Prince: 10 years without the musician of musicians who sold 100 million records

BarcelonaOn March 15, 2004, the annual induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The date was used to pay tribute to George Harrison, who had died a few years earlier, and the event concluded with a performance of While my guitar gently weeps by Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and Dhani Harrison, the ex-Beatle's son, and Prince, who was also being inducted as an artist into the academy and would join them on guitar. As Joel Gallen, the gala's director, explained years later to The New York Times, during the morning rehearsals, Prince remained on the sidelines, playing basic chords, following the tone. Although they encouraged him to shine, he stayed in the shadows, in a corner of the stage, without standing out. No one expected what happened hours later. The performance went smoothly until the song was nearing its end, and then Prince delivered one of the most iconic guitar improvisation solos in the history of popular music. It's three minutes of virtuosity, genius, and rhythm. And passion, dedication, and enthusiasm. The astonished faces of his fellow musicians on stage speak for themselves. Finally, the show ended, Prince threw his instrument in the air and walked off stage.

Having died just a decade ago and born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis, he had all the genetic predisposition to end up dedicating himself to music. The son of a singer and a jazz musician, he lived with instruments from a very young age. As happens with so many geniuses throughout history, he was self-taught and had a supernatural ear. Although his first musical contact was with a piano, when he was a child he learned to play the openings of his favorite television series, he quickly moved on to the guitar, with which he would become a legend. And from six strings to everywhere: on his first album, For you,, he even played all 27 instruments himself.

Experimentation and risk

During the eighties and much of the nineties, Prince was practically the only artist who went head-to-head with Michael Jackson and Madonna. All three up there, in the pop Olympus. They dominated the charts on a global scale, but Prince always had the will to go one or two steps further. "They were born in the same summer, that of 1958, and they exploded in popularity as solo artists at the same time, but Prince is more comparable to Bowie, for experimentation, risk-taking and research in all senses, musical, aesthetic or with the theme of gender," explains Montse Frisach, cultural critic and author of Prince. The purple alchemist.

The figures his career amassed are spectacular –he has sold over 100 million records worldwide–, but what is incalculable is his influence, which isn't about numbers. “He was a musician’s musician”, explains film director, writer and Prince fan Carlo Padial. His legacy proves it, having endured almost above that of any other musician of the eighties. And we see this now, as genres fuse relentlessly and black music centers a good part of the most successful and interesting pop on the planet, and Prince's work resonates more visionary than ever: “He has influenced very many musicians. You only have to listen to very famous current productions, like The Weeknd's, where Prince is everywhere. Possibly, the general public isn't aware of it, but people who make music continue to admire him greatly”. Humorist Magí Garcia, also a great follower of the Minneapolis native, goes a step further: “All the R&B vocal groups of the nineties wouldn't exist without him”.

A prolific legacy

Between 1978 and 2016, Prince released a total of 39 studio albums. It is an almost unattainable amount of material, a very unusual fact for a mainstream artist. To give us an idea, musicians of his status, like Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen, produced between half and a third of the albums in the same years. And it is that he composed many well-known songs –Purple rain, Kiss, When doves cry and a very long etcetera – but his quest was much deeper than a radio hit. Nevertheless, his creative peak also coincides with his peaks of popularity, especially remarkable during his first decade of activity, with SignO' The Times, a double album, probably marking his great moment. “With that album he breaks everything. It could be seen as a commercial suicide, but Prince has the drive to raise the ceiling of mainstream music much more than to make a greatest hits album,” says Garcia.

Excuse the macabre comment, but Prince was futuristic even in death, due to an accidental overdose of fentanyl. Of this synthetic opioid, now the cause of a rampant pandemic in the United States, there was not even talk in 2016. And from here, as the cliché goes: the artist dies and everything else remains. Starting with the music, of course, the Minneapolis Sound that broke racial and gender barriers of the time and united the African-American audience, fans of funk and R&B, with the rock and New Wave of white listeners. And much more: his perpetual dispute with the music industry to maintain artistic control and copyright of his work, which included re-recording – an action that Taylor Swift imitated twenty years later –, the literal conversion into a symbol, or non-binary ambiguity. He was as big a star as the best of his generation, but he surpassed them in artistic ambition and industry vision. But that's not all: “Although he is a pop culture icon, he remains largely unknown. And partly it is because he did not make it easy at all – says Carlo Padial –. He has such an extensive and changing world that it is difficult for the general public to approach it massively. He is mainstream and at the same time very cryptic”.

He is certainly not as remembered as Michael Jackson, but just ten years after his death, on April 21, 2016, he remains one of the most present artists in spirit. “There was no one as complete as Prince, who composed, sang, had a stage presence, danced, and played all the instruments as he did. In this sense, he was unique”, says Montse Frisach. Perhaps time has never proven an artist as right as the future proved him. This is surely the most definitive triumph.