Prince Rogers Nelson (1958-2016) could play every instrument, write every part, produce every record, and perform for three hours without breaking a sweat. He crossed every genre boundary while remaining defiantly himself.
Prince Rogers Nelson was born on June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to a jazz pianist father, John L. Nelson, and a jazz singer mother, Mattie Shaw. The marriage was unstable and eventually ended; Prince moved between his parents' households and eventually lived with a neighborhood family, the Andersons, whose son Andre would become his first musical collaborator. By his early teens, Prince had taught himself to play piano, guitar, bass, and drums, and had begun assembling a musical vision of startling ambition and unusual coherence. At nineteen, having already recorded a demonstration tape that circulated through the major labels, he negotiated a recording contract with Warner Bros. that gave him complete creative control and the right to produce himself — terms that almost no debut artist of his era managed to secure. The first album, For You (1978), was recorded entirely by Prince: every instrument, every vocal part, mixed and co-produced by the artist himself at age nineteen. This was not a one-time experiment or a budget concession. It was his standard mode of operation for much of his career. He was not merely competent on multiple instruments; he was technically accomplished at a professional level on guitar, piano, bass guitar, and drums, and later became equally fluent on synthesizers and production technology as those tools evolved through the 1980s.
The four-year period from 1982 to 1986 represents perhaps the most creatively concentrated and commercially successful run of any popular musician since the Beatles. 1999 (1982) introduced his synthesizer-driven Minneapolis sound to mass audiences while simultaneously addressing nuclear anxiety in a party-funk framework. Purple Rain (1984) — simultaneously a film soundtrack, a commercial blockbuster, and an aesthetic statement — demonstrated the full range of Prince's musical intelligence within a single album's span: 'When Doves Cry,' built without any bass guitar whatsoever (an audacious structural decision in a funk-derived context), reached number one; 'Let's Go Crazy' opened with a church organ and built into hard rock; 'Darling Nikki' was sexually explicit hard rock that would eventually trigger the PMRC hearings and the creation of the parental advisory label; 'Purple Rain' itself was a guitar-driven power ballad that climaxed with an extended solo of controlled emotional intensity. The album sold over 25 million copies worldwide. Around the World in a Day (1985) deliberately pivoted away from Purple Rain's commercial formula into psychedelic pop, demonstrating that Prince was not going to allow commercial success to define his artistic direction. Parade (1986), the soundtrack to his film Under the Cherry Moon, showed his command of orchestral pop and French cabaret influences. Sign O' the Times (1987), a double album widely regarded as his masterpiece, surveyed crack cocaine, AIDS, gang violence, natural disaster, and transcendent love across 16 tracks that moved from solo acoustic funk to Minneapolis-style electro to spoken-word gospel to dense orchestral R&B.
Prince's guitar playing occupies a specific and elite position in the history of the electric guitar. His technical approach synthesized the bluesy expressionism of Jimi Hendrix — the use of the whammy bar, feedback, and sustained notes as vehicles for emotional intensity — with the percussive rhythmic precision of James Brown's approach to funk guitar and the melodic lyricism that Carlos Santana had brought from Latin music into rock. His live performances were widely documented as exceptional: the guitar solo he delivered at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony during a performance of 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' — originally a George Harrison composition — has been cited by multiple critics, musicians, and guitarists as one of the greatest live guitar performances ever captured on film. Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and George Harrison's son Dhani were onstage; Prince stayed in the background, played rhythm for most of the song, then stepped forward for the final solo and delivered something that left everyone present visibly astonished. The footage circulates endlessly because it is one of the rare cases where the superlatives applied to a musician are immediately verifiable by watching the event.
Prince's conflict with Warner Bros. over ownership and artistic control became the defining public drama of his career from 1993 onward. Having delivered recordings at a rate that exceeded Warner's ability to release them — he claimed to have recorded dozens of complete albums that the label warehoused to control supply — he grew increasingly frustrated with the standard industry arrangement in which a record company retained ownership of master recordings. He began appearing in public with the word 'SLAVE' written on his cheek. He legally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol — a combination of the male and female symbols — and released music under that designation, becoming known in the press simply as 'the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.' In 1996, free from his Warner contract, he released the triple album Emancipation as an independent statement. He spent subsequent years reacquiring his masters, releasing music through his own label NPG Records, experimenting with direct-to-fan distribution before the internet made it standard, and advising younger artists on contractual rights. He died on April 21, 2016, at his Paisley Park compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, from an accidental overdose of fentanyl. He was 57. His estate discovered thousands of unreleased recordings stored in a climate-controlled vault. The full inventory of what Prince made and never released may never be known; what has been released since his death has consistently confirmed that the vault contains work of the quality his living output had already established.