Prince

Prince Rogers Nelson was born on the seventh of June 1958 at Minneapolis, Minnesota, the elder of two children of John Lewis Nelson — a jazz pianist and bandleader who performed across the Minneapolis Black-club circuit of the 1950s and 1960s under the stage name Prince Rogers — and Mattie Della Shaw Nelson, a vocalist who also performed with the Prince Rogers Trio. His parents separated when he was seven. He was raised between the two households in the racially segregated North Side of Minneapolis. He taught himself piano at seven, guitar at fourteen, drums at fifteen, and across his teens the complete arsenal of the rhythm-section instrumentation through self-instruction at his stepfather's house.

He recorded his first demo tape at fifteen at the Minneapolis ASI Studios with the high-school friend Pepe Willie and the producer Owen Husney. The tape — fourteen songs all played, sung, written and produced by the seventeen-year-old Prince alone — produced his Warner Brothers contract of 1977 at eighteen on terms that gave him full artistic control of his recording career — the youngest Black artist in American major-label history to receive such terms.

He recorded across the following nine years the studio albums — For You (1978), Prince (1979), Dirty Mind (1980), Controversy (1981), 1999 (1982), Purple Rain (1984), Around the World in a Day (1985), Parade (1986) and Sign o' the Times (1987) — that established him as the principal American auteur of 1980s recorded popular music. The 1984 album Purple Rain — the soundtrack to the Warner Brothers film of the same name — sold over twenty-five million copies, occupied the Billboard 200 for one hundred and twenty-two consecutive weeks, and won three Grammy Awards and one Academy Award.

He founded the Paisley Park Records label in 1985 and the affiliated Paisley Park studio complex at Chanhassen, Minnesota, in 1987 — the only Black-owned independent commercial recording facility of comparable scale and equipment in the world at the time.

He changed his name to the unpronounceable symbol in 1993 as part of his protracted contract dispute with Warner Brothers over ownership of his master recordings — a dispute he conducted as the most prominent artist of his generation in support of artist rights. He recovered the masters in 2014.

He produced across his thirty-eight-year recording career thirty-nine studio albums, recorded an estimated eight thousand unreleased songs that remain in the Paisley Park vault, and at his death held the record for the most posthumously-discovered material of any major artist.

He died of accidental fentanyl overdose at his Paisley Park complex on the twenty-first of April 2016, at fifty-seven.

He is honored here as the principal auteur of 1980s popular music.