Prince

Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958), known as more...

His music has spanned myriad styles including funk, pop, rock, R&B/soul, and hip hop, and is widely regarded as musical genius and the definition of the "Minneapolis sound". He is also known to have hundreds of songs unreleased in a vault under his own alias, as well as other names. Regarded as a perfectionist, Prince has a reputation as being difficult to work with, and for being highly protective and controlling 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.

Biography

Uptown: Early years

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Mount Sinai Hospital 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 cult film Purple Rain starring Prince, Morris Day of The Time, and pop singer Apollonia. In more recent years, it has been noted in numerous publications that both Prince's parents are in fact African-American, and like many black Americans, their lineage is an amalgam of ethnicities. In an interview in a 1985 issue of Rolling Stone magazine it was noted that Prince's mother possessed African-American, Native-American and Caucasian ancestry.

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