The singer Mick Jagger said was out of everybody’s league: “He outperformed almost everyone”
Mick Jagger has witnessed countless artists be christened the next best thing, only for them to fail to live up to the hype and become yesterday’s news.
However, once in a generation, if that, an irrefutable talent emerges that nobody can deny who is clearly destined for greatness. They possess a never-before-seen characteristic which makes them unlike any other artist around and fills their peers with fear at the thought of following them on stage.
Anyone with a degree of musical understanding knew that Prince firmly fell into the category above. He was a one-of-one, who couldn’t be contained in a singular box, rejecting industry norms and genre tags. Prince was the total package, and Jagger instantly recognised that ‘The Purple One’ was cut from a silkier cloth than the rest.
After being awe-struck by the new kid on the block, Jagger went out of his way to invite Prince to open up for The Rolling Stones. In theory, it should have been a perfect match, while also forcing The Stones to up their game and not be shown up by their own opener.
However, rather than delivering a night that should be remembered as the stuff of legend, it was a living nightmare for Prince. He was still a fledgling artist at this stage, with his musical stylings and flamboyant persona yet to be fully welcomed by the public, not least by the not-so liberal crowd who frequented Stones concerts around that time.
Rather than being welcomed with open arms at the LA Coliseum, he was booed, jeered, and faced alleged racism from the crowd, which prompted a tearful exit, which saw Prince fly back to Minnesota before the second show.
Jagger, who was upset by the scenes, successfully persuaded Prince to return to Los Angeles to finish the run of shows. Even if the crowd weren’t on Prince’s side, Jagger was, and not for the last time either.
In 1995, he stuck up for Prince when everybody else had started to ridicule him when he started releasing music as the ‘Artist Formerly Known as Prince’. In the media, he had become a figure of fun, viewed as nothing more than an easy, cheap laugh for comedians rather than a musical genius, which Jagger deemed greatly unfair.
“I think Prince is a great artist, very traditional in some ways,” he told Rolling Stone.
“Prince has been overlooked. But he’s so incredibly in the mould of the James Brown sort of performer. He broke a lot of musical modes and invented a lot of styles, and couldn’t keep up with himself. Very prolific, which is rare.”
Jagger wanted people to judge Prince on his music alone and view him as somebody who possessed a singular, uncompromising willingness that no one else had in their arsenal.
“So Prince has a lot of talent as a writer,” Jagger then said, before stating that it was in the live environment where he truly came into his own, adding, “I’ve seen great performances by Prince. He’s outperformed almost everyone. I’d rate him at the top. I don’t think there’s a lot of competition from new artists.”
When these comments were made in 1995, many had begun to take the talent of Prince for granted, causing his commercial sales to tumble and causing him to be perceived as a faded star. Jagger never bought into that theory, and soon enough, everyone else had re-aligned to his perspective.
In 2016, when the purple light was switched off permanently, Jagger eulogised Prince, describing him as a “revolutionary artist” whose “talent was limitless”.
While Prince was a complex individual away from the stage, every word said by Jagger is demonstrably true, and he’s unquestionably an artist who will continue to inspire in 100 years.
