Prince

Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958), known from 1993 to 2000 as more...

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His music has spanned myriad styles; though his early material was firmly rooted in R&B, funk and soul, he has constantly expanded his musical palette throughout his career, absorbing many other genres including new wave, pop, rock, blues, jazz and hip hop. The distinctive characteristics of the early-to-mid 1980s work which brought him to superstardom (including sparse and industrial-sounding drum machine arrangements, and the use of synthesizer riffs to serve the role traditionally occupied by horn riffs in earlier R&B, funk and soul music) became known as the "Minneapolis sound," which proved heavily influential. He has a reputation as a workaholic, having released over a thousand songs both under his own name and through other artists, and is known for having composed and recorded many more songs that remain unreleased. Regarded as a perfectionist, Prince has a reputation as being somewhat difficult to work with, and for being highly protective of his music. He writes, composes and produces most of his music single-handedly, and plays most of the instruments on his albums. He also is a well-known songwriter for other artists, and some of those songs have topped the charts as well. He currently lives in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

Biography

Uptown: early years

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Mount Sinai Hospital on June 7, 1958 to John L. Nelson and Mattie Shaw. John L. Nelson played in a jazz trio The Prince Rogers Trio, hence Prince's birth name. There are a number of myths regarding Prince’s ethnicity and gender, some spread by Prince himself. The most pervasive is that he is the child of a black father and white mother, a myth later bolstered by the film Purple Rain, starring Prince himself. Prince's parents are, in fact African-American, his mother of African-American, Native American & white lineage, specifically (noted in a 1985 Rolling Stone interview with Prince). And according to an April 28, 1983 Rolling Stone article, Prince's father is of Black and Italian ancestry, and his mother "is a mixture of a bunch of things."

After the birth of his sister, Tika Evene in 1960, Prince's parents gradually drifted apart. Prince’s parents formally separated and he had a troubled relationship with his stepfather causing him to run away from home. He lived briefly with his father, who bought him his first guitar. Later, Prince moved in with a neighborhood family, the Andersons, and became friends with their son, Andre Anderson (later called André Cymone).

Read more at Wikipedia.org