Prince,
the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate
showman, died on Thursday at his home, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen,
Minn. He was 57.
His
publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, confirmed his death but did not report a
cause. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that
deputies responded to an emergency call at 9:43 a.m. “When deputies and
medical personnel arrived,” he said, “they found an unresponsive adult
male in the elevator. Emergency medical workers attempted to provide
lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced
deceased at 10:07 a.m.”
The sheriff’s office said it would continue to investigate his death.
Last
week, responding to news reports that Prince’s plane had made an
emergency landing because of a health scare, Ms. Noel-Schure said Prince
was “fighting the flu.”
Prince
was a man bursting with music — a wildly prolific songwriter, a
virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk,
rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career
that lasted from the late 1970s until his solo “Piano & a
Microphone” tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical
prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with
accepted music-business practices.
Prince sold more than 100 million records, won seven Grammys and was inducted Hall of Fame.
A
seven-time Grammy winner, Prince’s Top 10 hits included “Little Red
Corvette,” “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss” and “The Most
Beautiful Girl in the World”; albums like “Dirty Mind,” “1999” and “Sign
O’ the Times” were full-length statements. His songs also became hits
for others, among them “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor,
“Manic Monday” for the Bangles and “I Feel for You” for Chaka Khan. With
the 1984 film and album “Purple Rain,”
he told a fictionalized version of his own story: biracial, gifted,
spectacularly ambitious. Its music won him an Academy Award, and the
album sold more than 13 million copies in the United States alone.
In
a statement, President Obama said, “Few artists have influenced the
sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite
so many people with their talent.”
He
added, “He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and
an electrifying performer. ‘A strong spirit transcends rules,’ Prince
once said — and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative.”
Prince
recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing
every instrument and singing every vocal line. Many of his albums were
simply credited, “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince.”
Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the
polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once
spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a Grammy Awards
telecast and play the Super Bowl Halftime show. He would often follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.
On
Prince’s biggest hits, he sang passionately, affectionately and
playfully about sex and seduction. With deep bedroom eyes and a sly,
knowing smile, he was one of pop’s ultimate flirts: a sex symbol devoted
to romance and pleasure, not power or machismo. Elsewhere in his
catalog were songs that addressed social issues and delved into
mysticism and science fiction. He made himself a unifier of dualities —
racial, sexual, musical, cultural — teasing at them in songs like
“Controversy” and transcending them in his career.
He
had plenty of eccentricities: his fondness for the color purple, using
“U” for “you” and a drawn eye for “I” long before textspeak, his
vigilant policing of his music online, his penchant for releasing troves
of music at once, his intensely private persona. Yet for musicians and
listeners of multiple generations, he was admired well-nigh universally.
Prince’s
music had an immediate and lasting influence: among songwriters
concocting come-ons, among producers working on dance grooves, among
studio experimenters and stage performers. He sang as a soul belter, a
rocker, a bluesy ballad singer and a falsetto crooner. His most
immediately recognizable (and widely imitated) instrumental style was a
particular kind of pinpoint, staccato funk, defined as much by keyboards
as by the rhythm section. But that was just one among the many styles
he would draw on and blend, from hard rock to psychedelia to electronic
music. His music was a cornucopia of ideas: triumphantly, brilliantly
kaleidoscopic.
Prince
Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, the son of John
L. Nelson, a musician whose stage name was Prince Rogers, and Mattie
Della Shaw, a jazz singer who had performed with the Prince Rogers Band.
They were separated in 1965, and his mother remarried in 1967. Prince
spent some time living with each parent and immersed himself in music,
teaching himself to play his instruments. “I think you’ll always be able
to do what your ear tells you,” he told his high school newspaper,
according to the biography “I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon”
(2013) by the critic Touré.
Eventually
he ran away, living for some time in the basement of a neighbor whose
son, André Anderson, would later record as André Cymone. As high school
students they formed a band that would also include Morris Day, later
the leader of the Time. In classes, Prince also studied the music
business.
He
recorded with a Minneapolis band, 94 East, and began working on his own
solo recordings. He was still a teenager when he was signed to Warner
Bros. Records, in a deal that included full creative control. His first
album, “For You” (1978), gained only modest attention. But his second,
“Prince” (1979), started with “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a No. 1 R&B
hit that reached No. 11 on the pop charts; the album sold more than a
million copies, and for the next two decades Prince albums never failed
to reach the Top 100. During the 1980s, nearly all were million-sellers
that reached the Top 10.
With
his third album, the pointedly titled “Dirty Mind,” Prince moved from
typical R&B romance to raunchier, more graphic scenarios; he posed
on the cover against a backdrop of bedsprings and added more rock guitar
to his music. It was a clear signal that he would not let formats or
categories confine him. “Controversy,” in 1981, had Prince taunting, “Am
I black or white?/Am I straight or gay?” His audience was broadening;
the Rolling Stones chose him as an opening act for part of their tour
that year.
Prince
grew only more prolific. His next album, “1999,” was a double LP; the
video for one of its hit singles, “Little Red Corvette,” became one of
the first songs by an African-American musician played in heavy rotation
on MTV. He was also writing songs with and producing the female group
Vanity 6 and the funk band Morris Day and the Time, which would have a
prominent role in “Purple Rain.”
Prince
played “the Kid,” escaping an abusive family to pursue rock stardom, in
“Purple Rain.” Directed by Albert Magnoli on a budget of $7 million, it
was Prince’s film debut and his transformation from stardom to
superstardom. With No. 1 hits in “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry,”
he at one point in 1984 had the No. 1 album, single and film
simultaneously.
He
also drew some opposition. “Darling Nikki,” a song on the album that
refers to masturbation, shocked Tipper Gore, the wife of Al Gore, who
was then a United States senator, when she heard her daughter listening
to it, helping lead to the formation of the Parents’ Music Resource
Center, which eventually pressured record companies into labeling albums
to warn of “explicit content.” Prince himself would later, in a more
religious phase, decide not to use profanities onstage, but his songs —
like his 2013 single “Breakfast Can Wait” — never renounced carnal
delights.
Prince
didn’t try to repeat the blockbuster sound of “Purple Rain,” and for a
time he withdrew from performing. He toyed with pastoral, psychedelic
elements on “Around the World in a Day” in 1985, which included the hit
“Raspberry Beret,” and “Parade” in 1986, which was the soundtrack for a
movie he wrote and directed, “Under the Cherry Moon,” that was an
awkward flop. He also built his studio complex, Paisley Park, in the
mid-1980s for a reported $10 million, and in 1989 his “Batman”
soundtrack album sold two million copies.
Friction
grew in the 1990s between Prince and his label, Warner Bros., over the
size of his output and how much music he was determined to release.
“Sign O’ the Times,” a monumental 1987 album that addressed politics and
religion as well as romance, was a two-LP set, cut back from a triple.
By
the mid-1990s, Prince was in open battle with the label, releasing
albums as rapidly as he could to finish his contract; quality suffered
and so did sales. He appeared with the word “Slave” written on his face,
complaining about the terms of his contract, and in 1993 he changed his
stage name to an unpronounceable glyph, only returning to Prince in
1996 after the Warner contract ended. He marked the change with a triple
album, independently released on his own NPG label: “Emancipation.”
For
the next two decades, Prince put out an avalanche of recordings.
Hip-hop’s takeover of R&B meant that he was heard far less often on
the radio; his last Top 10 hit was “The Most Beautiful Girl in the
World,” in 1994. He experimented early with online sales and
distribution of his music, but eventually turned against what he saw as
technology companies’ exploitation of the musician; instead, he tried
other forms of distribution, like giving his 2007 album “Planet Earth”
away with copies of The Daily Mail in Britain. His catalog is not
available on the streaming service Spotify, and he took extensive legal
measures against users of his music on YouTube and elsewhere.
But
Prince could always draw and satisfy a live audience, and concerts
easily sustained his later career. He was an indefatigable performer:
posing, dancing, taking a turn at every instrument, teasing a crowd and
then dazzling it. He defied a downpour to play a triumphal “Purple Rain”
at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, and he headlined the Coachella
festival in 2008 for a reported $5 million. A succession of his bands —
the Revolution, the New Power Generation, 3rdEyeGirl — were united by
their funky momentum and quick reflexes as Prince made every show seem
both thoroughly rehearsed and improvisational.
A trove of Prince’s recordings remains unreleased, in an archive he called the Vault.
Like much of his offstage career, its contents are a closely guarded
secret, but it’s likely that there are masterpieces yet to be heard.
