Prince

Featured Album

Essential Albums

  • Diamonds and Pearls
    Diamonds and Pearls

    1991

  • Sign O' The Times
    Sign O' The Times

    1987’s Sign O’ The Times isn’t just the most comprehensive album in Prince’s catalog, it’s one of the most comprehensive albums in pop. Everything he explored in his first 10 years as an artist is here: R&B, soul, rock and gospel, Beatles-like vignettes (“Starfish and Coffee,” “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”), and funk so carnal it could make you shiver (“U Got the Look”). He’s as contemporary as rap (“Sign O’ The Times”) and as classic as a doo-wop ballad (“Adore”), and in both discovers the minimal but highly expressive sound that makes him him. The range of his imagination is astonishing, and his ability to convey that range in sound moreso. Celebratory, intimate, playful, serious, as sacred as “The Cross” and profane as “Hot Thing”: He doesn’t try and resolve his contradictions, he embodies them, and in doing so, makes a space for the full breadth of his personality—a feat all the more liberating when he fantasizes about picking out his partner’s clothes (“If I Was Your Girlfriend”) or enjoys a fruit cocktail and warm bath (“The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”). Black men weren’t allowed to be so sensitive and weird—and for that matter, neither were white. From here, we get the sprawling fluidity of Pharrell, Frank Ocean, and OutKast, and the stubbornness of Kanye West, but we also get the left-field experiments of artists like SOPHIE and Arca—music whose flamboyance and expressivity opened up new, utopian spaces in sound. The fact that he made the album almost entirely on his own after the dissolution of his band, the Revolution, isn’t just a feat of talent, it’s poetry: Sign O’ The Times is a reminder that you, too, contain multitudes.

  • 1999 (2019 Remaster)
    1999 (2019 Remaster)

    Even the brilliant provocations of Dirty Mind and Controversy couldn’t have prepared us for the album that made Prince a star. Featuring three Top 20 hits—“Little Red Corvette,” “Delirious,” and the title track—1999 didn’t just help define his electro-futuristic sound, but the sound of ’80s pop in general. And though Prince's primary area of study remained sex (“Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” “Lady Cab Driver”), his stabs at satire (“All the Critics Love U in New York”) are surprisingly sharp, too.

  • Controversy
    Controversy

    Prince once said that the lesson he learned from 1980’s Dirty Mind was that he could get away with whatever he wanted as long as he was true to himself. For an artist who’d had a couple of false starts, the insight was freeing: Not only did he not have to resolve the discrepancies between his innocence and sexuality or his interest in music both Black and white, he had to embrace them. His manager at the time, Owen Husney, had said that controversy was press, a dynamic that Prince was, by 1981, well aware of: Years before the Parents Music Resource Center designed their infamous “parental advisory” warning, singles from Dirty Mind came with stickers saying the music was unsuitable for minors, and the album came with one that advised radio programmers to listen before playing. And when it came time for 1981’s Controversy, Prince opted to lean into it. Politically, he’s never been more explicit: There are songs about religious fundamentalism (“Annie Christian”) and nuclear disarmament (“Ronnie, Talk to Russia”), as well as open questions about sexuality and race (“Controversy”). But part of his brilliance was how he kept things light—and let his most radical politics work through osmosis. “Jack U Off,” for example, is a rockabilly song about anonymous sex, but it’s also a pitch from a Good Samaritan about the prospects of a utopia where you, too, could get what you need when you need it, whether virginal, menopausal, or otherwise. And while it’s hard to misconstrue the message of “Do Me, Baby,” it’s rare to hear a man turn over his sexual agency so completely, and coo as though he likes it. So when Prince sings about “Sexuality,” he isn’t just talking about sex as an act, but sex as a fulcrum of liberation for everyone, regardless of race, income, New Wave, R&B, or otherwise. He keeps you dancing because a moving body is a receptive body. And then, on that very song, he makes his intentions clear: “Stand up, everybody, this is your life/Let me take you to another world.” With Controversy, he extended his wings. By the time of 1999’s release a year later, he was in flight.

  • Dirty Mind
    Dirty Mind

    1980

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About Prince

In the early 2000s, the filmmaker Kevin Smith contacted Prince to see if he could use one of Prince’s songs in one of his movies. Prince responded by asking Smith to make a documentary about him. Smith said sure, but the project never got off the ground. When Smith tried to pull out, one of Prince’s assistants explained to him that it wasn’t that simple. 'Why not?' Smith asked. After all, he wasn’t even a documentarian; he made features. 'I get it,' the assistant said—but Prince doesn’t understand reality like the rest of do. Prince… Prince calls you at three in the morning to ask if he can get a camel. He isn’t doing it to be a jerk. But he does want the camel. It’s a funny story, of course. But it also illustrates the strength and commitment of Prince’s vision. The camel is an extreme example. But imagine you told him there was no way to mix new wave and psychedelia with funk and R&B. Or that a man couldn’t explore androgyny without risking his sex appeal. Imagine, really, telling Prince there were any conventional boundaries he had to respect—and then imagine how much groundbreaking art would’ve been lost if he’d listened. Born Prince Rogers Nelson in 1958, he trained in ballet as a teenager, starting his music career just out of high school. By 24, he’d already released a body of work (including Dirty Mind, Controversy, and 1999) that helped shape nearly every style of ‘80s pop music, Black and white; by 30, he was both a midnight-movie cult hero (Purple Rain) and a Beatles-level visionary (Sign o’ the Times). To read about his Paisley Park compound is to get a glimpse of a world of almost perpetual creativity—between his debut in 1978 and his death in 2016, there was barely a year he didn’t put out an album, and there were several years during which he put out two. He was one of pop music’s true universals, and yet always distinctly Black. And to listen to him mix sexual ecstasy with spiritual transcendence (“When Doves Cry,” “If I Was Your Girlfriend”) not only finished the mission Little Richard started, it delivered on rock ’n' roll’s promise that you could find heaven here on earth if you were willing to shake for it.

HOMETOWN
Minneapolis, MN, United States
BORN
June 7, 1958

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