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Magazine

Prince and the CompetitionBy JODY ROSEN APRIL 22, 2016

One of the more impressive artifacts making the Internet rounds in the last

24 hours is a video, recorded at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

induction ceremony, of an all-star band playing the Beatles’ “While My

Guitar Gently Weeps.” The performance is a tribute to George Harrison, a

posthumous honoree that evening, by a group that includes his son Dhani,

along with old bandmates and collaborators like Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and

Steve Winwood. Then there’s another person on stage, too, standing a bit

apart from the rest, bent over an electric guitar. He’s a small man, in a dark

pinstriped suit, a scarlet red shirt and matching derby hat — a look that

splits the difference between toreador and pimp. For a while, the guy hangs

back in the shadows, strumming and looking a bit bored. But three and a

half minutes in, he saunters into the spotlight to take a guitar solo.

The guitarist is Prince, and what ensues is something like a cyclone. A

huge sound comes roaring out of his Telecaster, an onslaught of notes and

riffs and block chords that continues rippling and lashing for nearly threeminutes. It’s an attack that seems intended not just to extinguish all

memory of Eric Clapton’s famous solo on the original recording, but to

vanquish George Harrison and the Beatles for good measure. It’s a brazen

hijacking of an In Memoriam tribute, a breach of etiquette — and a

wondrous exhibition of pure showmanship and ego. When the song ends,

Prince whips off his guitar, flings it in the air and peacocks off, stage left.

To mount a proscenium in the company of Prince, who died Thursday

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at age 57, was to bask in greatness and to risk humiliation. On occasions

like this one, Prince’s performances had a way of shifting from show

business as usual — a star’s prerogative to entertain and strut his stuff —

into the realm of pure blood sport. He aimed not only to put on a great

show but also to show others up, to singe lesser mortals with pyrotechnic

displays of musicianship and charisma. His competitive instincts could

overwhelm his gentler, courtlier ones. A month before the Rock Hall gig, he

appeared on the Grammy Awards, charging through a medley of his hits

alongside Beyoncé. You could see him straining to be courteous, to cede the

spotlight a bit. But after a few minutes, he appeared to lose patience and

cranked up the virtuosity — dancing, shredding on guitar, sliding from the

depth-sounder bottom end of his vocal register into an otherworldly

falsetto. The spectacle concluded with another guitar toss, and Beyoncé,

one of the world’s more unflappable performers, was left looking rather

windblown, teetering on her high heels.

Antagonism has always been one of music’s animating forces. It runs

through history: the cutting contests of Storyville jazz musicians, Bronx

street corner battle-rap showdowns, Mozart versus Salieri, Beatles versusStones, Whitney versus Mariah. But Prince may have been the most

tenacious musical competitor of them all. His ambition was outrageous:

With every song, every note, he aimed to be the best, the baddest, the most

wizardly, the most unimpeachable. He seemed to have swallowed an

encyclopedia of music history and developed world-historical ambition to

go with it. He was a one-man band extraordinaire, the world’s best rhythm

section and the world’s best background vocal choir. He could sing like Al

Green or, if the mood struck, John Lennon; he could work a bandstand as

fearsomely as James Brown and play a guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix. His

death came as a shock because he had strode into his sixth decade in

apparently undiminished form, with the waistline and hairline of a man

half his age and the stamina of a man even younger than that. His

hitmaking days were behind him, and his pop-culture profile waxed and

waned, but whenever he resurfaced, he served notice that he was

indomitable: He could still sing, dance, play instruments, write songs and

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produce records better than everyone else.

Rivalry defined his career from the beginning. On his first major

concert tour, in the winter and spring of 1979-80, Prince was the warm-up

act for Rick James, another rising star who was scrambling racial andmusical categories. Tension flared between the two singers; James

complained to journalists about the sensationalism of Prince’s act, with its

eye-popping clothes and obscene lyrics. James was right, of course. Prince

played the weird card, and not just because it came naturally to him. Weird

was good business; Prince knew he could trump the competition by

standing out. An elfin black man in lingerie belting out a jittery New Wave

song about a 32-year-old nymphomaniac who keeps her 16-year-old brother as a sex slave — the shtick was hard to ignore.

But the real strangeness of Prince was in his sound: jagged pop-funk

that hit the 1980s with an electric jolt. Musicians in the early ’80s found

themselves surrounded by any number of new high-tech toys, instruments

they hadn’t quite learned how to use. Prince figured them out, devising a

new brand of dance music based on a heretofore unheard-of idea: that

synthesizer and drum machines could carry a sweaty funk groove as

forcefully as guitars and drums and brass sections had. Prince’s music was

a triumph of minimalism, of addition by subtraction. The power of his best

singles lies in what is not there as much as what is. You hear it in the eerily

clattering “When Doves Cry,” which jettisons bass altogether, and in the

throb of “Sign o’ the Times,” which tilts in the opposite direction, pushing a

pulsing bass way out front.

Those and other catchy, sonically visionary songs made Prince a

superstar. Today, it’s striking how much more adventurous Prince’s records

were than those of fellow ’80s titans — including his chief friendly nemesis,

Michael Jackson. Some of his singles even took dead aim at those rivals.

“Raspberry Beret” played like a funky, libidinous sendup of Bruce

Springsteen’s Heartland road songs. (“I put her on the back of my bike/And

we went riding/Down by Old Man Johnson’s farm.”) The astounding guitar work on the “Purple Rain” soundtrack seemed directed at Jackson, who had

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muscled up his music on hits like “Beat It.” The point was unmistakable: If

Michael Jackson wanted a rip-roaring guitar solo, he had to corral Eddie

Van Halen and pay him a generous day rate. Prince could peel off the solo

himself, presumably in between orgies.

A pop psychologist might diagnose a Napoleon complex in Prince, who

stood just 5 feet 2 — 5 feet 6 in purple platforms. As he aged, his digs at

competitors sometimes turned shrill. As late as 2004, he was still taking

swipes at Michael Jackson: “My voice is getting higher/And Eye ain’t never

had my nose done . . . That’s the other guy,” he sang on “Life ‘o’ the Party.”

That song was on “Musicology,” a comeback album that found Prince

playing the fuddy-duddy, scorning hip-hop. (“Take your pick/Turntable ora band?” he sniffed.) It was a weirdly reactionary move for a guy who had

always kept moving toward the new and the next.

But Prince was also a more charming, earthier, funnier guy than many

realized. His sense of humor shines through in dozens of songs, including

those that revel in surreal nonsense. (“Let’s go crazy/Let’s go nuts/Let’s

look for the purple banana/’Til they put us in the truck.”) He was least

convincing when he turned to weightier, spiritual matters, as he often did.

Gospel testimonies such as “The Cross” and “The Ladder” are bogged down

by moralism and clichés, and albums like the 2001 Jehovah’s Witness

manifesto, “The Rainbow Children,” are close to unlistenable.

The true subject of Prince’s grandest songs is the grandeur of Prince’s

songs. I’m still not sure what “purple rain” is; no one is. I do know that

“Purple Rain” is a tour de force, Prince’s audacious attempt to write theultimate rock power ballad, just as “Adore” is the ultimate falsetto soul

ballad, and “Kiss” is the ultimate bare-bones funk jam, and “1999” is the

ultimate apocalyptic party anthem, and so on. Prince’s records induce awe

— not at God’s grace or the majesty of the universe, but at a more local

wonder: the fact that one human person, one mind and body, could contain

so much music. His religious views were esoteric and ever-shifting and,

frankly, not so interesting. But his faith in music and his own paranormalgift for it never wavered. His most persuasive theological pronouncement

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came in “My Name Is Prince.” “In the beginning God made the sea,” he

sings. “But on the seventh day he made me.” Amen.

Jody Rosen is a critic at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

© 2016 The New York Times Company