Do we like Prince Rogers Nelson?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of quiet giving and racial-justice work, with one contested gay-marriage remark and a bandmate's account of a frosty reunion.
Prince was born in Minneapolis in 1958, signed to Warner Bros. as a teenager with creative control, and went on to play nearly every instrument on his records. Purple Rain made him a global star, he won seven Grammys, and he went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. He died at Paisley Park, his home and studio, on 21 April 2016.
On sexuality and gender he was a queer icon in the early 80s, blurring lines in his look and lyrics without ever labelling himself. Then he became a Jehovah’s Witness around 2000 and dropped songs he thought were too sexual. That faith teaches that same-sex relations are a sin, which is where the muddle starts.
The sore spot is a 2008 New Yorker interview in which he appeared to wave away gay marriage, quoting scripture at the writer. People close to him said he was misquoted and the writer stood by her account. Wendy Melvoin, the guitarist in his Revolution band, has said he turned down a 2000 reunion because of her homosexuality. The pair did perform with him again six years later.
Where the record gets thin is any actual campaigning. Nothing turned up of him pushing laws against LGBTQ+ people, and when Minnesota legalised same-sex marriage in 2013 he dodged questions about it in a Star Tribune interview. Faith alone is no fail here, so it’s an asterisk, not a strike.
The giving is the real story. Van Jones says Prince quietly bankrolled Green For All and the #YesWeCode tech-training program for young people, and sent an anonymous $50,000 cheque to Jones’s work. He also reportedly sent money to Trayvon Martin’s family, and in 2015 he held a Baltimore peace concert after Freddie Gray’s death. As a Witness he kept quiet about it, so we only heard properly after he died.
The ugliest claim is Sinéad O’Connor’s. In 2021 she told the New York Times that he attacked her at his Hollywood home, an allegation she had made in milder form in 2007. Prince was dead by then and the guitar.com report carries no response from his estate. His ex-wife Mayte Garcia told TMZ in 2018 that she never saw him be violent, so it’s one disputed allegation and not a pattern.