The one singer Prince said mattered more than anyone
In a world full of pop stars that like to play the game, Prince played by his own rules.
He may have grown up knowing what the music industry could have been like, but from his wilderness period of changing his name to a symbol to making music quicker than his label could put it out, he didn’t want to be known as the kind of pinup star that most people loved in the age of MTV. He was the epitome of what a true artist was supposed to be, and the only way for him to be satisfied was to get the kind of pat on the back from the artists that actually mattered to him.
Because when listening to some of the biggest names that Prince worked with, it’s not like he had set his sights on being a one-stop shop for music. There’s a good chance that people could get pretty much any kind of song that they were looking for going through his catalogue, but even when he could make an entire record of him playing every single instrument, he was always willing to take a chance on someone who really knew their stuff.
He was looking for musicians rather than being an A&R man, and listening to what people like Sheila E could do on his records was only the beginning of his legendary track record for finding great artists. Even though there would be many great artists from the New Power Generation, hearing someone like Lizzo show up on one of his records years before she ever blew up is one of the many surreal surprises that ‘The Purple One’ had his finger on the pulse of.
Then again, that’s because all of the greatest bands that he followed were always about musicians working off of each other. It’s hard to hit on that same sense of groove when everything’s being played by one person, but when you listen to a record by Sly and the Family Stone or even some of James Brown’s live recordings, you can hear every single member of the band reacting and responding to whatever lick that their bandmate played.
There was a lot of structure to Prince’s tunes, but there was never anyone who spoke the language of jamming quite like George Clinton. Parliament Funkadelic never apologised for making songs that were out of the ordinary, and while there is a touch of Eddie Hazel in some of Prince’s greatest solos, he always came back to Clinton when he was unsure about where his music was heading.
The critics might not have liked an album like Around the World in a Day when it first came out, but as long as Prince got the approval of Clinton, that was all that mattered, saying, “Not long ago I talked to George Clinton, a man who knows and has done so much for funk. George told me how much he liked Around the World in a Day. You know how much more his words mean than those from some mamma-jamma wearing glasses and an alligator shirt behind a typewriter?”
And it’s not like Clinton was wrong in his assessment, either. While there have been countless times when the world has been behind the times when it comes to Prince, the idea of slamming him for going into psychedelic territory just feels wrong today. He wanted to put himself in the same league as his favourite rock acts, and even if he managed to make an album that pulled from The Beatles, there was no reason to complain when it sounded fantastic.
So while Prince’s relationship with his labels and his fans might have been on the rocky side from time to time, he knew he was on the same page when talking amongst musicians. He never wanted to make music looking to please the suits at the label, and as long as he followed his gut the same way that Clinton did, he figured that no one else would be able to touch what he did.
