Prince, a quintuple threat instrumentalist-singer-songwriter-producer-performer who became one of the towering figures in music the last four decades, has died at 57.
He was found dead Thursday morning at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minn. It was in that very studio that he created most of his iconic music. Sheriff’s officials in Minnesota say deputies found music superstar Prince unresponsive in an elevator after they were summoned to his suburban Minneapolis compound. Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson says first responders tried CPR but couldn’t revive the 57-year-old musician. Olson says Prince was pronounced dead at 10:07 a.m. Thursday, about half an hour after deputies arrived. Medical examiners have received Prince’s body and plan to perform an autopsy Friday. Last week, Prince had to be taken to a hospital after his flight home from Atlanta made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill. A representative said the singer had been fighting the flu for several weeks.
“I’m shocked to hear that Prince passed at such a young age,” said Beach Boys auteur Brian Wilson on Twitter. “Musically, he could do it all: sing, play, arrange and produce.”
The Minneapolis-born artist released several dozen studio albums, and had at least as much unreleased music in his archives. His hits included the album and movie “Purple Rain,” which established him as a major star in the mid-’80s. He famously broke away from the major-label system in the mid-’90s to become an independent artist. The hits dried up, but he continued to steadily release music and pioneered the use of the Internet as a distributor for his music. He toured infrequently in recent years, but when he did, he continued to be a huge draw. A 2004 arena tour produced $87 million in revenue.
He was mysterious and elusive by design, granting few interviews and shrouding much of his behind-the-scenes workaholic tendencies in secrecy, especially once he started sequestering himself at his Paisley Park Studios, a $10 million state-of-the-art recording studio and performance space in the hills outside Minneapolis. It was a sanctuary where he spent the bulk of his time, often toiling till dawn on music and occasionally throwing impromptu listening parties and jam sessions for friends and fans.
Prince could be contradictory. His explicit lyrics drew the ire of Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center in the ’80s, but he spent most of the last decades of his life as a Jehovah’s Witness, even going door-to-door in his community to spread his beliefs. He worked within the major-label system until the ’90s, then fought back against what he described as an unnecessarily restrictive release schedule. In protest, he was photographed with the word “slave” written on his face and then began using an unpronounceable symbol to identify himself rather than his name. Friends were instructed to refer to him as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” or simply “The Artist.” He won his release from Warners and began releasing albums independently, becoming one of the first major artists to embrace the Internet to communicate with and market music directly to his fans. Yet in 2010 he called the Internet “completely over” and zealously fought against any digital distribution of his music.
As a cultural figure, he was a major mainstream artist – going toe-to-toe in the blockbuster-album ’80s with such performers as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston. Yet he maintained a cutting-edge sense of experimentation in his music and image. He appeared on his “Dirty Mind” album cover dressed in woman’s lingerie, and his androgynous imagery underlined the notion that he was an outsider, an artist who wasn’t playing by the same industry rules as everyone else.
That independent spirit resonated with subsequent generations of musicians. As singer Neko Case said Thursday on Twitter, “It makes me shiver when I think of all the people who might not have found the bravery to make art if it weren’t for Prince and (David) Bowie.”
Apart from the controversy, Prince was widely recognized as one of the most innovative musicians of his time. He was a master synthesist, an artist who could mix his diverse array of influences — James Brown, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, George Clinton, Sly Stone – or quote (and sometimes outdo) a contemporary, as when he performed an eight-minute version of Radiohead’s “Creep” in 2008 at the Coachella music festival in California. He was a master entertainer and showman, a superb dancer who could also play a masterful extended guitar solo in the lineage of Jimi Hendrix or Parliament-Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel.
Born Prince Rogers Nelson in 1958, he grew up in a musical household in Minneapolis. His father led a jazz band and his mother was a singer, and the teenage Prince developed his own vocal and instrumental chops in a series of local bands with Andre Cymone (who would become a key member of Prince’s band the Revolution) and Morris Day, who would go on to sing lead vocals in the Prince-produced band the Time. He was signed to Warner Brothers as a teenager, and wrote, produced and performed his 1978 debut album, “For You.” At age 19, he handled all the vocals and played everything from the electric guitar, keyboards, bass and drums to congas, finger cymbals and orchestral bells.
It would set the stage for a career that was largely self-directed, often to the consternation of his managers and record companies. After two albums of libidinous R&B, he embraced the terse vocabulary of new wave and post-punk on the “Dirty Mind” album in 1980, and soon began reeling off a string of masterpieces that incorporated everything from raw funk and hard rock to Joni Mitchell-style ballads and avant-garde experiments: “1999” (1982), “Purple Rain” (1984), “Sign O’ the Times” (1987). He was the driving force in the “Minneapolis sound” that invaded the pop charts during the ’80s, often acting as producer, songwriter and musician for such local contemporaries the Time (which included future Janet Jackson producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis), Vanity 6, Apollonia and Sheila E.
They all followed the lead of Prince, who scored more than two dozen top-40 singles, including “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss” and “Raspberry Beret.” On “When Doves Cry,” he stripped away many of the instruments, most crucially the bass, and left behind a stark skeleton: a drum machine, spasms of guitar, a distorted vocal, jabbing synthesizers. It became one of his signature songs, and surely among the most radical tracks ever to top the singles charts.
After his falling out with Warner Brothers in the ’90s, he became a self-contained music industry. The learning curve was steep, and his label had difficulty processing orders for his self-released music. But he showed a knack for striking advantageous deals with the music corporations he once openly loathed in order to improve distribution, while retaining the rights to his music. In this way, he created a new business model that allowed him to work within the music industry while retaining his artistic freedom. He assembled a series of stellar bands that mixed sharp newcomers with veteran musicians he admired, such as Sly Stone bassist Larry Graham and James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker.
“My favorite instrument?” Prince told the Tribune in 2012. “It’s the band.”
No two shows were the same, and each night offered a new take on the Prince legacy – he’d improvise like a big-band-era jazz conductor, or keep an arena in thrall by simply sitting down at a bar stool with an acoustic guitar and playing tour guide through his musical past.
“What I’m doing now — giving the albums directly to the fans, changing the show every night to reflect that it’s about music and not a circus with lots of pyrotechnics — has the spirit of the ’60s in it,” he told the Tribune in a 2004 interview. “I often wonder if I’d be better placed there.”
In the rare times Prince would sit down for an interview, he offered a sense of perspective that was far wider than the album he was releasing that month or the show he would play the next week. So many artists of his stature would talk to the media only when they had something to promote. Prince always took a wider view.
One of his most popular songs, “Let’s Go Crazy,” sounds like it begins inside a church, in a moment of crisis, a funeral perhaps: “Dearly beloved/We are gathered here today/To get through this thing called life.”
Prince’s life would endure a series of crises, moments where his image and lyrics were questioned, his motives deemed suspect, his music considered irrelevant. Many of his albums in the last two decades died unceremoniously, forgotten almost as soon as they were released, though there were musical gems scattered throughout almost all of them. But Prince was undaunted. He always saw himself as a lifer, the type of artist who would be making albums till the moment he died. Indeed, his most recent pair of albums – “HITnRUN Phase One” and “HITnRUN Phase Two” came out only four months ago.
“I heard ‘Prince is crazy’ so much that it had an effect on me,” he told the Tribune on a 1997 visit to his Paisley Park studio, soon after he left Warner Brothers. “So one day I said, ‘Let me just check out.’ Here there is solitude, silence – I like to stay in this controlled environment. People say I’m out of touch, but I’ll do 25 or 30 more albums – I’m gonna catch up with Sinatra – so you tell me who’s out of touch. One thing I ain’t gonna run out of is music.”
greg@gregkot.com
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