“Too many hits”: Prince’s surprising take on Queen
There never seemed to be a true off switch whenever it came to Prince.
As much as people love listening to some of his greatest tunes from the 1980s, ‘The Purple One’ didn’t want to stop for a second once he reached the big time, and most of us would be happy to have at least one album under our belts that was half as good as the 40 records that he put out during his lifetime. But even if he had a lot of great tunes to choose from, he couldn’t even fathom the kind of hits that his contemporaries were working with.
Granted, not every one of Prince’s records was cut out to be one of the biggest hits in the world. Purple Rain was a goddamn avalanche of great music when it came out, but was anyone seriously listening to all three hours of Emancipation and thinking that every one of those songs was going to end up on the charts? Absolutely not. This was Prince following his bliss, and even some of the lower lights from his catalogue were a lot better than they had any right to be when he made them.
I mean, a good chunk of his recorded output was albums that he didn’t want to make or release, but had to because he was on Warner Bros, and yet records like Chaos and Disorder are an example of him doing alternative rock better than nearly anyone else in the 1990s. It’s impossible for someone to manage as many genres as he did, but that’s all because he was following in the footsteps of the greats.
Some of his heroes, like Stevie Wonder, never bothered staying in one genre for the rest of their lives, and when looking at the biggest rock bands he was sharing a stage with, none of them wanted to be one-trick ponies, either. As much as those Rolling Stones fans hated him when he opened for them in the 1980s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were as interested in switching up their styles in the 1960s before coming right back to the blues throughout their final years on the charts.
But there are hardly any seasoned rock and roll bands that have covered as much ground as Queen has. They will forever be known as the band with mammoth singers that sang tunes like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but considering every one of their hits was a bold new direction, it was hard to get a handle on what they were doing. They could inhabit everything from gospel to synthpop to disco to rockabilly when they wanted to, and Prince could only stand in reverence for what they put out.
Sure, ‘The Purple One’ had them beat in terms of sheer volume, but there was no way that anyone could touch what the rock and roll monarchs did in his eyes, with Brian May recalling, “I remember Prince saying, ‘Too many hits, too many hits.’ It’s a nice problem to have. We’ll be throwing in a few songs which people won’t have seen live for a very long time; the problem is what to leave out.”
And it’s not like Prince didn’t build up his same backlog of instant classics, either. He may have cared less about which songs he played every single time he performed, but when you’ve sold out stadiums and conquered the world with a gig like Queen did at Live Aid, it would have been impossible for anyone to go to their shows without hearing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or ‘We Are the Champions’ whenever they walked in the door.
The band’s voice may be silenced now, but even when they go out on tour with Adam Lambert, it’s not like they forgot how to give the people what they want. They had built up a repertoire that any rock band would dream of having, and there was no chance that they were going to leave until they had every single member of the audience on their feet stamping along to ‘We Will Rock You’.
