Prince

Prince Rogers Nelson was born on June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to two musicians. His father, John L. Nelson, was a pianist and songwriter who performed under the stage name Prince Rogers with a jazz group called the Prince Rogers Trio, and his mother, Mattie Della Shaw, sang with the same band before working as a social worker ^[1]. The boy was named after his father's stage persona, a decision John Nelson later said reflected his hope that his son would accomplish everything he had wanted to do himself.

Music filled the household from the start, but the household itself did not hold together. His parents separated when Prince was around ten years old, and he spent his adolescence moving between the homes of his father, his mother and stepfather, and eventually the family of his friend André Anderson, who later performed as André Cymone ^[2]. In the basement of the Anderson home the two teenagers practiced obsessively, and Prince taught himself piano, guitar, and drums largely by ear.

At Minneapolis Central High School he played basketball and studied music, and by his mid teens he was performing in a band called Grand Central, later renamed Champagne, alongside Anderson and drummer Morris Day ^[2]. Minneapolis was far from the established music industry centers of Los Angeles and New York, and that isolation shaped him. With no scene to conform to, he absorbed everything on the radio, from Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown to Joni Mitchell and Santana, and began assembling a style that belonged to no single genre.

A Minneapolis studio owner named Chris Moon heard the teenager's demos in the mid 1970s and connected him with local businessman Owen Husney, who became his first manager. Husney's promotional campaign presented the 18-year-old as a prodigy who could write, sing, produce, and play every instrument himself, and in 1977 Warner Bros. Records signed him to a contract that gave the young artist an unusual degree of creative control, including the right to produce his own albums ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Prince at that moment would have found an unknown, but the label was betting on something rare.

His debut album, For You, appeared in 1978 with a credit line stating that Prince had produced, arranged, composed, and performed the record. The follow-up, Prince, released in 1979, delivered his first significant hit, the single I Wanna Be Your Lover, which reached the top of the R&B chart ^[1]. The albums Dirty Mind (1980) and Controversy (1981) pushed further, mixing explicit lyrics with stripped-down funk and new wave textures, and critics began treating him as one of the most original figures in American pop.

The breakthrough to mass audiences came with the double album 1999 in 1982. Its singles, including Little Red Corvette and Delirious, crossed over to rock radio and MTV at a time when Black artists rarely received such exposure ^[3]. Backed by his band the Revolution, Prince toured relentlessly, and the synthesizer-driven, guitar-edged style he perfected in this period became known as the Minneapolis sound, a template he also extended to protégé acts such as The Time and Vanity 6, for whom he wrote and produced under pseudonyms ^[2].

The film and album Purple Rain, both released in 1984, turned Prince into a global phenomenon. The semi-autobiographical movie, in which he starred as a struggling Minneapolis musician called the Kid, grossed far beyond its modest budget, and the soundtrack spent 24 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 ^[4]. The album produced the chart-topping singles When Doves Cry and Let's Go Crazy, and the project earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score along with multiple Grammy Awards ^[4]. For a stretch in 1984 he held the number one album, single, and film in the United States simultaneously, a feat few performers have matched.

Rather than repeat the formula, he swerved. Around the World in a Day (1985) explored psychedelic pop and yielded the hit Raspberry Beret, while Parade (1986) accompanied his second film, Under the Cherry Moon, which he also directed, and contained the spare funk landmark Kiss ^[1]. In 1987 he released the double album Sign o' the Times, a sprawling work addressing drugs, AIDS, faith, and romance that many critics rank among the finest albums of the 1980s ^[5]. Lovesexy followed in 1988, and in 1989 his soundtrack for Tim Burton's Batman returned him to the top of the album chart.

Any list of Prince achievements must also count his writing for others. Songs he composed became major hits in other hands, including Nothing Compares 2 U for Sinéad O'Connor, Manic Monday for the Bangles, and I Feel for You for Chaka Khan ^[3]. Across his career he placed dozens of singles on the Hot 100, won seven Grammy Awards, and released 39 studio albums, with estimates of his worldwide record sales exceeding 100 million ^[4]. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, his first year of eligibility, and his guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps at that ceremony became one of the most replayed live performances of the internet age ^[5].

In the early 1990s Prince signed a widely publicized new contract with Warner Bros., but the relationship soon collapsed over a basic disagreement: he wanted to release music as fast as he recorded it, and the label wanted to protect the market with slower, spaced releases. He also came to object to the fact that Warner, not he, owned the master recordings of his catalog ^[6]. In 1993 he stopped using his name professionally and adopted an unpronounceable glyph combining male and female symbols, which forced media outlets to call him The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

During the dispute he appeared in public with the word slave written on his cheek, a protest against contract terms he considered a form of servitude, and he pushed albums out quickly to fulfill and escape the deal ^[6]. Chaos and Disorder in 1996 closed out the Warner contract, and that same year he issued the triple album Emancipation independently, celebrating his freedom. When the publishing arrangement that had required the name change expired in 2000, he resumed calling himself Prince.

The fight made him an early and vocal experimenter in direct distribution. He sold music through his NPG Music Club online in the early 2000s, gave away the album Planet Earth with a British newspaper in 2007, and policed unauthorized use of his work on the internet with unusual aggression ^[6]. In 2014 he reached a new agreement with Warner Bros. that returned ownership of his master recordings to him, a resolution he had pursued for two decades and one that later became a reference point for other artists negotiating control of their catalogs ^[3].

For a man who spent his life on stage, Prince guarded his private world closely. In 1996 he married Mayte Garcia, a dancer and singer in his touring organization. Their son, Amiir, was born that October with Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, and died a week after birth, a loss both parents later described as devastating ^[7]. The marriage ended in 2000. A second marriage, to Manuela Testolini, lasted from 2001 to 2006. He had no surviving children.

Raised around Seventh-day Adventist and Baptist congregations, he became a Jehovah's Witness in 2001 after long study with musician Larry Graham, and he occasionally went door to door in Minnesota as part of his ministry ^[7]. His faith reshaped his art: he stopped performing some of his most sexually explicit early material and removed profanity from his concerts. He was also a vegetarian for much of his adult life and a famously private resident of the Minneapolis area, which he never abandoned for either coast.

His home base from 1987 onward was Paisley Park, a 65,000 square foot studio and performance complex he built in Chanhassen, a suburb southwest of Minneapolis ^[8]. There he recorded constantly, stockpiling unreleased material in a storage vault whose contents, by many accounts, could fill decades of posthumous releases. Friends and collaborators described a perfectionist who slept little, rehearsed bands to exhaustion, and might summon musicians for a session at three in the morning, then host a public dance party in the same building the next night.

The 2000s brought a sustained commercial and critical revival. The album Musicology (2004), promoted by including a copy with every concert ticket, returned him to the upper reaches of the charts, and 3121 (2006) debuted at number one ^[3]. His halftime performance at Super Bowl XLI in February 2007, delivered in a Miami downpour and climaxing with Purple Rain played in actual rain, is regularly cited among the greatest halftime shows ever staged ^[5]. In 2007 he also played 21 nights at London's O2 Arena.

He kept working at a pace few younger artists matched. In 2014 he released two albums on the same day, Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum, and in 2015 and 2016 he toured with a stripped-down show called Piano and a Microphone, performing alone at the keyboard ^[8]. Those concerts, intimate and career-spanning, turned out to be his farewell. In April 2016 his plane made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois, after a show in Atlanta so that he could receive medical attention, an incident his representatives attributed at the time to influenza.

On April 21, 2016, Prince was found unresponsive in an elevator at Paisley Park and pronounced dead at age 57. The Midwest Medical Examiner's Office ruled that he died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid; investigators concluded he had unknowingly taken counterfeit pills containing the drug, and no criminal charges were ultimately filed ^[9]. Because he left no will, his estate spent six years in probate before being divided in 2022 between a music company and his siblings' interests. Landmarks around the world, including the Eiffel Tower and the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, were lit purple in tribute in the days after his death ^[9].

Prince facts tend toward the superlative: 39 studio albums released in his lifetime, seven Grammy Awards, an Oscar, more than 100 million records sold, and a vault of unreleased recordings still being mined ^[4]. Yet his influence resists simple counting. He proved that one artist could write, produce, and play virtually everything on a hit record, and generations of self-contained studio auteurs, from D'Angelo to contemporary bedroom producers, work in a mold he did much to create ^[5]. His refusal to respect boundaries between funk, rock, pop, and R&B, and between masculine and feminine presentation, widened what a mainstream star could be.

His institutional afterlife took shape quickly. Paisley Park opened to the public as a museum in October 2016, preserving his studios, instruments, wardrobe, and motorcycles for visitors ^[8]. His estate, in partnership with record labels, has issued expanded editions of Purple Rain, 1999, and Sign o' the Times, along with previously unheard material such as the 1983 home recording of Piano and a Microphone and the album Welcome 2 America. In 2016 the University of Minnesota awarded him an honorary doctorate posthumously, and Minnesota later marked June 7 as Prince Day.

Any Prince biography ends where it began, in Minneapolis. He recruited his bands from the city, recorded there when he could have gone anywhere, and made the First Avenue nightclub, the setting of Purple Rain, an international landmark ^[2]. Musicians he mentored and rivals he spurred, from The Time and Sheila E. to the wider Minneapolis sound that touched producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, carried his methods across pop music. Nearly a decade after his death, his catalog remains a working library for artists, scholars, and listeners trying to understand how one performer contained so much.