🇺🇸 Prince

Biography

At the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami, fifty-two years after the form was invented and thirty-two years after Prince Rogers Nelson had signed his first record deal as a teenager, he walked onto a stage in a driving rainstorm and played a nine-minute set that began with a medley of rock guitar licks — Hendrix, Foo Fighters, Creedence, Bob Dylan — before arriving at "Purple Rain," the title track from his 1984 album, which he performed in full while the rain fell and 140 million people watched on television. It was, by virtually universal critical consensus, the greatest halftime performance in Super Bowl history, and it was accomplished by a man who had been playing guitar since he was seven years old, who had negotiated his first record deal without a manager at eighteen, and who had spent the intervening decades becoming arguably the most comprehensively skilled musician in the history of popular music.

Prince Rogers Nelson was born June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of John Nelson — a musician who performed under the name Prince Rogers — and Mattie Shaw, a jazz singer. Music was not a hobby in the Nelson household; it was a profession, and Prince approached it as such from earliest childhood. By the time he was seven years old, he had taught himself to play piano, guitar, and drums — not at a beginner level, but with a technical proficiency that adults found disquieting. He was writing songs by ten, leading bands by fourteen.

Minneapolis in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not, by any conventional reckoning, a music industry hub. There were no major labels based there, no established infrastructure for developing talent, no local scene that connected to national commercial markets in the way that New York or Los Angeles did. What it had was a funk and soul tradition fed by Black radio stations and local club circuits that was, if anything, more musically demanding than coastal equivalents because it had no shortcuts to commercial success. Prince absorbed that tradition and augmented it with everything he could find: rock guitar from Hendrix and Santana, pop melody from Joni Mitchell and Todd Rundgren, soul harmony from Sly Stone.

In 1977, at eighteen, he traveled to New York and negotiated a record deal with Warner Bros. directly — no manager, no lawyer he hadn't chosen himself. The deal was unusual: it gave him complete creative control over his recordings and the right to produce his own albums. At the time, Warner Bros. executives considered this a reasonable concession for an unknown artist from Minnesota. Within seven years, it would be the most creatively productive record deal in the company's history. His debut album, For You, was released in 1978 when he was nineteen. He played all twenty-seven instruments on it himself. He has received credit for this on almost every subsequent album he released.

Purple Rain, released in June 1984 alongside the semi-autobiographical film of the same name, is the album on which all of his preceding development converged. It reached number one on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for twenty-four consecutive weeks. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. "When Doves Cry," the lead single, became the first number one single in American chart history to feature no bass line — a deliberate decision by Prince, who removed the bass part at the last minute and refused to explain why. The album has sold over twenty-five million copies and appears on virtually every critical ranking of the greatest albums ever made.

What followed Purple Rain was one of the most astonishing creative outputs in popular music history: thirty-nine studio albums over thirty-eight years, each one different from the last, many of them recorded entirely by himself in his Paisley Park studios complex outside Minneapolis. He wrote songs for other artists — "Nothing Compares 2 U" for Sinéad O'Connor, "Manic Monday" for the Bangles, "I Feel for You" for Chaka Khan — each of which became a major hit. He changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol from 1993 to 2000 in a dispute over creative ownership with Warner Bros., a gesture that was widely ridiculed at the time and now reads as prescient: he was arguing about artist ownership of masters twenty years before the conversation became mainstream.

He died at Paisley Park on April 21, 2016, of an accidental fentanyl overdose. He was fifty-seven years old. His vault — the recordings he had made and chosen not to release, stored in a climate-controlled room at Paisley Park — was estimated to contain thousands of hours of unreleased music. What was released in his lifetime remains the most comprehensive demonstration of musical range and technical mastery by any pop artist of his era. He played everything. He understood everything. He refused to explain himself. He was right not to.

Timeline

Peers in Perspective