Prince: Twenty-Seven Instruments and One Long Argument
On his 1978 debut *For You*, recorded at nineteen, Prince Rogers Nelson played all twenty-seven instruments himself, and wrote, produced and arranged the record besides. Warner Bros. had signed him at eighteen and handed him creative control of three albums — an almost unheard-of concession. Sixteen years later it curdled into the ugliest artist-label war of the modern era, conducted with the word SLAVE written on his cheek.
Minneapolis, and a Name He Hated
He was born on 7 June 1958 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis to Mattie Della Shaw, a jazz singer, and John Lewis Nelson, a pianist who performed as Prince Rogers. His father named him after the act because he wanted his son "to do everything I wanted to do." The boy hated it and called himself Skipper. He was born epileptic and had childhood seizures; he later said an angel told him he would not be sick anymore.
He wrote his first song, "Funk Machine," on his father's piano at seven. He played football, basketball and junior varsity baseball at Central High, and trained in classical ballet at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through the Minneapolis schools' Urban Arts Program — an unusual pairing that surfaces later in the physical precision of his stagecraft.
The Rise, and the Rivalry
*Dirty Mind* (1980) was, in Stephen Thomas Erlewine's description, a "stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock." *1999* (1982) sold four million and put "Little Red Corvette" into MTV's heavy rotation — one of the first two videos by Black artists to get there, alongside Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," and only after CBS threatened to pull its entire video catalogue. He and Jackson maintained a competitive rivalry for years.
He was also running a shadow career, writing and playing most of The Time's material under the pseudonyms Jamie Starr and The Starr Company, and later handing "Manic Monday" to the Bangles, who took it to number two.
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Take the IQ test →Purple Rain
*Purple Rain* (1984) spent twenty-four consecutive weeks at number one and sold over thirteen million copies in the United States. The film grossed more than $68 million and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. For a stretch of 1984 Prince simultaneously held the number one film, album and single in America — the first person ever to do it. The album took two of his first three Grammys.
It also produced the decade's most consequential piece of accidental legislation. Tipper Gore heard her daughter listening to "Darling Nikki," founded the Parents Music Resource Center, and the Parental Advisory sticker followed.
Sign o' the Times, and the Vault
He was constitutionally incapable of releasing less than he made. In 1986 and 1987 he was working simultaneously on *Dream Factory* with the Revolution and *Camille*, a solo project sung in a sped-up, female-sounding voice, then consolidated everything into a triple album called *Crystal Ball*. Warner Bros. forced it down to a double. The result — *Sign o' the Times*, released 31 March 1987 — is widely considered his greatest work and one of the greatest albums ever made, and topped the Pazz & Jop critics' poll.
The next record showed the other face of the same temperament. *The Black Album* was pressed in 500,000 copies before Prince recalled it, having concluded it was evil; surviving vinyl sold for over $10,000. He replaced it with *Lovesexy* (1988), which he called its spiritual opposite.
Slave
In 1992 he re-signed with Warner Bros. for a reported $100 million and six albums. Within a year the relationship had broken down over pace: he wanted his backlog released continuously, the label wanted to protect the market. In 1993 he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol — Warner Bros. was reduced to mailing journalists floppy disks containing a custom font — and appeared in public with "slave" written on his face. He fulfilled the contract by dumping albums in quick succession, left in 1996, and released the 36-song *Emancipation* through his own NPG Records.
He dropped the symbol on 16 May 2000, when the Warner publishing contract expired. The war continued by other means: albums given away with newspapers, sold through his own websites, bundled with concert tickets. In 2006 he took a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for "visionary use of the Internet to distribute music and connect with audiences." In 2014 he re-signed with Warner after eighteen years apart — and got ownership of his masters in exchange for a *Purple Rain* reissue.
The Third Act, and Paisley Park
*Musicology* (2004) returned him to the top five worldwide and won two Grammys; that year he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, played a two-minute solo on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at George Harrison's induction, was named greatest frontman of all time by Spin, and topped Rolling Stone's earnings list at $56.5 million. In 2007 he played the Super Bowl XLI halftime show on a stage shaped like his symbol, in the rain, to 140 million viewers; Billboard later called it the greatest Super Bowl performance ever staged.
He died at Paisley Park on 21 April 2016, aged fifty-seven, of an accidental fentanyl overdose from counterfeit hydrocodone pills. He left no will. In the week after his death 4.41 million of his albums and songs sold, and five albums sat in the Billboard 200 top ten simultaneously — a first in chart history.
Why Prince Is Called a Genius
The word was applied explicitly and institutionally: in June 2016 Condé Nast published a commemorative edition titled *The Genius of Prince*. The claim rests on something concrete. Most great pop records are committee products; Prince's were frequently one person doing every job. Twenty-seven instruments on a debut album is not a party trick but evidence of a specific capacity — holding an entire arrangement in mind, hearing each part's role before it exists, and executing all of them to professional standard. Add a compositional range credibly spanning funk, new wave, psychedelia, ballads and hard rock guitar, and an output rate so far beyond normal that his own label had to physically restrain him. Andy Warhol painted him twelve times; Vanity Fair claimed the 1984 portrait caught him "at the height of his powers."
The honest counter-case is that the faculty had no editor attached. He recalled a finished album because he decided it was evil. His film career after *Purple Rain* collapsed into Golden Raspberries for Worst Director, Worst Actor and Worst Original Song for *Under the Cherry Moon*, and a $4.2 million flop in *Graffiti Bridge*. The Lovesexy tour failed to profit despite strong attendance. The symbol years cost him a decade of commercial standing. Prolific and undisciplined are not opposites; in his case they were one trait.
Legacy
He sold over 100 million records, invented the Minneapolis sound, and won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, seven Grammys, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2024. The durable inheritance is the argument he picked: Prince established, at enormous personal cost, that an artist could demand ownership of his own recordings — and eventually got them back.
