Prince

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Diamonds and Pearls
    Diamonds and Pearls
    Diamonds and Pearls

    Prince had ended the 1980s—the decade in which he reigned supreme—on a royal high with 1989’s Batman soundtrack, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts and gave him a chart-topping single in “Batdance”. But when Prince started the 1990s with yet another soundtrack—this time for his own film, 1990’s Graffiti Bridge—it failed to recapture the glory of 1984’s Purple Rain or even 1986’s Parade: Music From the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon. Hoping to make his mark on the new decade, Prince reset with a new backing band, the New Power Generation—also known as the NPG—resulting in 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls, another multi-platinum jewel in his crown. Having first made made their presence felt on Graffiti Bridge—appearing on the soundtrack’s aptly titled second track, “New Power Generation”—the NPG was in full force on Diamonds and Pearls, Prince’s 13th studio album. The move marked a major departure from the sound perfected by Prince’s previous band, The Revolution. That group had helped his Purple Highness reach the pinnacle of his pop-rock powers on Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day and Parade. But the New Power Generation was an R&B-based combo incorporating elements of jazz, blues, gospel and, most significantly, hip-hop—which Prince clearly recognised was becoming the sound of the future: The NPG’s resident rapper, Tony M., flexes his flow on tracks like “Gett Off”, which finds Prince putting some hip-hop swag in his own delivery. But Tony M. isn’t the only vocalist to share the mic with Prince on Diamonds and Pearls. Rosie Gaines duets with Prince on the sparkling title track, one of this album’s two Top 10 hits. And the NPG are in full force on the chart-topping “Cream”, which harkens back to the psych-rock era of The Revolution, but with a bluesy streak that befits Prince’s new band.

  • Sign O' The Times (Super Deluxe Edition) [2020 Remaster]
    Sign O' The Times (Super Deluxe Edition) [2020 Remaster]
    Sign O' The Times (Super Deluxe Edition) [2020 Remaster]

    Prince didn’t waste any time in the 1980s. Even before the arrival of his 1986 film Under the Cherry Moon—which turned out to be a royal flop—he was already at work on new music, resulting in the double album that would become perhaps his most obsessed-about record of his career: Sign O’ The Times. Released in 1987, the album marked the end of Prince’s astonishing run with The Revolution, his famed backing band (though the group is credited here on the live jam “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”, and members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman are featured elsewhere). The 16 tracks that make up the original edition of Sign O’ The Times find Prince incorporating the various sounds he’d perfected during The Revolution era—including the psychedelic trippiness of 1985’s Around the World in a Day—along with the funk and R&B innovations he’d made on his own before Purple Rain turned him into a pop-rock supernova. Sign O’ The Times is, in essence, his magnum opus—at once a summary and celebration of everything Prince was capable of during the peak of his powers. And with the hit title tune—the album’s first single, and opening track—the Purple One became the Political One, tackling everything from drug addiction to nuclear war. On an album packed with lushly produced tracks, “Sign O’ The Times” is notably spare—so much so, you really hear the message in the music. It’s one of Prince’s boldest statements, and a spiritual successor to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”. And he was just getting started. Sign O’ The Times also features such crucial cuts as “If I Was Your Girlfriend”, which he sings from the perspective of his female alter ego, Camille; it’s a slinky, slightly sinister piece of freaky funk. “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”, meanwhile, is a burst of guitar-pop glitter that wouldn’t have been out of place on Purple Rain. And the album closer “Adore” is one of Prince’s all-time best ballads, one that finds him at the top of his game (and his falsetto). In between it all comes “U Got the Look”, Sign O’ The Times’ biggest single, and a bit of pop-rock perfection, with an eroticised Sheena Easton providing heck-a-slammin’ support.

  • Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)
    Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)
    Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)

    In 1985, less than six months after the end of the Purple Rain Tour and the release of his Around the World in a Day album, Prince began shooting his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon. Released in 1986—and featuring Prince serving as both star and director—the black-and-white film lacked the performance-showcase feel of 1984’s Purple Rain (and didn’t come near ’s box office or critical heights). But Under the Cherry Moon still had strong musical elements, with Prince playing Christopher Tracy, a piano player and gigolo in 1930s France. And the album it inspired, Parade, is less of a traditional soundtrack and more of a companion album, in both style and structure. The album’s first four tracks—“Christopher’s Tracy Parade”, “New Position”, “I Wonder U” and “Under the Cherry Moon”—play more like evocative scene-setters than traditionally constructed pop songs, with each clocking in at less than three minutes. The same goes for the piano instrumental “Venus de Milo” and “Do U Lie?”—the latter a bit of jazzy, French-kissed whimsy that perfectly captures the period and Riviera locale. But listeners don’t need to gaze upon the Cherry Moon in order to take part in the Parade: There’s the party jam “Girls & Boys”, which references “the steps of Versailles” and drops some French; the funk-rocker “Anotherloverholenyohead”, which serves as the album’s answer to “When Doves Cry”; and the gorgeous “Sometimes It Snows in April”, a Joni Mitchell-esque elegy for Christopher Tracy that would prove to be even more poignant when Prince himself died in April 2016. But the two biggest hits from Parade—which was released three months before Under the Cherry Moon hit theatres—have no connection to the film. First up is “Mountains”, one of two tracks that Prince wrote with guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman of The Revolution (Parade would prove to be the third and final album in which Prince shared billing with his best-known backing band). Then, of course, there’s the stuttering “Kiss”, the smash single that became one of Prince’s several career chart-toppers, and reconfirmed his mid-1980s commercial clout. With a sexy staccato beat that’s as impossible to resist as Prince’s flirty falsetto, “Kiss” proved once again why the singer simply ruled our world.

  • Purple Rain
    Purple Rain
    Purple Rain

    100 Best Albums You can’t very well tell a story about a troubled artist whose difficult personality belies his musical genius without, you know, actual musical genius. In this sense, the soundtrack to Purple Rain began life with the highest degree of difficulty imaginable; the impossibility that its success could ever have been in doubt is the project’s greatest legacy. With half its tracklist comprising Top 10 singles, the soundtrack is what truly turned Prince Rogers Nelson from just big enough to get to star in a summer blockbuster based on his life to one of the most instantly recognisable and distinctive pop artists ever. This is no slight to the movie, which has its charms (shout-out Morris Day), as much as it’s a testament to Prince’s all-engulfing star power and genre-fluid/gender-fluid virtuosity—nine perfect, definitive pop-soul-dance-rock-R&B-funk-whatever-else songs that couldn’t help but swallow everything in their orbit. The brilliance of Purple Rain is how it stirs seemingly contradictory moods—lust, devotion, intimacy, alienation—into a brew where nothing can be separated from anything else. Prince makes trauma sound erotic (“When Doves Cry”) and salvation sound reckless (“Let’s Go Crazy”). His sexual escapades are spiritual, disorienting and almost psychedelic (“Darling Nikki”, “Computer Blue”), while his spiritual journeys are grounded in the mechanics of a guitar solo (“Purple Rain”). The album broke records and brains: Tipper Gore’s overreaction to the image of Darling Nikki masturbating to a magazine begat a congressional witch hunt debating the morality of pop music. Prince often drew comparisons to Jimi Hendrix for the way he mixed music that felt Black and white, sacred and profane. The reality is that he had no precedent then and no comparison now.

  • 1999
    1999
    1999

    Heading into his fifth studio album in five years, Prince was already flexing his prolific powers—not just as a solo artist, but also as the mastermind behind several other Minneapolis groups, all of which allowed the Purple One to express his seemingly boundless creativity: In 1982 alone, Prince oversaw the release of Vanity 6’s self-titled debut album, played extensively on The Time’s sophomore hit What Time Is It? and released the double-disc classic 1999—a visionary statement that, in many ways, was truly 17 years ahead of its time. Building on the mix of foreboding funk and blunt social statements he employed on 1980’s Dirty Mind and 1981’s Controversy, the future-shocked 1999 took Prince’s music—and message—to the masses, becoming his first album to land in the Top 10 of the Billboard Album charts. And this party manifesto spawned the singer’s biggest hits to date, including the apocalyptic title tune, the euphoric “Little Red Corvette” and the giddy, bopping, synth-driven “Delirious”. The success of those three tracks—in particular “Little Red Corvette” and “Delirious”—would eventually land Prince his Purple Rain movie deal. Yet they’re just the opening tracks on this lengthy classic, which finds Prince’s genius in full flight. 1999 features the anthemic mantra of “D.M.S.R.”, the conscious soul of “Free”, the jazzy funk of “Lady Cab Driver” and the libidinous lift-off of “International Lover”. But the album also found Prince evolving beyond his one-man-band beginnings, setting the stage for the Revolution era to come on Purple Rain, with Prince getting musical input from such skillful musicians as Lisa Coleman, Wendy Melvoin, Dez Dickerson and Bobby Z. By the end of the millennium, “1999” would be played nonstop—and while it may have seemed in that moment the world had finally caught up to Prince, in truth, he was always a few years ahead of us.

  • Controversy
    Controversy
    Controversy

    By the early 1980s, Prince was embracing his own increasing power—and provocation—as both a genre-busting artist and as a gender-bending cultural force. Dirty Mind, the singer’s bawdy punk-funk collection, had become an instant classic upon its release in 1980. His follow-up, 1981’s Controversy, finds Prince acknowledging his new-found infamy: “I just can’t believe all the things people say/Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?” he sings on the title track. And while listeners had plenty of questions about Prince, he delighted in giving them few direct answers—an approach that would pay off throughout the decade, as the mysterious singer ascended the pop throne. Controversy—which features regal assists from Lisa Coleman, Dr Fink and Bobby Z., who’d rule alongside Prince as members of The Revolution—finds the singer pushing back against the reactionary political conservatism of the Reagan regime, whom he addresses directly in the punk protest of “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”. Meanwhile, the funk-pop propulsion of Controversy’s “Sexuality” and the slow-jam seduction of “Do Me, Baby”—the latter of which features nearly eight minutes of erotic enlightenment—let you know that His Royal Badness still very much had a dirty mind. The carnal delight of tracks like “Private Joy” and the raunchy romp “Jack U Off” makes it clear that, in some ways, Controversy is an unapologetically sexual sequel to its predecessor. But the album also finds Prince taking on politics (again, “Ronnie, Talk to Russia”) and religion (“Annie Christian”). And Prince has never been straight-up funkier than on “Let’s Work”. Ultimately, Controversy provides a euphoric escape from the unknown in uncertain times, and sets up Prince for the pop-altering triumph of 1999.

Live Albums

Compilations

Appears On

About Prince

In the early 2000s, the filmmaker Kevin Smith contacted Prince to see if he could use one of Prince’s songs in one of his movies. Prince responded by asking Smith to make a documentary about him. Smith said sure, but the project never got off the ground. When Smith tried to pull out, one of Prince’s assistants explained to him that it wasn’t that simple. 'Why not?' Smith asked. After all, he wasn’t even a documentarian; he made features. 'I get it’, the assistant said—but Prince doesn’t understand reality like the rest of do. Prince… Prince calls you at three in the morning to ask if he can get a camel. He isn’t doing it to be a jerk. But he does want the camel. It’s a funny story, of course. But it also illustrates the strength and commitment of Prince’s vision. The camel is an extreme example. But imagine you told him there was no way to mix new wave and psychedelia with funk and R&B. Or that a man couldn’t explore androgyny without risking his sex appeal. Imagine, really, telling Prince there were any conventional boundaries he had to respect—and then imagine how much groundbreaking art would’ve been lost if he’d listened. Born Prince Rogers Nelson in 1958, he trained in ballet as a teenager, starting his music career just out of high school. By 24, he’d already released a body of work (including Dirty Mind, Controversy and 1999) that helped shape nearly every style of ‘80s pop music, Black and white; by 30, he was both a midnight-movie cult hero (Purple Rain) and a Beatles-level visionary (Sign o’ the Times). To read about his Paisley Park compound is to get a glimpse of a world of almost perpetual creativity—between his debut in 1978 and his death in 2016, there was barely a year he didn’t put out an album, and there were several years during which he put out two. He was one of pop music’s true universals, and yet always distinctly Black. And to listen to him mix sexual ecstasy with spiritual transcendence (“When Doves Cry”, “If I Was Your Girlfriend”) not only finished the mission Little Richard started, it delivered on rock ’n' roll’s promise that you could find heaven here on earth if you were willing to shake for it.

HOMETOWN
Minneapolis, MN, United States
BORN
7 June 1958
GENRE
R&B/Soul

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada
  翻译：