The band Prince claimed that he could outdo: “I can play that kind of music”
Music has never been about making everything a competition. There are always going to be people who play better than you, but it’s more about how you use music as an emotional translator rather than an excuse to play a billion notes per second whenever the tape starts rolling. But even when it comes to song crafting, Prince knew that by the 1990s, he could school artists like U2 any day of the week.
Compared to where both acts had been in the 1980s, though, the Irish lads and ‘The Purple One’ had gone through major makeovers. Prince always had a baseline level of quality to every one of his albums, but since he never fully stopped for a second, it’s easy to pick out pieces of every genre under the sun coming to the forefront, like New Jack Swing on ‘Gett Off’ or the beginnings of rap on ‘My Name is Prince’.
Whereas with U2, it was a case of them pairing things down. They had already conquered both sides of the Atlantic after The Joshua Tree exploded, but since they were releasing music concurrently with the rise of alternative acts like Nirvana, Achtung Baby was their excuse to put their egos on the shelf for a little bit and make a caricature of what a rockstar is supposed to be.
But Prince would never let go of his ego for a second. He didn’t come this far to suddenly pair down his sound, but when he was up for different Grammy awards for his music at the start of the 1990s, seeing the new flavour of stadium post-modern irony was not sitting well with him.
As far as he could tell, what they were doing was a blatant retread of what had been going on on the street for years now. Just listening back to some of Prince’s deep cuts on albums like Sign o’ the Times, he was clearly capable of merging genres the same way that U2 were doing, and even if the Academy for Recording Arts said otherwise, he was going to make sure that everyone knew what he was capable of.
In an interview with Rolling Stone shortly afterwards, Prince said that he could teach the group a thing or two about what a real rock star can pull off, saying, “I don’t go to awards shows anymore. I’m not saying I’m better than anybody else. But you’ll be sitting there at the Grammys, and U2 will beat you. And you say to yourself, ‘Wait a minute, I can play that kind of music, too. I know how to do that, you dig? But you will not do ‘Housequake.’”
Even once the alternative generation was in full swing, Prince’s lesser albums still had far more staying power than anything that the 1980s pinup stars could have done. As much as he didn’t care for it upon release, Chaos and Disorder might be one of his most neglected albums, featuring him playing alternative rock and having the same kind of fire in his music that Soundgarden could have hoped for.
And given that this is the same man who dominated the Super Bowl and delivered a guitar solo to end all guitar solos at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, U2 was far from the first group on his hit list. He was surrounded by worthy competitors of rock and roll, but it hardly mattered when he could clear all of them out the minute he strapped on his guitar.
