The artist Miles Davis called a combination of “James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye… and Charlie Chaplin”
He was cooler than a polar bear’s toenail, so being complimentary wasn’t really top of the Miles Davis playbook.
Instead, he played horn mightier than Genghis Khan’s maurading empire and stole your girl with a steely stare. He was so good at this that he didn’t need to get chummy with anyone and pay them lip service. Yet, there was one fellow who he fixed with a slew of glowing comparisons.
After collaborating with Prince, he pitched him as the perfect alloy of a string of strangely disparate talents. According to Rolling Stone, Davis compared him to a combination of “James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye… and Charlie Chaplin. How can you miss that?” he asked.
The answer: very easily. But maybe he was right. He had the blood and thunder of Brown, the ingenuity of Hendrix, the soul and sexuality of Gaye, and the performative touch of Chaplin, all balled up into a unique, diminutive 5’3″ frame.
So, you might imagine that Prince may well have blushed when he was hailed as a mix of heroes by one of the most revered musicians in history. But you’d be imagining it all wrong. Prince hated comparisons. To Prince, he was just Prince. Most of all, he hated being compared to Hendrix.
While he might have agreed that the late ‘Foxey Lady’ luminary was a master of his instrument, that’s where the similarities stopped. “If they really listened to my stuff,” he said of the critics who perhaps problematically generalised because of skin tone more so than anything else, “they’d hear more Santana influence than Hendrix.”
“Hendrix played more blues,” he said. “Santana was prettier.” And that was closer to the beautified pop that he was trying to deliver. In truth, this drive to showcase individualism is something that Davis would certainly appreciate.
As the jazz master said himself, “It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.” Prince embodied that to such an extent that he even changed his name. The little Purple One simply never stood still, as is evidenced by his apparently stellar basketball skills, too.
Along the way, he enamoured more folks than just Miles Davis – not that ‘just’ should ever have entered that sentence. In fact, he towered over many of his peers to such an extent that after watching him live, he was so godlike in his greatness that Paul Westerberg said he was “fucking embarrassed to be alive”.
So, while he might have had a smattering of all the stars Davis compared him to within him, he was somehow more than the sum of his parts. Hence why Davis also hailed him “a genius”.
