The moment "When Doves Cry" started playing, something felt different.
No bass. Just a drum machine, guitar, and a voice — and somehow, from that alone, a musical space this rich was possible. I still remember the strangeness of that moment, the first time I heard it — the "emptiness" arriving as music.
Prince was a musician who opened a different dimension in music by removing what was supposed to be there. Strip out the bass. Break the chord. Ignore the wall between genres. That posture changed pop music in the 1980s at its foundations.
What was the first Prince song that reached you?
🎹 The Prodigy from Minneapolis — Prince's Birth and Musical Awakening
June 7, 1958. Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Prince Rogers Nelson was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in Minneapolis. His father, John Lewis Nelson, was a jazz pianist and songwriter — his stage name was "Prince Rogers," and his son simply inherited the name. His mother, Mattie Della Shaw, was a jazz singer who performed vocals for the Prince Rogers Trio.
Prince was born into music.
But the road from birth was not smooth. As a young child, Prince suffered from epilepsy. Through repeated seizures, his mother told him "You are special. God is always watching over you." Prince spoke publicly about his epilepsy in a 2009 interview — and said that the anxiety around epilepsy was one of his motivations for becoming a performer. When a child turns what makes them "different" into a source of power, it sometimes becomes the origin of great art.
His parents divorced when Prince was ten. Life began alternating between his father's home and his mother's home. In that unstable domestic environment, music was where Prince found the most peace. He turned to the piano his father had left behind and spent hours alone, searching for sounds.
At seven years old, Prince wrote his first song on his father's piano. He titled it "Funk Machine" — the fact that a seven-year-old chose "funk" as a song title already reveals something essential about who this person was.
After his father eventually threw him out, Prince moved into the basement of his neighbors, the Anderson family. There, with André Anderson (later André Cymone, one of Prince's first bandmates), he kept making music. That basement was Prince's first studio — in that space, with minimal soundproofing and minimal equipment, Prince taught himself guitar, drums, bass, and keyboards, one after another.
His father bought him a guitar. That guitar changed his life. But Prince was not satisfied with one guitar. He wanted to know every instrument — to hit drums, play bass, press keys, and create every possible sound with his own hands.
That impulse — "do everything yourself" — became the core of Prince's music.
🎓 Playing All Instruments Alone — The Warner Bros. Deal and a Startling Debut
By seventeen, Prince was already attracting attention in the Minneapolis music scene.
In March 1975, Prince recorded his first demos with his initial band, Grand Central (later renamed Champagne). But Prince's solo talent was already spilling beyond what a band could contain.
Working with local musician Pepe Willie's band 94 East, gaining experience as a session musician, Prince completed a set of solo demo recordings. When those demos reached New York's music industry, multiple labels expressed interest.
Warner Bros. presented Prince with unprecedented terms — a contract that included full production control over his own music. At that time, granting this level of creative autonomy to a new artist was extraordinarily unusual. Warner Bros.'s people trusted the musical independence of this Minneapolis teenager from the beginning.
At eighteen (some releases claimed seventeen, but he was actually eighteen), Prince signed with Warner Bros. and released his debut album, For You, on April 7, 1978.
On this album, Prince accomplished something astonishing — he played every instrument on all twenty-seven tracks himself. Guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, synthesizers, percussion — everything by Prince's own hands.
For You was commercially modest in its debut, but its method of creation sent a shock through the music industry. Playing all instruments alone was not impossible, but finishing a debut album at this level of completion that way was nearly unprecedented.
The 1979 self-titled album Prince achieved clearer commercial success. The single "I Wanna Be Your Lover" reached number one on the Billboard R&B chart and number eleven on the Hot 100. The lightness of that funk and the sweetness of that falsetto — this was the first "Prince voice" that reached the world.
One important piece of background about Prince: his parents were African-American from Louisiana who had relocated to liberal Minnesota seeking a freer environment. Minneapolis, where Prince grew up, was a city with a small Black population and a white majority. This environment connects directly to Prince's musical posture of "crossing the racial boundary" — his sound, which was neither R&B nor rock nor pop but a mixture of all of them, emerged from a refusal of specific racial and cultural frameworks.
🌠 "Dirty Mind" and "Controversy" — Provocateur of Sex and Politics
With 1980's Dirty Mind, Prince threw a bomb into the music industry.
The album cover was shocking — Prince standing in only a trenchcoat, in his underwear. The lyrical content was equally extreme, with sexual themes pushed to the foreground. "Head," "Sister," "Do It All Night" — simply listing the song titles conveys what this album was reaching for.
But Dirty Mind was not simply "an album selling sex." Its extremity was a challenge against the template the music industry and society had constructed for how Black artists "should" present themselves.
The polished entertainment of Motown, the soul confessions of Aretha and Marvin, the dancefloor music of disco — this was what Black pop music in the early 1980s was expected to produce. Prince demolished every one of those expectations with Dirty Mind.
Musically, too, Dirty Mind was genre-unidentifiable — funk, rock, and new wave all coexisting. For a Black artist to do this was revolutionary at the time.
The 1981 follow-up Controversy added political and religious questioning to the sexual provocation. The title track asks: "Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?" — simultaneously questioning categories of race and sexuality. The final track of Controversy concludes with "The Lord's Prayer" quoted in full — placing a religious prayer at the end of a sexually provocative album. This paradox embodies the complexity of Prince as a person. He maintained sincere religious faith throughout his life while simultaneously producing the most provocative expressions imaginable.
When you encounter Prince's "extremity," what do you make of it? Was it provocation for provocation's sake — or an expression of something deeper?
🚀 "1999" — The Philosophy of Partying Through the End of the World
The 1982 double album 1999 was the turning point at which Prince became a global star.
The title "1999" reflected the atmosphere of the time. In the early 1980s, Cold War tension between the US and USSR was at its peak, and the fear of nuclear war was genuinely real. The collective anxiety that "the world might end" hung over society.
Prince took this theme head-on, but converted it in a completely unexpected direction — "if the world ends tomorrow, let's party tonight."
"I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray" — this opening line sets the tone for the whole song. Converting nuclear war fear into dance music — this paradoxical thinking is Prince's essence.
"1999" reached number four on the R&B chart and number twelve on the Hot 100. But it found even greater resonance when rereleased in 1983 — radio stations started playing it again in the wake of the Purple Rain success, and "1999" became a hit a second time.
The album also contained "Little Red Corvette" — using a car as a metaphor for sexual desire, this song was one of the first to reach a wide white rock audience. In an era when MTV was not actively airing Black artists' videos, "Little Red Corvette"'s video received heavy MTV rotation — partly because MTV treated Prince as a "rock artist."
The double album format of 1999 also deserves notice. For an artist still close to newcomer status, releasing a double album was unusual. But Prince did it because "one disc wasn't enough for what I needed to say." This attitude — "I have things to say, they don't fit, so I'll add more" — runs through the entirety of Prince's subsequent career.
🎵 "Purple Rain" — The Summit Where Film and Music Became One
On June 25, 1984, Purple Rain was released.
Released simultaneously as a film and an album, Purple Rain is the absolute peak of Prince's career and one of the most important works in all of 1980s pop culture.
The film Purple Rain is a semi-autobiographical story — a father's domestic violence, the relationship with his mother, conflict with band members, and the road to becoming a star. The character Prince plays, "The Kid," is not Prince himself, but embodies much of Prince's interior life.
For the film's production, Prince had originally planned to give the direction to someone else, but ultimately chose the unknown director Albert Magnoli. Magnoli told Prince a new song was needed, and asked him to write something "that fits the domestic abuse scene."
The next morning, Prince came back with two songs. One of them was "When Doves Cry."
The album held the number one position on the Billboard 200 for twenty-four weeks and sold more than twenty-five million copies worldwide. The film grossed more than $90 million against a production budget of around $7 million.
And Prince became the first person in history to simultaneously achieve number one in film, album, and single — Purple Rain the film at number one, the album at number one, the single "When Doves Cry" at number one. This record has never been broken.
At the following year's Academy Awards, Purple Rain won the Oscar for Best Original Song Score. Prince's Oscar.
Prince rarely explained the title "Purple Rain." But the image — the color of the sky between sunset and night, rain falling through purple air — suggests the mysterious moment where ending and beginning intersect. That is the essence of this film and album.
🌍 "When Doves Cry" — The Revolution Without a Bassline
"When Doves Cry" from 1984 is one of the most original singles in the history of pop music.
The story of how it came to be is full of the kind of anecdote that suits Prince perfectly. After all the other tracks for Purple Rain were complete, director Albert Magnoli said he needed one more song. Prince entered the studio and in a single day wrote "When Doves Cry," played all the instruments, and finished the recording.
The most revolutionary thing about the song is the absence of bass.
Conventional dance pop — especially 1980s R&B — always has a bassline. It functions as the foundation of rhythm and harmony, producing the groove that moves the listener's body. Prince had originally put a bassline on "When Doves Cry."
But when the recording was complete, Prince felt "something is wrong." He asked singer Jill Jones what she thought. She said: "Why don't you have it your way?" Prince muted the bass track — saying "if I could have it my way, it would sound like this."
What was born in that moment was that "music with a hole in it."
The dry sound of the Linn LM-1 drum machine, Prince's guitar, that vocal moving between falsetto and low register — the space that bass would have occupied became, instead, the center of the music. The listener's ear is pulled toward the sense that "something is missing," and that sense of lack gives the music a distinctive tension.
"When Doves Cry" was the number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 for the entire year of 1984. It stayed at the top of the chart for five weeks.
The lyric is deeply connected to the film's themes — anger at a father, the contradictions of love, the terror of finding the father's shadow inside oneself. "Touch if U will my stomach / Feel how it trembles inside" — this is one of Prince's most direct instances of speaking his own vulnerability through music.
🎸 Prince the Guitarist — A Genius Often Overlooked
When people talk about Prince, most focus on his vocals or his production ability. But Prince was also one of the greatest rock guitarists of his generation.
The guitar solo at the end of "Let's Go Crazy" — that explosion of a few dozen seconds — is the most direct demonstration of Prince's guitar talent. The wah-pedal work strongly reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix, the fusion of overwhelming technique and emotional expression — anyone hearing that solo for the first time must have wondered "who is this guitarist?"
Prince taught himself guitar with no formal instruction, learning by ear from recordings. Because he was self-taught, he was never bound by "what guitarists are supposed to do," and developed playing techniques that were entirely his own.
The 2004 Grammy Awards performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" — a tribute to George Harrison of the Beatles — is remembered as the moment that reintroduced Prince's guitar talent to the world. In the second half of the song, Prince delivered a guitar solo that concluded with him throwing the guitar into the air above the audience — it disappeared (actually caught by a crew member in the wings).
The story goes that Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and Dhani Harrison were all on that stage that night, and every one of them had the look of someone who had just been stolen from.
Rolling Stone ranked Prince at number thirty-three on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (2011 edition). Many musicians feel this ranking undersells him — Prince's guitar functioned not merely as technique but as a direct expression of musical emotion, and the quality of that function is incomparable.
Have you ever listened to Prince's music with his role as a guitarist in mind? The final solo of "Let's Go Crazy" is still a breathtaking experience today.
🌟 The Revolution — Band, Race, and the Boundary of Music
To tell the story of Prince in the Purple Rain era, the band The Revolution is indispensable.
The Revolution was a band that mixed Black and white members — Bobby Z (drums, white), Lisa Coleman (keyboards, white), Wendy Melvoin (guitar, white), Brown Mark (bass, Black), Matt Fink (keyboards, white) — and this diverse lineup was a visual embodiment of Prince's musical philosophy of crossing racial boundaries.
The Wendy and Lisa combination deserves particular attention. Wendy's guitar and Lisa's keyboards added subtle, complex textures to Prince's music. There are sounds on the Purple Rain album that could not have existed without them — especially the opening conversation of "Computer Blue": "Wendy?" "Yes Lisa?" "Is the water warm enough?" "Yes Lisa." "Shall we begin?" "Yes Lisa." This passage symbolizes the intimacy of The Revolution as an entity.
In the 1980s music industry, the division between Black and white artists was still deeply entrenched. Black artists on the R&B chart, white artists on the pop chart or rock chart — Prince and The Revolution deliberately ignored this division.
The Purple Rain album was neither R&B nor rock nor pop — it was all of them simultaneously. This "dissolution of genre" emerged from the overlap between Prince's musical philosophy and the racial diversity of the band.
In a divided America in the 1980s, the image of The Revolution — white and Black, men and women, standing together on stage — was both a musical statement and a social one.
🎤 Love for Joni — The Artist Prince Respected Most
One of the artists Prince showed the deepest reverence for throughout his life was Joni Mitchell.
"If you don't listen to Joni Mitchell, you can't be my friend" — Prince is reported to have said this. When his musical influences are discussed, names like James Brown, Sly Stone, and Carlos Santana frequently come up, but Joni's name was as important to Prince as any of them, if not more so.
Why did Prince hold Joni in such deep regard?
One reason is his identification with Joni's posture of "creating your own musical language." Just as Joni used more than sixty guitar tunings to find "her own sound," Prince also refused to be confined by existing genres or conventional approaches to instruments, always pursuing "his own sound."
Another reason is his deep respect for Joni's poetic lyrics. Prince's lyrics are sometimes extreme and provocative, but at their foundation there is a serious engagement with poetry. An admiration for Joni's ability to "paint pictures with words" occasionally surfaces in Prince's own writing.
Prince actually covered Joni's "A Case of You" in several live performances. When that delicate folk masterwork is played in Prince's voice and on his guitar, something like a "resonance of souls" between the two musicians becomes audible.
And Joni's stance of fighting between pop commercialism and artistic integrity — "protecting my music over being commercially successful" — is the same philosophy that Prince would embody in his later battles with Warner Bros.
After Prince's death in 2016, Joni released a public statement: "He was a genius. And he knew, more deeply than anyone, what music is supposed to be."
⭐ The Minneapolis Sound Revolution — The Influence on Future Generations
With the success of Purple Rain, Prince became something beyond a star — he became a phenomenon.
But one of Prince's most important legacies is the establishment of what came to be called "the Minneapolis Sound."
What is the Minneapolis Sound? Funk groove, rock guitar, synth-pop texture, and gospel emotional expression — all fused together into a distinctive sound that emerged from Prince and his circle in the 1980s. Sheila E., The Time, Apollonia 6 — all produced by Prince, all spreading the same sound around the world.
The impact this sound has had on subsequent music is immeasurable.
The rivalry with Michael Jackson — though it was never simple competition. The "Prince vs. MJ" frame of the 1980s was the product of an era in which two geniuses mutually stimulated each other, competing to expand the possibilities of pop music.
As influence on later artists: Lenny Kravitz, Bruno Mars, Frank Ocean, The Weeknd — all received direct influence from Prince's genre-crossing approach, his posture of doing everything himself, and the complexity of simultaneously singing sex and spirituality.
Rolling Stone named Prince one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, placing his influence alongside Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and James Brown.
And Timbaland has said: "Prince redefined what music is. Without him, today's music scene would be something completely different."
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The boy born in Minneapolis in 1958 wrote funk at seven, signed with Warner Bros. at eighteen, and at twenty-six simultaneously achieved number one in film, album, and single.
The bass-free space of "When Doves Cry" is still ringing somewhere in the world today.
That "emptiness" is the music. That is the core of what Prince taught. 🎹
https://toshiyu03.blog/let-me-have-my-say-%f0%9f%8e%b5-the-music-memories-corner/
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