The decades Prince believed was the “golden age” of music
When Prince first emerged on the scene, he wasn’t messing about.
On his debut album, he launched a masterpiece where he played each and every instrument and produced the whole thing on his own, at the age of only 19. Part of it came down to his intense perfectionism, but mostly, Prince was inspired to compete like his heroes did.
That sense of truly playing the game and competing powered his entire career. It’s the reason why the artist was always pushing forward, challenging himself to expand his skills, take his songs to more adventurous levels and even dabble in other projects like making movies.
To Prince, that’s what an artist did. He believed that an artist always led with their best foot forward and should never tire of innovating and wanting to improve. It’s a powerful mindset to have, and one that led him well, but it’s also one he got from his own favourite moment in musical history.
“I am here today because of the golden age of the ‘60s, ’70s and ’80s music,” he said. Prince launched his own career right in the middle of that. His debut arrived in 1978, meaning that the ‘60s and ‘70s were his inspiration, and then the ‘80s became his playing field, or his battleground, as he used the influence he took from before to allow him to go up against and compete with his peers.
But Prince wasn’t competing in a way where he was trying to beat out the competition or even necessarily top the charts or win in any commercial sense. From the strange and fascinating directions his music took, that much was clear as he always prioritised creativity. Instead, he was merely trying to earn a spot in the grand lineage of true artists and harness the behaviours that his heroes raised him on during those incredible decades.
To him, that was the time when the role of the artist really meant something. “This is when artists played their own instruments, they wrote their own songs,” he said, believing that people were more authentic and real back then. He also believed that the staggering quality made everyone raise their game, adding, “They had to perform next to people like Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett, James Brown. You gotta have your act together.”
However, not to argue with an icon, but how true is that? Prince talks about artists writing their own songs, but of the biggest tracks of all those eras, plenty were written by studio songwriters as artists like Elvis Presley, The Jackson 5, Madonna and more didn’t write their own tracks. Also, in the ‘80s, especially, as pop started to take hold in the dawning of the MTV era, artists definitely weren’t playing their own instruments, especially not as they were all busy lip syncing on Top Of The Pops.
But Prince’s more general belief about these eras rings true for so many music fans. Those decades do feel like beacons of originality and true artistry that allowed acts to rise to the top that might exist outside of a more traditional mainstream energy. Also, as Prince said, with the high quality of work coming out, everyone had to raise their game, leading to an artist like Prince coming out of the gate swinging.
