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Btw, @PolishHeadlock, I agree with you. I think Prince is very overrated as a musician and artist.
MJ, however, really is the king of pop, even if he never really had great prestige as a musician or artist.
Could not disagree more. I think as highly rated as Prince generally is, he's still underrated.
My favorite illustration is his version of Bill Withers' (another artist very high on my list) "Ain't No Sunshine." Everyone's done a version of it (including MJ, who charted with it). I had a whole mix CD of ANS covers. But Prince's take just blows everyone--McCartney, Sting, Jackson, the Temptations, Joe Cocker, fucking Ed Sheeran, the Neville Brothers, everyone--away. And it's not even a footnote to his career. I don't think it's on anything you can buy (I saw an online vid that I can't find now). He's done dozens of songs that are totally under the radar but would be the best thing that many legends have ever done.
One of my favorite living writers had a character that was a big Prince fan. Had him say this:
I don't know whether The Artist Formerly Known As Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music has never made much of an impact on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna's Cadillac, I first heard the single "Kiss" squirting its manic way out of the car radio. To that point in my life I might have once or twice heard music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic discomfort and expulsive release, and which in so doing passingly charmed my Tourette's, gulled it with a sense of recognition, like Art Carney or Daffy Duck -- but here was a song that lived entirely in that territory, guitar and voice twitching and throbbing withing obsessively delineated bounds, alternately silent and plosive. It so pulsed with Tourettic energies that I could surrender to its tormented squeaky beat and let my syndrome live outside my brain for once, live in the air instead.