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Prince Is Dead at 57 Prince Is Dead at 57
(35 minutes later)
Prince, the singularly flamboyant and prolific songwriter and performer whose decades of music transcended and remade genres like funk, rock and R&B, died on Thursday at his Paisley Park studio and estate in Minnesota, according to a statement from his publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. He was 57. Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died Thursday at his residence, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., according to a statement from his publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. He was 57.
Across a career of more than 35 years, Prince released 39 albums and won seven Grammy Awards while being lauded not only for his songs, but their visual presentation both onstage and on camera. His 1984 film “Purple Rain” is widely considered one of the best and most influential music films, while its accompanying soundtrack won an Oscar and spawned the No. 1 hits “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry.” Other indelible Prince singles included “Little Red Corvette,” “Kiss,” “Raspberry Beret” and “Sign ‘O’ the Times.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. No cause of death has been given. 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.”
Having never slowed his output or performances, Prince released four albums in the last 18 months, including the two-part “HITnRUN” in 2015. He sold some 40 million albums overall in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, 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 the arena 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.
In addition to being a commercial force, Prince was a trailblazer for artists’ rights and development, schooling and supporting numerous musical protégés — Morris Day, Sheila E, his most recent collaborators 3rdeyegirl — while waging his own fight against record labels, famously changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol and writing “slave” across his face during a dispute with his label at the time, Warner Bros. 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 and “I Feel for You” for Chaka Khan. With the 1984 film and album “Purple Rain,” Prince 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.
He was a provocative performer who often played with androgyny and overt sexuality, posing suggestively on his album covers and shocking audiences at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007 with a massive phallic guitar silhouette. Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. 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. Often, Prince would follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.
Prince had recently been touring as a bare-bones solo act on the “Piano and a Microphone” tour. And last month, he announced plans to release a memoir, tentatively titled “The Beautiful Ones,” for the publisher Random House. In 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. But 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.
“We’re starting right at the beginning — my first memory — and hopefully we can move all the way to the Super Bowl,” he said at an intimate concert celebrating the book deal. 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 huge troves of music at once, his intensely private persona. Yet among musicians and listeners of multiple generations, he was admired well-nigh universally.
Artists across mediums and generations mourned Prince’s death online Thursday, including Katy Perry, Samuel L. Jackson, Bootsy Collins, Chris Rock and many more. “Long Live The King,” Questlove tweeted.
Full obituary to follow.