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Prince music biography continued...

Minnesota, Price formed his first band in junior high and never looked back. Throughout his career, Prince's music has spanned several styles with early material rooted in R&B, funk, and soul, to later work featuring experimentation with such genres as New Wave, pop, rock, blues, jazz, and hip hop. The distinctive characteristics of his early-to-mid 1980s output, (such as synthesizer riffs and industrial sounding drum arrangements) brought him superstardom and became known as the "Minneapolis sound," which proved heavily influential.
1999 may be Prince's most influential album: its synth-and-drum machine-heavy arrangements codified the "Minneapolis sound" that would loom over mid-'80s R&B and pop, not to mention the next two decades' worth of electro, house, and techno. In the first half of the album, Prince songs are all anthems: "1999," "Little Red Corvette" (the rock-radio breakthrough he'd been after since the beginning; it reached #6 on the pop chart), "Delirious," the nervous grind of "Let's Pretend We're Married," and the sardonic "DMSR" ("All the white people clap your hands on the four now . . . one, two, three [clap]"). The rest of the album contains breakthrough tunes in terms of experimentation, including "Lady Cab Driver" and the ominous, "Something in the Water."
Prince has been a prolific artist, having released numerous albums and several hundred songs, both under his own name and through other artists. Regarded as a perfectionist, Prince is known for being highly protective of his music. He produces, composes, arranges and performs nearly all of the songs on his albums. Rolling Stone magazine has stated that in terms of his songwriting Prince ranks up there with Lennon and McCartney and Bob Dylan, and that his guitar playing is equal to Jimi Hendrix's. High praise for a scrawny kid from Minneapolis who grew up to be one of the world's most gifted musical geniuses.