How to Become a Prince Fan

Prince creates experts. Anyone who was so prolific, so influential, and so mysterious seems to conjure analysts and superfans and informal documentarians left and right. There are people who know more about Prince than I do, who have sought out every bootleg, who have meticulously tracked every collaboration and side project.

But Prince isn’t about competition. Prince is about uniting people, making enough music that everyone has something to latch on to, and straddling the line between silly and serious so well that you never knew which one he was at any given moment. You already know Prince was a genius composer, a guitar virtuoso, an electrifying dancer, and a bona fide weirdo. But maybe he hasn’t caught you yet. Don’t worry, we’re here to answer your questions, and by the end we promise you’ll have a new appreciation for “Batdance.”

Prince. Wasn’t he that guy who wrote that bad song for the Minnesota Vikings?
Look, if you’re not going to take this seriously, neither am I.

Okay, but like, I know who Prince is. “Purple Rain,” weird symbol, good at making pancakes, sort of gave me a creepy vibe. Why should I like him?
I admit, I was once like you. Prince was the soundtrack to every party my mom threw growing up, and while I had fun dancing around to “Kiss,” something about him intimidated me. He was just so intense. As a teenage girl, though, I fawned over the gender-bending sexuality of David Bowie and Rocky Horror Picture Show and RuPaul. And yet somehow Prince was, for a while, too much. He was the audible equivalent of prolonged eye contact, a man in thigh-high stockings daring you to question your ideas about funk, rock, sexuality, religion, and race without any ironic detachment. But eventually, something clicked.

But some of his music sucked, right?
Prince was constantly making things. When he died, his home studio housed thousands of hours of unreleased demos and beats, so much that, according to Britain's Express, “an entire album of his unreleased music could be published every year for the next century.” Here was a man who was constantly experimenting, changing his sound, evolving. And he suffered from the Catch-22 all prolific artists suffer from—the public gets bored when they stay the same, but angry when they change. This is not to say Prince didn’t release some clunkers, but there is beauty and complexity in the work of someone who keeps trying things. Prince did not want to make “1999” for 30 years. Once you accept that his entire career was an act of experimentation, it’s easier to make space for the weird ones.

Wait, back up, just tell me a little about Prince.
Okay, so Prince’s actual name is Prince—Prince Rogers Nelson—and he was named after the name his dad performed under in a jazz group. Prince was born in Minnesota, with most of his family originally hailing from Louisiana. He was a pioneer of what became known as the “Minneapolis Sound,” a combination of funk, synth-pop, and new wave that he made with folks like Morris Day, Apollonia, André Cymone, Wendy Melvoin, and Lisa Coleman. If you’ve listened to Bruno Mars recently, this is a lot of what he’s going for.

Oh, okay, I like “Uptown Funk.”
Who doesn’t? And “Uptown Funk” is basically a Morris Day and The Time song, the “rival” band in Prince’s film Purple Rain, even though Prince wrote most of their songs and played all the instruments on their first album.

Huh, that sounds like a dick move.
My man had a lot of opinions about music. Prince famously played all the instruments on his debut album, For You, and for the rest of his career, he was meticulous about how all of his projects sounded. Which you only really get to do if you’re the type of talent who can play every instrument. Prince was equally controlling about his image, whether it was his fashion or his record contracts or not letting Weird Al write a “Raspberry Beret” parody.

What can I say, he was a complicated person who sometimes had misguided opinions on things like rap music and sexual orientation. But he was always changing, and always seemed to want to consider new ideas.

Let’s go back to Purple Rain. I think I saw it once, and it was a weird movie! Why do people freak out about it?
Purple Rain is one of those movies you can’t really judge on the spectrum of “good” and “bad.” It exists outside of that. In it, Prince plays The Kid, a biracial (though both of Prince’s actual parents were black) musician living in his parents’ basement, trying to make it with his band, The Revolution, at Minneapolis’s First Avenue club. He also deals with an abusive father, is bullied by The Time, and endlessly negs Apollonia. It’s dramatic. It’s problematic. It features Prince doing a perfect, balletic spot-turn while angrily looking for his dad.

Ultimately, you watch Purple Rain for the performances, which were recorded live at First Avenue. And this is where you’ll, hopefully, finally, understand Prince. He understood the power of performance, and was a master at commanding attention. He knew when to jump from a five-foot-tall speaker, when to split, when to strut, or when to just stand and rip a beautiful and not-at-all gratuitous guitar solo.

All right, I’m starting to feel it. But what the hell was with the Artist Formerly Known as Prince thing?
Ahhh, the symbol. Okay, so in 1993, Prince had been feuding with his record label, Warner Bros. He had been with them since 1977 but in 1990 signed a new deal with a rigid production schedule. Essentially, Prince wanted to release a lot of music, and Warner Bros. wanted him to slow it down. So he changed his name to the unpronounceable Love Symbol (a combination of the male and female sex symbols that he’d been toying with since the beginning of his career) because, as he said in a press release at the time, “the company owns the name Prince and all related music under Prince.” Through the loophole, he could release his own music. The contract expired in 2000, after which Prince went back to being called Prince.

That actually makes some sense, in a very weird, Prince way.
Now you’re getting it!

You’ve persuaded me. I want to give Prince a try. Where do I start?
Oh boy. The problem with a very long, prolific career is that it’s nearly impossible to choose a few songs to represent him. I’m going to assume you’ve already heard a lot of the hits (“1999,” “Purple Rain,” “When Doves Cry,” etc.) and give you six songs that might not be on your radar. This is by no means exhaustive or a list of any “best” songs. Please don’t yell at me, Prince fans.

“I Wanna Be Your Lover”

Just for a moment, imagine you’re in the summer of 1979. Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” was released in July, and then a month later comes this, the lead single off Prince’s second, self-titled album. What a summer! I don’t want to get into the Jackson vs. Prince wars some like to engage in, but watch the video. Look at the impish, androgynous sexuality Prince exudes. Look at how he can say, “I wanna be the only one you come for” with a straight face. He means it. He means everything. Whatever your sexual orientation is, he’s fucking with it.

“When You Were Mine”

Prince’s career is littered with songs made famous by other people, like “Manic Monday,” "I Feel for You,” “Nothing Compares 2 U.” This one was made more famous by Cyndi Lauper, but Prince’s version off Dirty Mind (an incredible half-hour of new wave front to back) is about as great a pop jam as ever existed. It’s one of those songs that shines in its ‘80s, synth-heavy production but, stripped down, is just a perfect song that can break your heart and make you dance.

“The Beautiful Ones”

This is one that I didn’t fully get until I saw it live. It’s a slow-burn ballad, coming after the upbeat jams “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Take Me with U” on Purple Rain. In his performance of it in the film, he sits at the piano, singing in a gentle falsetto that gets fiercer and more forceful every second, before it explodes into a primal scream and the question “Do you want him, or do you want me? Cause I want you.”

“Sometimes It Snows in April”

It’s easy to think of Prince as some sort of wind-up funky sex toy, always jumping and dancing and spinning around. But the man had many introspective moments, perhaps none more than this simple song about loss. It’s a reminder that, while Prince used the power of costume and performance, he didn’t need it.

“Cream”

Prince once joked during an acoustic set on MTV that he wrote this song while looking in the mirror. It’s a great example of his “later career” (lol, it came out in 1991) hits, which got a lot more experimental outside of the Minneapolis sound. I mean, it’s got a Bonnie Raitt–ish slide-guitar thing going on, on top of the funk and the synth. And that MTV performance is Prince at his most cheeky.

“Black Sweat”

The video that launched a thousand reaction GIFs. Prince was known for making some of the funkiest dance beats with no basslines, like “Kiss” and “When Doves Cry.” “Black Sweat” is little more than a drum machine and falsetto, and it sounds like you’re at a party in Wakanda in 1994, except Wakanda is on the moon.

This sounds great. But, um, what about “Batdance”?
“Batdance” is a thrilling, theatrical adventure that answers the question “What if CATS but, instead, bats?” and I will hear nothing against it.