Prince (musician)

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince Rogers Nelson arrived at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis on the 7th of June, 1958, and for the next 57 years he operated at a pitch that most musicians never approach. He sold more than 100 million records worldwide. He played every instrument on his debut album - all 27 of them. He became the first artist in history to simultaneously hold the number-one film, album, and single in the United States. And when a record label tried to control the pace at which he released his own music, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol just to spite them.

  But figures and firsts only go so far. The deeper question is how a boy who grew up switching between his parents' homes in Minneapolis - sometimes sleeping in a neighbor's basement - built one of the most singular bodies of work in modern popular music. How did someone dismissed from a Rolling Stones tour after three songs eventually headline the Super Bowl halftime show for 140 million viewers? How did the same man who wrote the song that inadvertently created the Parental Advisory label also use his wealth to quietly save the Joffrey Ballet?

  What follows is the story of a musician who, according to Jon Pareles of The New York Times, was "a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop" - and who never stopped tearing down what he had just built.

• 2. Minneapolis Roots

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  John Lewis Nelson was a pianist and songwriter who performed under the stage name Prince Rogers, fronting a jazz group called the Prince Rogers Trio alongside his wife Mattie Della Shaw. When their son arrived in 1958, he named the boy after that stage name - because, as John told a television program in 1991, he wanted his son "to do everything I wanted to do."

  The child hated the name. He went by "Skipper" instead. He also said he was "born epileptic" and experienced seizures in his early years, though he later told his mother that an angel had promised him he would not be sick anymore. By the time he was seven, he was writing songs on his father's piano. The first one was called "Funk Machine".

  His parents divorced when he was ten. The split sent him bouncing between households - his father's, then his mother's, where her new husband Hayward Baker had moved in. Prince had a fraught relationship with his stepbrother Omarr, and the tension pushed him out the door repeatedly. Baker did take Prince to see James Brown in concert, which Prince acknowledged as a formative experience. After his father eventually threw him out, Prince moved into the basement of the Anderson family next door, befriending their son Andre Cymone - who would resurface later as the bassist in Prince's first touring band.

  At Central High School in Minneapolis, he played football, basketball, and baseball, and was trained in classical ballet through the Minnesota Dance Theatre's Urban Arts Program. That combination - the physical discipline of dance, the competitive drive of team sports, and years of self-taught musicianship - shaped the performer he was becoming. He would later donate a substantial sum of his own money to save the failing Joffrey Ballet in Chicago during the 1990s.

• 3. The Warner Deal and Early Records

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  In 1976, shortly after graduating from Central High School, Prince made a demo tape with a producer named Chris Moon at Moon's Minneapolis studio. Moon could not land a record deal on his own, so he brought the tape to a Minneapolis businessman named Owen Husney. Husney signed Prince - then 19 - to a management contract and helped him cut a new demo at Sound 80 Studios with engineer David Z. The resulting press kit drew interest from Warner Bros. Records, A&M Records, and Columbia Records. Prince signed with Warner Bros. in 1977, and the label agreed to give him creative control over three albums while retaining his publishing rights.

  Husney and Prince relocated to Sausalito, California, where the debut album For You was recorded at Record Plant Studios. The album notes credited Prince with writing, producing, arranging, composing, and playing all 27 instruments - every one except the lyrics to "Soft and Wet", which were co-written by Moon. Released on the 7th of April, 1978, "Soft and Wet" reached No. 12 on the Hot Soul Singles chart.

  The self-titled follow-up album in 1979 moved further. Released on the 19th of October, it reached No. 3 on the Billboard Top R&B/Black Albums chart and was certified platinum. The single "I Wanna Be Your Lover" sold more than a million copies and sat at No. 1 on the Hot Soul Singles chart for two weeks. Prince performed it on The Midnight Special on the 8th of January, 1980, and on American Bandstand on the 26th of January.

  Then came Dirty Mind in 1980. Stephen Thomas Erlewine later described it as "a stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock." The album was certified gold. The following year, Prince opened for the Rolling Stones on their United States tour - but in Los Angeles, wearing a trench coat and black bikini briefs, he was forced off the stage after three songs by audience members throwing trash at him.

• 4. Purple Rain and a Triple Crown

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  In the early 1980s, Prince told his management to secure him a role in a major motion picture - this despite having little film exposure at the time. His manager Bob Cavallo later recalled the instruction as close to a demand. It produced, in 1984, the semi-autobiographical film Purple Rain and the studio album that served as its soundtrack.

  The Purple Rain album, recorded with his backing band the Revolution, spent 24 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It sold more than 13 million copies in the United States. "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy" both reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. At one point that year, Prince simultaneously held the No. 1 album, single, and film in the country - the first artist to achieve that. The film grossed more than $68 million domestically and won Prince an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. Rolling Stone later ranked the album eighth on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

  The cultural ripples were wide. Pop artist Andy Warhol became fascinated by Prince and ultimately created 12 unique paintings of him in different colorways, all kept in his personal collection; four now reside at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A Vanity Fair article in November 1984 reproduced Warhol's portrait alongside the piece "Purple Fame".

  And then there was Tipper Gore. After Gore's 11-year-old daughter Karenna was heard listening to Prince's song "Darling Nikki" - which contained a reference to masturbation - Gore founded the Parents Music Resource Center. The center pushed for a warning label on records containing content unsuitable for minors. The recording industry eventually complied voluntarily. That label, now known as Parental Advisory, traces directly to a Prince song.

• 5. Sign O' the Times and the Symbol

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  After the Purple Rain tour, Prince disbanded the Revolution and fired Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. He was simultaneously working on two projects: an album with the Revolution called Dream Factory, and a solo record built around an androgynous alter ego named Camille, featuring a sped-up female-sounding voice. He planned to merge both into a triple LP titled Crystal Ball. Warner Bros. refused, insisting he cut it down. The resulting double album, Sign o' the Times, was released on the 31st of March, 1987.

  The Pazz & Jop critics' poll named it the top album of that year. It sold 3.2 million copies. Four singles charted on the Hot 100: the title track at No. 3, "U Got the Look" at No. 2, "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" at No. 10, and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" at No. 67. The Sign o' the Times Tour performed well in Europe, but Prince refused to bring it to the United States. As a compromise, the final two nights were filmed for theatrical release.

  Prince then recorded The Black Album - darker, more funk- and hip-hop-oriented than anything prior. After 500,000 copies had already been pressed, he declared the album spiritually "evil" and had it recalled. Surviving vinyl copies later sold for upward of $10 thousand. The album was officially released in 1994.

  By 1993, the conflict with Warner Bros. had escalated. The label was releasing his enormous backlog of music at a controlled pace. In protest, Prince formally adopted an unpronounceable symbol as his legal stage name. To allow journalists to print it, Warner Bros. mass-mailed floppy disks containing a custom font. Prince became "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince" - or simply "the Artist" - and began making public appearances with the word "slave" written on his face. That same year, Warner released the three-disc greatest hits compilation The Hits/The B-Sides. Prince reverted to his original name on the 16th of May, 2000, after his publishing contract with the label expired.

• 6. Super Bowl, Final Years and Legacy

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  On the 4th of February, 2007, Prince played the Super Bowl XLI halftime show in Miami on a stage shaped like his symbol. The performance reached 140 million television viewers - the largest audience of his life. His 12-minute set in the rain opened with a snippet of the Queen track "We Will Rock You" and closed with "Purple Rain". Billboard ranked it the greatest Super Bowl halftime performance ever in 2015.

  Later in 2007, he played 21 concerts at the O2 Arena in London, capping ticket prices at £31.21. The original seven-night run sold out its 140,000 tickets in 20 minutes; the residency was extended three times. His Musicology Tour in 2004 had already made him, according to Rolling Stone, the highest-earning musician in the world that year, with an annual income of $56.5 million. He played 96 concerts on that tour; the average ticket cost $61.

  In 2015, following the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody, Prince released the song "Baltimore" and held a tribute concert at his Paisley Park estate called "Dance Rally 4 Peace". He encouraged attendees to wear gray in Gray's honor. On the 10th of May, he performed a separate show at the Royal Farms Arena in Baltimore with Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby present.

  His final album, Hit n Run Phase Two, was released on the 12th of December, 2015. His final tour, Piano and a Microphone, stripped everything away - just Prince and a custom piano. It opened on the 16th of February, 2016, in Melbourne, Australia, including a date at the Sydney Opera House. The tour was cut short by illness in April.

  Prince died on the 21st of April, 2016, at Paisley Park in Chanhassen, Minnesota, after accidentally overdosing on counterfeit hydrocodone/paracetamol pills laced with fentanyl. He was 57. In the first five hours after news broke, sales of his catalog spiked 42,000 percent. Five of his albums entered the top ten of the Billboard 200 simultaneously - a first in the chart's history. His incomplete memoir, "The Beautiful Ones," was published posthumously by Random House in October 2019. He had managed to complete around 50 pages before his death, alongside a handwritten concept for the film Purple Rain. A nine-disc Super Deluxe edition of Sign o' the Times, released in 2020, received a perfect 10 from Pitchfork.