PRINCE

born June 7, 1958, Minneapolis, Minn., U.S. original name Prince Rogers Nelson, also known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, The Artist, and influential singer, guitarist, songwriter, producer, dancer, and performer on keyboards, drums, and bass who was among the most talented American musicians of his generation. Like Stevie Wonder, he was a rare composer who could perform at a professional level on virtually all the instruments he required, and a considerable number of his recordings feature him in all the performing roles. Prince's recording career began with funk and soul marketed to a black audience; his early music also reflected the contemporary musical impact of disco. Later records incorporated a vast array of influences, including jazz, punk, heavy metal, the Beatles, and hip-hop, usually within an overall approach most informed by funky up-tempo styles and soulful ballads; the latter often featured his exquisite falsetto singing. Taking an early interest in music, Prince began playing the piano at age seven and mastered the guitar and drums by the time he joined his first band at age 14. With very few African-American residents, his hometown, Minneapolis, was an unlikely site for the development of a major black star, but Prince even managed to lead other local musicians, most notably Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, to major success. Prince's lyrics often address sexuality with frankness and imagination, and his music constructs correspondingly intense experiences of desire. Much of his work, in its lyrics and imagery, struggles with the constriction of social conventions and categories. As one of his biographers put it, The whole thrust of Prince's art can be understood in terms of a desire to escape the social identities thrust upon him by simple virtue of his being small, black, and male. Prince explored typographical oddities in his song titles and lyrics as another way of evading convention. In 1993 he announced that he had changed his name to a combination of the male and female gender signs-. There is also a strong religious impulse in some of his music, sometimes fused into a kind of sacred erotic experience that has roots in African-American churches. "Little Red Corvette" (1983) was Prince's first big crossover hit, gaining airplay on at a time when virtually no black artists appeared on the influential new medium. Purple Rain (1984) made him one of the major stars of the 1980s and remains his biggest-selling album. Three of its singles were hits: the frenetic funk of "Let's Go Crazy," the androgynous vulnerability of "When Doves Cry," and the anthemic title cut. Thereafter he continued to produce inventive music of broad appeal; outside the United States he was particularly popular in Britain and the rest of Europe. Throughout most of his career, Prince's prolific inventiveness as a songwriter clashed with his record company's policy of releasing only a single album each year. As a backlog of completed but unreleased recordings piled up in his vault, he gave songs to other performers-some of whom recorded at and for Paisley Park, the studio and label he established in suburban Minneapolis-and even organized ostensibly independent groups, such as the Time, to record his material. His 1996 album, Emancipation, celebrated the end of his Warner Brothers contract, which enabled him to release as much music as he liked on his NPG label. Later he explored marketing his work on the Internet and through private arrangements with retail chains as a means of circumventing the control of large record companies. Robert Walser