Understanding the feud between Michael Jackson and Prince
Prince and Michael Jackson had glaring similarities but striking differences in their artistry and as people. For a time, they were the biggest pop stars on the planet, yet, their relationship was never congenial.
Jackson was born two months after Prince, but when it came to their careers, he had a head start on his peer. ‘The King of Pop’ was robbed of a childhood and knew nothing else from life apart from performing on front of a stage in front of thousands. Growing up in the public eye was never his ambition, and in truth, Jackson didn’t have a say in the matter, but it did help immeasurably when he went solo.
On the other hand, Prince had an organic rise from the bottom, and he began by playing the club circuit. Although Jackson had no say in becoming a child star, it did wonders for his pop career and allowed him to skip the lower rungs of the ladder.
In 1978, Prince launched his career with the underrated For You, which was largely slept on. Jackson rose to the top of the pile the following year with Off The Wall. A rivalry started to develop between the two artists, who consistently tried to outdo each other.
Considering they were both at the top of the pop brigade, it was natural there would be an element of comparison between the two young hitmakers, but Jackson didn’t enjoy it.
During the writing of his autobiography, Moonwalker, Jackson gave his opinion on Prince. “I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” he explained. “I have proven myself since I was real little. It’s not fair. He feels like I’m his opponent. I hope he changes because, boy, he’s gonna get hurt. He’s the type that might commit suicide or something.”
Unsurprisingly, the comment didn’t make his book, and it didn’t surface until 2015 when The Daily Mirror unearthed the archived recording. In the same conversation, Jackson added Prince was “one of the rudest people I have ever met” and claimed he had acted “mean and nasty to my family.”
Additionally, he said, Prince “made a fool himself” by falling into a crowd after thinking a lamp post was a prop when it was real. Jackson continued: “People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video.”
Jackson’s hostility towards Prince might seem confusing. However, it can be traced back to 1985 when the latter refused to work with him. He brought together the world’s biggest artists to fight the AIDS crisis with ‘We Are The World’, but Prince wasn’t interested in the project.
Two years later, Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones tried to recruit Prince to collaborate on ‘Bad’, and he once again rebuffed their offer. “We invited [Prince] out to Michael’s house to sing on ‘Bad’, and he was very intelligent about it,” Jones explained in 2017. “Prince was always competing with Michael. So I told Michael, ‘you sit there, and Prince sits there, so it won’t look like we’re ganging up on him to do the record’. It was a beautiful meeting, a funny meeting, and [Prince] said, ‘you don’t need me on this, it’s going to be a number one anyway’ – which it was.”
Clearly, Jackson didn’t take the rejection as well as Jones. Prince turning him down on two occasions is precisely why he privately exploded about him during a conversation for his autobiography, and their relationship never recovered.
