Prince (1958—)

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Prince (1958—)

An exciting live performer and a prolific singer-songwriter, Prince resists easy categorization because of his uncanny ability to transcend genres in music and image. Often a misunderstood and controversial entertainer, Prince emerged on the music scene in 1977 to eventually record a staggering 20 albums in just 20 years. In the 1990s, Prince staged a bitter and highly publicized dispute with his record company, Warner Brothers, over the nature of his contract. Ultimately, the artist changed his name to a symbol in an attempt to regain creative control over his career. While Prince attained the peak of his critical and commercial success in the early 1980s, by the end of the 1990s he had emerged as a musical entrepreneur, continuing to tour regularly while maintaining a legion of fans in the United States and abroad.

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958 to Mattie Shaw and John Nelson, a local musician. In his formative years during the 1960s and 1970s, Prince honed his skills on a number of different instruments and immersed himself in the music of artists who would eventually come to influence his sound: Carlos Santana, Joni Mitchell, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and Jimi Hendrix. Drawing from this rich legacy, by the late 1970s Prince would help to invent what became known as the Minneapolis Sound: a blend of horns, guitars, and electronic synthesizers supported by a steady, bouncing rhythm.

While Prince has often been classified as a rock musician, his work is much more complex in the way it fuses elements from rhythm and blues, pop, rock, funk, punk, and country. The singer also boasts a wide-ranging vocal ability which includes a growling baritone, a full tenor sound, an elegant falsetto, and a piercing shriek. The multifaceted nature of Prince's music and singing helped earn him a wide and diverse audience throughout his career, allowing him to crossover the racial boundaries that tended to dominate the music scene before his arrival.

In April 1978, Prince released his first album, For You, on which he played most of the instruments and overdubbed his voice to heightened effect. While the album was a modest success, his next release, Prince (1979), sold over one million copies, producing the hit singles "I Feel for You" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover." The two albums that followed, Dirty Mind (1980) and Controversy (1981), were highly influenced by 1980s new wave and punk music. The latter album was aptly named: with each release, Prince become increasingly controversial for his explicit lyrics that would engage sexual themes including oral sex, incest, and sadomasochism.

Prince's outrageous sense of style also proved to be attention-grabbing. Sporting a small, short frame and a full mane of hair, Prince showed an affinity for lacy, frilly, and often suggestive clothing. His rare appearances in media interviews were awkward and self-effacing; yet on stage, he was carnal and exhibitionist in a way audiences had not witnessed before. Along with his musical peers Boy George and Michael Jackson, Prince helped establish a new sense of masculinity in the 1980s that owed a major debt to the images of popular rock stars like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Mick Jagger. In Prince's world, men could wear makeup and women's clothes and still maintain a diverse and supportive fan base.

Prince rose to superstar status with the release of his next two groundbreaking albums: 1999 (1982), a double-album set featuring several hit singles, including "Little Red Corvette" and the infectious, prophetic title track; and Purple Rain (1984), which became the defining moment of Prince's career. The album functioned as a soundtrack for Prince's first film, also titled Purple Rain. Directed on a modest budget by Albert Magnoli (who later became Prince's manager), the semi-autobiographical film presented Prince as the Kid, a struggling rock singer tormented by his dysfunctional relationships with women and his father.

Unexpectedly, Purple Rain became the most commercially and critically successful rock film since the Beatles' Hard Day's Night (1965). The soundtrack spawned a series of number one and top ten singles on the pop chart, including "Let's Go Crazy" and "When Doves Cry." The album ultimately earned the singer three Grammy Awards, while the title track garnered Prince a 1984 Academy Award for Best Original Song. The unprecedented success of the black-cast film also prepared the way for Spike Lee's groundbreaking independent film, She's Gotta Have It (1984), which in turn helped catalyze a new wave of black filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s.

Although Prince never again attained the commercial visibility of the year in which he released Purple Rain, he followed that work with a series of sophisticated and critically praised albums on his own record label, Paisley Park. These albums included Around the World in a Day (1985), which sold four million copies and featured the hit single "Raspberry Beret," and Parade (1986), which served as the soundtrack for his next film, the disastrous Under the Cherry Moon.

After disbanding his backup group the Revolution, Prince released a double-album set, Sign o' the Times (1987), which generated a concert film in the same year. The melodic complexity and musical diversity of Sign o' the Times helped firmly establish Prince as a "true" artist in many critical circles. His next album, Lovesexy (1988), was complemented by a lavish, expensive international tour. The album received attention mostly for its controversial album cover on which Prince appeared fully nude, his loin area strategically covered. Prince also composed the music for two soundtracks, Tim Burton's hugely successful Batman (1989) and his own film vehicle, Graffiti Bridge (1990), a project that failed miserably at the box office.

During the height of his fame in the 1980s, Prince became linked in the media to a string of glamorous female performers, including Vanity, Appolonia, Sheena Easton, and Kim Basinger. Prince also helped bring a number of artists to visibility, including Morris Day, Tevin Campbell, Sheila E, and Carmen Electra. In the 1990s, he used his formidable talent to produce albums and songs for legendary but largely forgotten rhythm and blues and funk artists like Mavis Staples and George Clinton.

In October 1991, Prince released an album titled Diamonds and Pearls, featuring his newly formed backup band, the New Power Generation. Although the album was a commercial success, Prince's mix of rap, rhythm and blues, and funk styles no longer seemed fresh or original in the changing scene of popular music in the 1990s. The artist seemed to be "chasing trends rather than creating them," according to his biographer Liz Jones. Moreover, Prince's androgynous image was no match for the powerfully abrasive images of masculinity that had gained appeal in popular culture in the early 1990s through gangsta rap and black films.

In 1993, Prince's behind-the-scenes battle with Warner Broth-ers—the record label that had represented him since his debut—came to public attention. In August 1992, Prince had signed a deal with the company which promised him one hundred million dollars for six albums, and a ten million dollar advance. Yet in order to recoup funds spent on Prince in the latter half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, in 1993 Warner Brothers released a double album set of Prince's greatest hits against the singer's wishes. In 1994, the company proceeded to close Prince's struggling Paisley Park label, much to the artist's chagrin. In response, Prince refused to release newly composed music, choosing instead to provide Warner with pre-recorded, and often lesser material from his vault of over 500 unreleased songs.

Yet Prince's attempt to resist Warner Brothers had far reaching effects on his audience and his critics, who longed to hear the quality of music that had defined his early career. Then, in 1993, Prince changed his name to a symbol which combined the generic signs for male and female. Unpronounceable, the new name alienated the singer from many of his fans, who were forced to refer to him as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or as The Artist. In September 1995, he released a new album, The Gold Experience, under the new symbolic name. Eventually, the release went gold, spawning one hit single, "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." Yet, partly due to poor management, Prince found himself deeply in debt at the end of year. As a result, he was forced to close several of the entrepreneurial ventures he had launched since the 1980s, including his Miami nightclub, Glam Slam, and his merchandise shops in Minneapolis and London.

In 1995, after a commercially and critically disastrous album release, Chaos and Disorder, The Artist Formerly Known as Prince met with Warner Brothers and the two entities mutually decided to terminate their contractual agreement. Prince then signed to EMI in 1996 and went on to release a three-CD collection titled Emancipation. The album contained new material and covers of songs made famous by artists as diverse Bonnie Raitt and the Stylistics. As a celebration of both his relationship with his new wife Mayte Garcia and his hard-won independence from Warner Brothers, the album rose to number 11 on Billboard's pop album chart and number six on the rhythm and blues charts. The artist's next release, Crystal Ball, would not emerge until 1998. In the same year, the Artist continued to develop his independent label by writing, producing, and distributing material for rhythm and blues icons Chaka Khan and Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone.

Although Prince continued to be known as an innovator in popular music, he was not able to sustain the commercial success of his early career into the 1990s, partly due to the rise of rap and other changes in popular music. Still, his emphasis on live instrumentation and musical virtuosity served to influence an entire generation of musical artists of the 1990s, including rhythm and blues performers D'Angelo and Maxwell. Prince also helped to establish a crossover scene in popular music, in which black singers were no longer limited to musical styles and became increasingly able to cross racial boundaries. Always ahead of his time, Prince's ambiguous, gender-bending image helped usher in a new, ostentatious style in popular culture and worked to transform the perception of black masculinity in U.S. society. No matter what name he goes by, Prince is truly an American superstar.

—Jason King