prince appeared at multiple award ceremonies in 2006: on February 15, he performed at the 2006 Brit Awards, along with Wendy & Lisa and Sheila E.,^[115] and on June 27, Prince appeared at the 2006 BET Awards, where he was awarded Best Male R&B Artist. Prince performed a medley of Chaka Khan songs for Khan's BET Lifetime Achievement Award.^[116]
In November 2006, Prince was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame;^[98] he appeared to collect his award but did not perform. Also in November 2006, Prince opened a nightclub called 3121, in Las Vegas at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino. He performed weekly on Friday and Saturday nights until April 2007, when his contract with the Rio ended.^{[citation needed]} On August 22, 2006, Prince released Ultimate Prince. The double disc set contains one CD of previous hits, and another of extended versions and mixes of material that had largely only previously been available on vinyl record B-sides. That same year, Prince wrote and performed a song for the hit animated film Happy Feet (2006). The song, "The Song of the Heart", appears on the film's soundtrack, which also features a cover of Prince's earlier hit "Kiss", sung by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. In January 2007, "The Song of the Heart" won a Golden Globe for Best Original Song.^[117]

2007–10: Super Bowl XLI, Planet Earth, and Lotusflower

Prince's stage set for the Earth Tour in 2007

On February 2, 2007, Prince played at the Super Bowl XLI press conference. Prince performed at the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show in Miami, Florida on February 4, 2007, on a large stage shaped like his symbol. The event was carried to 140 million television viewers, his biggest ever audience.^[118] In 2015, Billboard.com ranked the performance as the greatest Super Bowl performance ever.^[119]
Prince played 21 concerts in London during mid-2007. The Earth Tour included 21 nights at the 20,000 capacity O2 Arena, with Maceo Parker in his band. Tickets for the O2 Arena were capped by Prince at £31.21 ($48.66). The residency at the O2 Arena was increased to 15 nights after all 140,000 tickets for the original seven sold out in 20 minutes.^[120] It was then further extended to 21 nights.^[121]
Prince performed with Sheila E. at the 2007 ALMA Awards. On June 28, 2007, the Mail on Sunday stated that it had made a deal to give Prince's new album, Planet Earth, away for free with the paper, making it the first place in the world to get the album. This move sparked controversy among music distributors and also led the UK arm of Prince's distributor, Sony BMG, to withdraw from distributing the album in UK stores.^[122] The UK's largest high street music retailer, HMV, stocked the paper on release day due to the giveaway. On July 7, 2007, Prince returned to Minneapolis to perform three shows. He performed concerts at the Macy's Auditorium (to promote his new perfume "3121") on Nicollet Mall, the Target Center arena, and First Avenue.^[123] It was the first time he had played at First Avenue (the club appeared in the film Purple Rain) since 1987.^[124]
From 2008, Prince was managed by UK-based Kiran Sharma.^[125] On April 25, 2008, Prince performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he debuted a new song, "Turn Me Loose". Days after, he headlined the 2008 Coachella Festival. Prince was paid more than $5 million for his performance at Coachella, according to Reuters.^[126] Prince cancelled a concert, planned at Dublin's Croke Park on June 16, 2008, at 10 days' notice. In October 2009 promoters MCD Productions went to court to sue him for €1.6 million to refund 55,126 tickets. Prince settled the case out of court in February 2010 for $2.95 million.^[127]^[128] During the trial, it was said that Prince had been offered $22 million for seven concerts as part of a proposed 2008 European tour.^[129] In October 2008, Prince released a live album entitled Indigo Nights, a collection of songs performed live at aftershows in the IndigO2.

Prince at the Coachella Festival in 2008

On December 18, 2008, Prince premiered four songs from his new album on LA's Indie rock radio station Indie 103.1.^[130] The radio station's programmers Max Tolkoff and Mark Sovel had been invited to Prince's home to hear the new rock-oriented music. Prince gave them a CD with four songs to premiere on their radio station. The music debuted the next day on Jonesy's Jukebox, hosted by former Sex Pistol Steve Jones.^[131]
On January 3, 2009, the new website LotusFlow3r.com was launched, streaming and selling some of the recently aired material and concert tickets. On January 31, Prince released two more songs on LotusFlow3r.com: "Disco Jellyfish", and "Another Boy". "Chocolate Box", "Colonized Mind", and "All This Love" were later released on the website. Prince released a triple album set containing Lotusflower, MPLSoUND, and an album credited to Bria Valente, called Elixer, on March 24, 2009, followed by a physical release on March 29.
On July 18, 2009, Prince performed two shows at the Montreux Jazz Festival, backed by The New Power Generation including Rhonda Smith, Renato Neto and John Blackwell. On October 11, 2009, he gave two surprise concerts at the Grand Palais.^[132] On October 12, he gave another surprise performance at La Cigale. On October 24, Prince played a concert at Paisley Park.^[133]

2010–12: 20Ten and Welcome 2 Tours

In January 2010, Prince wrote a new song, "Purple and Gold", inspired by his visit to a Minnesota Vikings football game against the Dallas Cowboys.^[134] The following month, Prince let Minneapolis-area public radio station 89.3 The Current premiere his new song "Cause and Effect" as a gesture in support of independent radio.^[135]
In 2010, Prince was listed in Time magazine's annual ranking of the "100 Most Influential People in the World".^[136]
Prince released a new single on Minneapolis radio station 89.3 The Current called "Hot Summer" on June 7, his 52nd birthday. Also in June, Prince appeared on the cover of the July 2010 issue of Ebony,^[137] and he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 BET Awards.^[138]
Prince released his album 20Ten in July 2010 as a free covermount with publications in the UK, Belgium, Germany, and France.^[139] He refused album access to digital download services and closed LotusFlow3r.com.
On July 4, 2010, Prince began his 20Ten Tour, a concert tour in two legs with shows in Europe. The second leg began on October 15^[140] and ended with a concert following the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on November 14.^[141] The second half of the tour had a new band, John Blackwell, Ida Kristine Nielsen, and Sheila E.^[142] Prince let Europe 1 debut the snippet of his new song "Rich Friends" from the new album 20Ten Deluxe on October 8, 2010.^[143] Prince started the Welcome 2 Tour on December 15, 2010.^[144]
Prince was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame on December 7, 2010.^[145]
On February 12, 2011, Prince presented Barbra Streisand with an award and donated $1.5 million to charities.^[146] On the same day, it was reported that he had not authorized the television show Glee to cover his hit "Kiss", in an episode that had already been filmed.^[147]
Prince headlined the Hop Farm Festival on July 3, 2011, marking his first UK show since 2007 and his first ever UK festival appearance.^[148]
Despite having previously rejected the Internet for music distribution, on November 24, 2011, Prince released a reworked version of the previously unreleased song "Extraloveable" through both iTunes and Spotify.^[149] Purple Music, a Switzerland-based record label, released a CD single "Dance 4 Me" on December 12, 2011, as part of a club remixes package including Bria Valente CD single "2 Nite" released on February 23, 2012. The CD features club remixes by Jamie Lewis and David Alexander, produced by Prince.^[150]

2013–16: 3rdeyegirl and return to Warner Bros.

In January 2013, Prince released a lyric video for a new song called "Screwdriver".^[151] In April 2013, Prince announced a West Coast tour titled Live Out Loud Tour with 3rdeyegirl as his backing band.^[152] The final two dates of the first leg of the tour were in Minneapolis where former Revolution drummer Bobby Z. sat in as guest drummer on both shows.^[153] In May, Prince announced a deal with Kobalt Music to market and distribute his music.^[154]
On August 14, 2013, Prince released a new solo single for download through the 3rdeyegirl.com website.^[155] The single "Breakfast Can Wait" had cover art featuring comedian Dave Chappelle's impersonation of the singer in a sketch on the 2000s Comedy Central series Chappelle's Show.^[156]
In February 2014, Prince performed concerts with 3rdeyegirl in London titled the Hit and Run Tour. Beginning with intimate shows, the first was held at the London home of singer Lianne La Havas, followed by two performances of what Prince described as a "sound check" at the Electric Ballroom in Camden,^[157] and another at Shepherds Bush Empire.^[158] On April 18, 2014, Prince released a new single entitled "The Breakdown". He re-signed with his former label, Warner Bros. Records after an 18-year split. Warner announced that Prince would release a remastered deluxe edition of his 1984 album Purple Rain in 2014 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the album. In return, Warner gave Prince ownership of the master recordings of his Warner recordings.^[159]^[160]
In May 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent riots, Prince released a song entitled "Baltimore" in tribute to Gray and in support of the protesters in Baltimore.^[161]^[162]^[163]^[164] He also held a tribute concert for Gray at his Paisley Park estate called "Dance Rally 4 Peace" in which he encouraged fans to wear the color gray in honor of Freddie Gray.^[165]
Prince's penultimate album, Hit n Run Phase One, was first made available on September 7, 2015, on the music streaming service Tidal before being released on CD and download on September 14.^[166] His last album, Hit n Run Phase Two, was meant as a continuation of this one, and was released on Tidal for streaming and download on December 12, 2015.^[167]
The first projects to be announced following Prince's death were a greatest hits album, Prince 4Ever, to be released in November 2016 and an expanded and remastered reissue of Purple Rain for 2017.^[168]

Artistry

Music and image

A costume worn by Prince and associated memorabilia, displayed at a Hard Rock Cafe in Australia

The Los Angeles Times called Prince "our first post-everything pop star, defying easy categories of race, genre and commercial appeal."^[169] Jon Pareles of The New York Times described him as "a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop", and highlighted his ability to defy labels.^[170] Los Angeles Times writer Randall Roberts called Prince "among the most versatile and restlessly experimental pop artists of our time," writing that his "early work connected disco and synthetic funk [while his] fruitful mid-period merged rock, soul, R&B and synth-pop."^[171] Simon Reynolds called him a "pop polymath, flitting between funkadelia, acid rock, deep soul, schmaltz—often within the same song".^[172] AllMusic wrote that, "With each album he released, Prince showed remarkable stylistic growth and musical diversity, constantly experimenting with different sounds, textures, and genres [...] no other contemporary artist blended so many diverse styles into a cohesive whole."^[173]
As a performer, he was known for his flamboyant style and showmanship.^[170] He came to be regarded as a sex symbol for his androgynous, amorphous sexuality,^[174] play with signifiers of gender,^[175]^[176] and defiance of racial stereotypes.^[177] His "audacious, idiosyncratic" fashion sense made use of "ubiquitous purple, alluring makeup and frilled garments."^[169] His androgynous look has been compared to that of Little Richard^[174]^[178]^[179] and David Bowie.^[180]
Prince was known for the strong female presence in his bands and his support for women in the music industry throughout his career.^[181] Slate said he worked with an "astounding range of female stars" and "promised a world where men and women looked and acted like each other."^[182]

Influences and musicianship

Prince's music synthesized a wide variety of influences,^[170] and drew inspiration from a range of musicians, including James Brown,^[183]^[184]^[185]^[180] George Clinton,^[183]^[184]^[180] Joni Mitchell,^[183] Duke Ellington,^[186] Jimi Hendrix,^[183]^[180] The Beatles,^[183]^[180] Chuck Berry,^[183] David Bowie,^[183] Earth, Wind & Fire,^[183] Mick Jagger,^[183] Rick James,^[183] Jerry Lee Lewis,^[183] Little Richard,^[183] Curtis Mayfield,^[183]^[187] Elvis Presley,^[183] Todd Rundgren,^[188] Carlos Santana,^[183] Sly Stone,^[183]^[189]^[184]^[180]^[190] Jackie Wilson,^[183] and Stevie Wonder.^[190]^[191]^[192] Prince has been compared with jazz great Miles Davis in regard to the artistic changes throughout his career;^[183]^[193] Davis himself regarded Prince as an uncanny blend of Brown, Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Stone, Little Richard, Ellington, and Charlie Chaplin.^[194]^[186]^[195]
Journalist Nik Cohn described him as "rock's greatest ever natural talent".^[196] His singing abilities encompassed a wide range from falsetto to baritone and rapid, seemingly effortless shifts of register.^[9] Prince was also renowned as a multi-instrumentalist.^[180]^[197] He was considered a guitar virtuoso and a master of drums, percussion, bass, keyboards, and synthesizer.^[198] On his first five albums, he played nearly all the instruments,^[199] including 27 instruments on his debut album,^[200] among them various types of bass, keyboards and synthesizers.^[201] Prince was also quick to embrace technology in his music,^[202] making pioneering use of drum machines like the Linn LM-1 on his early '80s albums and employing a wide range of studio effects.^[203] The LA Times also noted his "harnessing [of] new-generation synthesizer sounds in service of the groove," laying the foundations for post-'70s funk music.^[171] Prince was also known for his prolific and perfectionist tendencies, which resulted in him recording large amounts of unreleased material.^[204]

Legal issues

Pseudonyms

In 1993, during negotiations regarding the release of The Gold Experience, a legal battle ensued between Warner Bros. and Prince over the artistic and financial control of his musical output. During the lawsuit, Prince appeared in public with the word "slave" written on his cheek.^[205] He explained that he had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol to emancipate himself from his contract with Warner Bros., and that he had done it out of frustration because he felt his own name now belonged to the company.^[206]^[207]
Prince sometimes used pseudonyms to separate himself from the music he had written, produced, or recorded, and at one point stated that his ownership and achievement were strengthened by the act of giving away ideas.^[90] Pseudonyms he adopted, at various times, include: Jamie Starr and The Starr Company (for the songs he wrote for The Time and many other artists from 1981 to 1984),^[208]^[209] Joey Coco (for many unreleased Prince songs in the late 1980s, as well as songs written for Sheena Easton and Kenny Rogers),^[210] Alexander Nevermind (for writing the song "Sugar Walls" (1984) by Sheena Easton),^[211] and Christopher (used for his song writing credit of "Manic Monday" (1986) for the Bangles).^[212]

Copyright issues

On September 14, 2007, Prince announced that he was going to sue YouTube and eBay, because they hosted his copyrighted material, and he hired the international Internet policing company Web Sheriff.^[213]^[214] In October, Stephanie Lenz filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Publishing Group claiming that they were abusing copyright law after the music publisher had YouTube take down Lenz's home movie in which the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy" played faintly in the background.^[215]^[216] On November 5, several Prince fan sites formed "Prince Fans United" to fight back against legal requests which, they claim, Prince made to prevent all use of photographs, images, lyrics, album covers, and anything linked to his likeness.^[217] Prince's lawyers claimed that this constituted copyright infringement; the Prince Fans United said that the legal actions were "attempts to stifle all critical commentary about Prince". Prince's promoter AEG stated that the only offending items on the three fansites were live shots from Prince's 21 nights in London at the O2 Arena earlier in the year.^[218]
On November 8, Prince Fans United received a song named "PFUnk", providing a kind of "unofficial answer" to their movement. The song originally debuted on the PFU main site,^[219] was retitled "F.U.N.K.", and is available on iTunes. On November 14, the satirical website b3ta.com pulled their "image challenge of the week" devoted to Prince after legal threats from the star under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).^[220]
At the 2008 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival ("Coachella Festival"), Prince performed a cover of Radiohead's "Creep", but immediately afterward he forced YouTube and other sites to remove footage that fans had taken of the performance, despite Radiohead's request to leave it on the website.^[221] Days later, YouTube reinstated the videos, as Radiohead said: "it's our song, let people hear it." In 2009, Prince put the video of the Coachella performance on his official website (LotusFlow3r.com).
In 2010 he declared "the internet is completely over", elaborating five years later that "the internet was over for anyone who wants to get paid, tell me a musician who's got rich off digital sales".^[9]
In 2013, the Electronic Frontier Foundation granted to Prince the inaugural "Raspberry Beret Lifetime Aggrievement Award"^[222] for what they said was abuse of the DMCA takedown process.^[223]
In January 2014, Prince filed a lawsuit titled Prince v. Chodera against 22 online users for direct copyright infringement, unauthorized fixation, contributory copyright infringement, and bootlegging.^[224] Several of the users were fans who had shared links to bootlegged versions of Prince concerts through social media websites like Facebook.^[225]^[226] In the same month, he dismissed the entire action without prejudice.^[227]
Prince was one of a handful of musicians to consistently deny "Weird Al" Yankovic permission to parody his music.^[228]

Personal life

Prince's home and recording studio, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota

Over the years Prince was romantically linked with many celebrities, including Kim Basinger, Madonna, Vanity, Sheila E., Carmen Electra, Susanna Hoffs, Anna Fantastic,^[11] Sherilyn Fenn,^[229] and Susan Moonsie of Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6.^[230] Prince was engaged to Susannah Melvoin in 1985.^[231] When he was 37, he married his 22-year-old backup singer and dancer Mayte Garcia, on Valentine's Day 1996. They had a son named Ahmir Gregory on October 16, 1996; he was born with Pfeiffer syndrome and died a week later.^[232]^[233] Prince and Mayte divorced in 1999. In 2001, Prince married Manuela Testolini in a private ceremony; she filed for divorce in May 2006.^[234]
Prince was an animal rights activist who followed a vegan diet for part of his life, but later described himself as vegetarian.^[235]^[236]^[237]^[238]^[239] The liner notes for his album Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999) featured a message about the cruelty involved in wool production.^[240]
Prince joined the Jehovah's Witnesses in 2001, following a two-year debate with friend and fellow Jehovah's Witness musician Larry Graham. Prince said that he did not consider it a conversion, but a "realization". "It's like Morpheus and Neo in The Matrix", he explained. Prince attended meetings at a local Kingdom Hall and occasionally knocked on people's doors to discuss his faith.^[241]^[242] Prince had needed double hip-replacement surgery since 2005. A false rumor was spread by the tabloids^[243] that he would not undergo the operation because of his refusal to have blood transfusions. However, the Star Tribune reported^[244] that Larry Graham, Prince's mentor and Bible teacher, "denied claims that Prince couldn't have hip surgery because his faith prohibited blood transfusions," putting the false rumor to rest, as hip surgery does not require blood transfusions.^[245]^[246]^[247] According to Morris Day, Prince in fact had the hip surgery in 2008.^[248] The condition was reportedly caused by repeated onstage dancing in high-heeled boots.^[249] Prince had been using canes as part of his outfit from the early 1990s onwards; towards the end of his life he regularly walked with a cane in public engagements, which led to speculation that it resulted from his not having undergone the surgery.^[250]
As a Jehovah's Witness, Prince did not speak publicly about his charitable endeavors; the extent of his activism, philanthropy, and charity was publicized posthumously.^[251] In 2001, Prince donated $12,000 anonymously to the Louisville Free Public Library system to keep the historic Western Branch Library, the first full service library for African Americans in the country, from closure.^[252] Also in 2001, he anonymously paid off the medical bills of drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who was undergoing cancer treatment.^[253] In 2015, he conceived and launched YesWeCode, paying for many hackathons outright and performing at some of them.^[251]^[254] He also helped fund Green for All.^[251]
In late March 2016, Prince told an audience he was writing a memoir, tentatively titled The Beautiful Ones.^[255]

Illness and death

Following his death, fans left flowers, purple balloons, and mementos beneath Prince's star painted on the front of the First Avenue nightclub

Prince saw Dr. Michael T. Schulenberg, a Twin Cities specialist in family medicine in Excelsior, on April 7, 2016, and again on April 20.^[256] On April 7, Prince postponed two performances at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta from his Piano & A Microphone Tour; the venue released a statement saying he had influenza.^[257] Prince rescheduled and performed the show on April 14, even though he still was not feeling well.^[258]^[259] While flying back to Minneapolis early the next morning, he became unresponsive, and his private jet made an emergency landing at Quad City International Airport in Moline, Illinois, where he was hospitalized and received Narcan, but he left against medical advice.^[260]^[261] Representatives said he suffered from dehydration and had had influenza for several weeks.^[258] Prince was seen bicycling the next day in his hometown of Chanhassen.^[262] He shopped that evening at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis for Record Store Day and made a brief appearance at an impromptu dance party at his Paisley Park recording studio complex, stating that he was feeling fine.^[259]^[263] On April 19, he attended a performance by singer Lizz Wright at the Dakota Jazz Club.^[264]
On April 20, Prince's representatives called Dr. Howard Kornfeld, a California specialist in addiction medicine and pain management, seeking medical help for Prince. Kornfeld scheduled to meet with Prince on April 22, and he contacted a local physician who cleared his schedule for a physical examination on April 21.^[260]^[265] On April 21, at 9:43 a.m., the Carver County Sheriff's Office received a 9-1-1 call requesting that an ambulance be sent to Prince's home at Paisley Park. The caller initially told the dispatcher that an unidentified person at the home was unconscious, then moments later said he was dead, and finally identified the person as Prince.^[266] The caller was Dr. Kornfeld's son, who had flown in with buprenorphine that morning to devise a treatment plan for opioid addiction.^[260] Emergency responders found Prince unresponsive in an elevator and performed CPR, but a paramedic said he had been dead for about six hours,^[267] and they were unable to revive him. They pronounced him dead at 10:07 a.m., 19 minutes after their arrival.^[260] There were no signs of suicide or foul play.^[260] A press release from the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office in Anoka County on June 2 stated that Prince had died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl,^[268] at the age of 57.^[269]
It is not yet known whether Prince obtained the fentanyl by a prescription or through an illicit channel.^[270] However, the question of how and from what source Prince obtained the drug which led to his demise is the subject of investigations by several law enforcement agencies.^[261]^[265]^[267] A sealed search warrant was issued for his estate,^[271] and another, unsealed, warrant was issued for the local Walgreens pharmacy.^[272]
Following an autopsy, his remains were cremated, and their final disposition remains private.^[273] On April 26, 2016, Prince's sister and only full sibling Tyka Nelson filed court documents in Carver County, to open a probate case, stating that no will had been found. Prince's five half-siblings also have a claim to his estate.^[274] As of three weeks after his death, 700 people claimed to be half-siblings or descendants.^[275] Bremer Trust was given temporary control of his estate, had his vault drilled open,^[276] and was authorized to obtain a blood sample for DNA profiling.^[277]

Remembrances

Numerous musicians and cultural figures reacted to Prince's death.^[278]^[279] President Barack Obama mourned him,^[280] and the United States Senate passed a resolution praising his achievements "as a musician, composer, innovator, and cultural icon".^[281] Cities across the US held tributes and vigils, and lit buildings, bridges, and other venues in purple.^[282]^[283]^[284] In the first five hours after the media reported his death, "Prince" was the top trending term on Twitter, and Facebook had 61 million Prince-related interactions.^[285] MTV interrupted its programming to air a marathon of Prince music videos and Purple Rain.^[286] AMC Theatres and Carmike Cinemas screened Purple Rain in select theaters over the following week.^[287] Saturday Night Live aired an episode in his honor titled "Goodnight, Sweet Prince," featuring his performances from the show.^[288]
Nielsen Music reported an initial sales spike of 42,000 percent.^[289] Prince's catalog sold 4.41 million albums and songs from April 21 to 28, with five albums simultaneously in the top ten of the Billboard 200, a first in the chart's history.^[290]

Discography

Main articles: Prince albums discography, Prince singles discography, The New Power Generation, and Madhouse (band)

For You (1978)
Prince (1979)
Dirty Mind (1980)
Controversy (1981)
1999 (1982)
Purple Rain (1984)
Around the World in a Day (1985)
Parade (1986)
Sign o' the Times (1987)
Lovesexy (1988)
Batman (1989)
Graffiti Bridge (1990)
Diamonds and Pearls (1991)
(Love Symbol Album) (1992)
Come (1994)
The Black Album (1994)
The Gold Experience (1995)
Chaos and Disorder (1996)
Emancipation (1996)
Crystal Ball (1998)
The Truth (1998)
The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale (1999)
Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999)
The Rainbow Children (2001)
One Nite Alone... (2002)
Xpectation (2003)
N·E·W·S (2003)
Musicology (2004)
The Chocolate Invasion (2004)
The Slaughterhouse (2004)
3121 (2006)
Planet Earth (2007)
Lotusflower (2009)
MPLSound (2009)
20Ten (2010)
Plectrumelectrum (2014)
Art Official Age (2014)
HITnRUN Phase One (2015)
HITnRUN Phase Two (2015)

Filmography

Main article: Prince videography

Film
Year	Film	Role	Director
1984	Purple Rain	The Kid	Albert Magnoli
1986	Under the Cherry Moon	Christopher Tracy	Prince
1987	Sign o' the Times	Himself	Prince
1990	Graffiti Bridge	The Kid	Prince

Television
Year	Show	Role	Notes
1997	Muppets Tonight	Himself	Episode 11
2014	New Girl	Himself	Episode: "Prince"

Tours

Prince Tour (1979–80)
Dirty Mind Tour (1980–81)
Controversy Tour (1981–82)
1999 Tour (1982–83)
Purple Rain Tour (1984–85)
Parade Tour (1986)
Sign o' the Times Tour (1987)
Lovesexy Tour (1988–89)
Nude Tour (1990)
Diamonds and Pearls Tour (1992)
Act I and II (1993)
Interactive Tour (1994)
The Ultimate Live Experience (1995)
Gold Tour (1996)
Love 4 One Another Charities Tour (1997)
Jam of the Year Tour (1997–98)
New Power Soul Tour/Festival (1998)
Hit n Run Tour (2000–01)
A Celebration (2001)
One Nite Alone... Tour (2002)
2003–2004 World Tour (2003–04)
Musicology Live 2004ever (2004)
Per4ming Live 3121 (2006–07)
21 Nights in London: The Earth Tour (2007)
20Ten Tour (2010)
Welcome 2 (2010–12)
Live Out Loud Tour (2013)
Hit and Run Tour (2014–15)
Piano & A Microphone Tour (2016)

Awards and nominations

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Prince

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Gulla 2008, p. 418.

Ro 2011, p. 9.

Perone 2006, p. xii.

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Harwin, Steven F., MD; Pivec, Robert, MD; Johnson, Aaron J., MD; Naziri, Qais, MD; Mont, Michael A., MD (August 1, 2012). "Revision Total Hip Arthroplasty in Jehovah's Witnesses". Orthopedics. Healio. 35 (8): e1145–e1151. doi:10.3928/01477447-20120725-11. Retrieved June 16, 2016.

Wittman, P. H.; Wittman, F. W. (1992). "Total Hip Replacement Surgery without Blood Transfusion in Jehovah's Witnesses" (PDF). British Journal of Anaesthesia. Oxford University Press. 68: 306–30. doi:10.1093/bja/68.3.306. Retrieved June 6, 2016.

Bonnett, C. A.; Lapin, R.; Docuyanan, G. B. (January 16, 1987). "Total hip replacement in Jehovah's Witnesses under spinal anesthesia without transfusion". Orthopedic Review. MEDLINE. 16 (1): 43–47. PMID 3453957.

wilkins, sara (April 23, 2016). "Jimmy Jam Opens Up About Prince's Hip Issues". Your Daily Dish. Retrieved June 17, 2016.

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Chipman, Melissa (April 21, 2016). "Prince made secret donation to support Louisville's historic Western Branch Library in 2001". Insider Louisville. Retrieved April 22, 2016.

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Guynn, Jessica (April 21, 2016). "Prince remembered as innovator, advocate for Black youth". USA Today. Retrieved April 22, 2016.

Coscarelli, Joe (March 19, 2016). "Prince Announces Coming Memoir at Performance". The New York Times. Retrieved May 5, 2016.

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"Music News: Prince appears at Paisley Park to assure fans he's okay after health scare". April 17, 2016. Retrieved April 21, 2016.

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Bream, Jon (April 17, 2016). "April 17, 2016: Prince offers a little speech and even less piano at Paisley to prove he's fine". Star Tribune. Retrieved April 21, 2016.

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Eligon, John & Kovaleski, Serge F. (May 4, 2016). "Friends Sought Help for Prince's Addiction, Lawyer Says". The New York Times. Retrieved May 4, 2016. and Eligon, John, Kovaleski, Serge F., Coscarelli, Joe (May 4, 2016). "Prince's Addiction and an Intervention Too Late". The New York Times. Retrieved May 5, 2016.

Variety Staff (April 21, 2016). "Prince Reportedly Treated for Drug Overdose Before Death; 911 Details Released". Variety. Retrieved May 9, 2016.

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Coscarelli, Joe (April 21, 2016). "Prince Is Dead at 57". The New York Times. Retrieved April 21, 2016.

Wilber, Del Quentin; Ng, David (2016-06-03). "Prince overdose: Authorities looking into how pop star obtained fentanyl". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles: Davan Maharaj. Retrieved 2016-08-11.

Date, Jack (April 28, 2016). "Search Warrant Issued for Prince's Paisley Park Estate". ABC News. Retrieved April 30, 2016.

Dillon, Nancy (April 29, 2016). "Authorities raid Minnesota Walgreens where Prince reportedly picked up prescriptions for heavy-duty medications". Daily News. New York. Retrieved April 30, 2016.

Grinberg, Emanuella (April 24, 2016). "Prince death: What we know". Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. CNN. Retrieved April 24, 2016.

France, Lisa Respers (April 26, 2016). "Prince had no will, says his sister". CNN. Retrieved April 27, 2016.

Merriman, Rebecca (May 7, 2016). "700 people claim to be Prince's half-siblings as judge orders DNA tests to find legitimate heirs". Mirror. MGN Ltd. Retrieved May 10, 2016.

"Prince's Vault Reportedly Drilled Open". ABC News. April 29, 2016. Retrieved April 30, 2016.

Puente, Maria (May 6, 2016). "Genetic testing ordered on Prince's blood to handle 'parentage' claims". USA Today. Gannett. Retrieved May 6, 2016.

Bueno, Antoinette (April 21, 2016). "Celebs React to Prince's Death: Read Touching Tributes From Carmen Electra, Katy Perry, Madonna and More". Entertainment Tonight. Retrieved April 22, 2016.

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Sources

Austen, Jake (2005). TV-a-Go-Go: Rock on TV From American Bandstand to American Idol. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 1556525729.
Bream, Jon (1984). Prince: Inside the Purple Reign. Macmillan Publishing. ISBN 9780020604105.
Buckley, Peter (2003). The Rough Guide to Rock. Rough Guides Ltd. ISBN 978-1-84353-105-0.
Cashmore, Ellis (1997). The Black Culture Industry. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415120821.
Cole, George (2005). The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis, 1980–1991. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0472032600.
Corson, Keith (2016). Trying to Get Over: African American Directors after Blaxploitation, 1977-1986. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-1477309087.
Draper, Jason (2011). Prince: Chaos, Disorder, and Revolution. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Backbeat Books. ISBN 9780879309619.
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Hawkins, Stan; Niblock, Sarah (2012). Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge. ISBN 9780754668763.
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External links

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Prince (musician) (category)

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Performance at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his induction in 2004

Sound Projections

Welcome to Sound Projections

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Prince Rogers Nelson (1958-2016): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

Prince Bio

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/remembering-prince

Culture Desk

Prince

American singer, songwriter, musician, and producer

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/30/arts/prince-s-parade-stakes-a-claim-to-popularity.html

PRINCE'S 'PARADE' STAKES A CLAIM TO POPULARITY

by JOHN ROCKWELL

March 30, 1986

But reality in this case seems considerably more interesting and complex; Prince is a talented, still-evolving musician capable of far more challenging work than a mere facile pop trickster with a dirty mind (the title of his 1980 album, and one of his best).

"I Wanna Be Your Lover" (1979)

"When You Were Mine" (1980)

"Controversy" (1981)

"Little Red Corvette" (1983)

"Delirious" (1983)

"Let's Go Crazy" (1984)

"Erotic City" (1984)

"I Would Die 4 U" (1984)

"Darling Nikki" (1984)

"Raspberry Beret" (1985)

"U Got the Look" (1987)

"I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" (1987)

"7" (1992)

"The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" (1994)

"Thieves in the Temple" (1990)

"Cream" (1991)

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/waiting-for-prince-to-be-prince-again

Culture Desk

Waiting for Prince to Be Prince Again

by Ben Greenman

Prince: 'If I knew the things I know now before, I wouldn't be in the music industry'

Exclusive Video Prince's Welcome 2 America Tour:

Prince -- "Housequake":

Housequake from 'Sign O the Times'--1987 (The movie) by Prince.

Prince (musician)

Contents

Early life

Career

1975–84: Beginnings and breakthrough

1984–87: The Revolution, Purple Rain, and subsequent releases

2000–07: Turnaround, Musicology, label change, and 3121

2007–10: Super Bowl XLI, Planet Earth, and Lotusflower

2010–12: 20Ten and Welcome 2 Tours

2013–16: 3rdeyegirl and return to Warner Bros.

Artistry

Music and image

Influences and musicianship

Legal issues

Pseudonyms

Copyright issues

Personal life

Illness and death

Remembrances

Discography

Filmography

Tours

Awards and nominations

See also

References

Sources

Further reading

External links

Editor's Bio

Blog Archive

Labels