Radical Control

In this current series, we’ve been living in the neighborhood of giants—artists who didn’t just have hits, but re-wired what popular music could be.

Today… someone different again.

A man who refused categories, ignored rules, blurred gender lines, shredded guitars, whispered falsettos, wrote anthems for other people in his spare time, and turned a small Midwestern city into the center of a new universe.

Prince.

Not “Prince the nostalgia act.”

Prince the problem.
Prince the possibility.
Prince the system update.

Let’s step into Minneapolis.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity. I’m George Bartley. And an episode by the name of radical control.

In this current series, we’ve been living in the neighborhood of giants—artists who didn’t just have hits, but re-wired what popular music could be.

Today… someone different again.

A man who refused categories, ignored rules, blurred gender lines, shredded guitars, whispered falsettos, wrote anthems for other people in his spare time, and turned a small Midwestern city into the center of a new universe.

Prince.

Not “Prince the nostalgia act.”

Prince the problem.
Prince the possibility.
Prince the system update.

Let’s step into Minneapolis.

Early life: the kid who heard everything
Prince Rogers Nelson was born June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, to musical parents. His father, John L. Nelson, was a jazz pianist; his mother, Mattie, a jazz singer. The stage name “Prince” was not ego inflation; it was literally the name his father had already used for his own jazz trio. From birth, the   kid was handed both a legacy and a script—and almost immediately started rewriting both.

What stands out in his early years is not a cute prodigy story, but an intensity that never really turns off.

Chronic asthma, a complicated home life, bouncing between households, feeling small and overlooked—yet obsessed with music. Piano first. Then guitar. Then drums. Then anything else within reach.

By his teens, Prince wasn’t just “talented.” He was the guy in Minneapolis who could do everything: write the song, play every instrument, arrange the horns, sing all the parts, and tell you exactly how it should sound on tape.

There is a story that when local producers underestimated him, he simply doubled down on learning the studio itself—mic placement, tape machines, mixing boards. Not just how to be the artist, but how to own the means of production.

That will matter later.

For now: picture a teenage Prince in the 1970s, headphones on, absorbing Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Santana, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Bowie, Parliament-Funkadelic. Funk, hard rock, psychedelia, prog, soul, folk, disco—all going into one human blender.

Not “influences” as separate bins. But ingredients

When he was still a teenager, Warner Bros signed him and, in a rare move for a young Black artist, gave him creative control. That meant he could produce his own records.

Think about that in context: the industry’s default posture toward young Black talent—especially then—was control, packaging, limitation.

And here is Prince saying:
No. I produce my own work.
No. I play my own instruments.
No. You don’t get to sand down the edges.

The first two albums, For You (1978) and Prince (1979), introduce him as a soft, sensual, falsetto-driven R&B-pop artist with crossover potential. The music is smooth, almost polite on the surface—but underneath is this insistence on authorship.

Then everything tilts.

Dirty Mind (1980) is where the polite mask comes off.

The sound is raw, lean, almost punk in its minimalism: drum machines, spiky keyboards, jagged guitar, synth bass. The lyrics are explicit, transgressive, gleefully impolite. Here is a 22-year-old Black artist from Minneapolis refusing all the boxes: not disco, not “respectable” R&B, not white rock, not soft radio soul.

He appears onstage in a trench coat, bikini briefs, leg warmers.

Gender? Category?
Your problem, not his.

Then Controversy (1981).
Then 1999 (1982).

The Minneapolis Sound is now a thing: a tight, bright, electronic funk—drum machines snapping, synths stabbing, guitar lines interlocking—designed not just for radio, but for takeover.

By the time the title track of 1999 is everywhere, Prince is no longer just talented; he is a gravitational field.

Purple Rain: myth in real time
In 1984, Prince pulls off something almost no one gets to do:

He invents his own myth while we’re watching.

Purple Rain is not just an album.
It’s a movie.
It’s a character.
It’s a world.

The film is messy and melodramatic.
The music is surgical.

With Purple Rain, Prince fuses rock guitar heroics, gospel-level intensity, pop hooks, and funk grooves into a single package that breaks through every marketing line the industry had relied on: Black/white, R&B/rock, sacred/profane, masculine/feminine.

He is on MTV—still largely segregated at that point.
He is on rock stations and R&B stations.
He is on the big screen, in lace, heels, and eyeliner, playing guitar like it’s on fire.

This is not an “acceptable crossover.”
This is a takeover.

The success, of course, comes with a price:
Suddenly everyone wants that Prince forever.
Purple. Romantic. Tragic. The Motorcycle.

Prince, being Prince, immediately begins refusing that version of himself.

Attitude: control, mystery, and sacred mischief
If you want to understand Prince’s “attitude,” it helps to see the pattern:

He is allergic to cages.

Cages of race.
Cages of gender.
Cages of genre.
Cages of contracts.

On one hand, he’s playful: the wit, the smirk, the innuendo, the theatrical heels. On the other hand, he’s deadly serious about work, discipline, and control.

Stories from musicians and engineers are consistent:

He could work you into the ground in the studio.

He heard parts you didn’t know were missing.

He’d record an entire album while others thought they were just rehearsing.

After a huge show, he might want to play a three-hour aftershow in a club… and still be better than everyone.

He was famously private.
Famously spiritual.
Famously contradictory.

He wrestled openly—with sexuality and spirituality, with sin and salvation, often within the same album.

And he believed, with a near-religious intensity, that an artist should own their work.

That belief leads to one of the most public, and most influential, clashes between a major musician and a major label.

The name change: “slave” on his face
By the early 1990s, Prince has delivered more hits than most labels see in a decade: Sign o’ the Times, Parade, Lovesexy, Batman, Diamonds and Pearls, [Love Symbol Album]—and more music left over in the vault than some bands make in a lifetime.

But Prince wants to release material at his own pace.
Warner Bros wants “schedule,” “cycle,” “control.”

When negotiations over ownership and release control break down, Prince fights back not with a press release, but with performance art:

He changes his name to an unpronounceable symbol.
He appears in public with the word “slave” written on his face.

At the time, some mocked it.
Some found it baffling.
 
But underneath the spectacle was a clear point:
“These corporations are profiting from my name and my masters. If I become something they literally cannot type, cannot market without me, I am forcing the conversation.”

You don’t have to agree with every tactic to see the through-line:
A Black artist demanding control of his catalog, his labor, his identity, long before “own your masters” became a standard industry talking point.

What looked like eccentricity or ego to some listeners in the 90s now reads more like a blueprint.

Paisley Park: building his own universe
Prince didn’t just ask for control.
He built an infrastructure for it.

Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, was:

A recording studio.

A rehearsal space.

A performance venue.

A film and video facility.

A lab.

He could bring collaborators to his space, on his terms.

He could work all night.
He could stage one-off shows.
He could design tours, albums, videos, and experiments inside a controlled artistic ecosystem—and then release as much or as little as he chose.

The vault at Paisley Park became legendary:
Hundreds—possibly thousands—of unheard tracks and concerts, side projects, experiments. A private library of “I wasn’t done yet.”

The existence of that vault is itself a statement:
Art does not exist only to feed the quarterly report.

The live shows: proof
For all the eccentricities, lawsuits, name changes, and industry arguments, one thing kept resetting the narrative about Prince:

The stage.

Watch the stories that musicians tell:

He could cut loose on guitar with the ferocity of Hendrix.

He could drop into James Brown-level funk breaks, hit-choreograph an entire band, throw, catch, and stop on cues with micron precision.

He could sit at the    alone and turn a stadium into a living room.

He could stretch one song into a 20-minute journey and no one in the room looked at their watch.

The attitude was never just “I’m weird, deal with it.”

The attitude was:
“I will outwork you.
I will out-play you.
I will blur every line you use to limit me.
And I will make it undeniable.”

The digital fight & late career: still rewriting rules
In his later years, Prince became known—sometimes criticized—for his hard line on digital rights:

Strict control over his music on YouTube.

Skepticism toward streaming platforms that paid artists pennies.

Surprise experiments with online-only releases and fan clubs.
Deals where albums were bundled with concert tickets or newspapers.

Again, underneath the confusion:
He was trying, in real time, to invent ways for an artist to stay independent in a changing economy.

Some of the experiments worked.
Some didn’t.

But the consistency is striking:
Decade after decade, Prince refused to be passive about his own value.

And through it all, he kept making music:
Funk records, rock records, quiet spiritual meditations, guitar showcases, groove-heavy experiments that younger artists would happily build entire careers on.

When Prince died in 2016, it felt less like the loss of a “celebrity” and more like the sudden silence of a signal that had been broadcasting non-stop possibilities.

Impact: what changed because Prince was here

1. Genre is optional.

Before Prince, plenty of artists crossed boundaries. After Prince, the boundaries themselves felt less real.

The idea that you can:
put gospel chords over a Linn drum machine,
play a searing rock solo over a synth-funk groove,
sing in a delicate falsetto and then bark out commands like a bandleader,
reference the sacred and the erotic in the same breath…

That hybrid DNA shows up everywhere: in modern R&B, neo-soul, alt-pop, electro-funk, experimental hip-hop. Whenever an artist refuses the narrow marketing lane they’ve been assigned, there is a little bit of Prince in that refusal.
2. The one-person studio auteur.

Prince didn’t invent multi-tracking yourself, but he embodied the ideal:

Write it.
Play it.
Produce it.
Direct it.

You can hear echoes of that model in artists who treat their laptop or their home studio as an extension of their body. The belief that you don’t have to wait for a producer, a label, a band, or permission.

3. Gender, sexuality, and performance.

The heels, eyeliner, lace, androgynous poses, explicit lyrics, sweet falsetto, fierce solos—Prince presented masculinity as something fluid, theatrical, playful, unafraid.

For later generations of artists—men, women, and nonbinary performers—Prince’s persona was a door kicked open: you could be seductive and spiritual, camp and virtuosic, tender and dominant, without asking which shelf the record store would put you on.

4. Artist rights and ownership.
His battle with Warner Bros, the name change, the “slave” on his face—whatever you think of the theatrics, the conversation he forced has only grown louder:

Who owns the music?
Who profits from it?
What does a fair deal look like?

You can draw a straight line from those early fights to modern discussions about masters, streaming royalty rates, and independent distribution. Many younger artists echo Prince’s language now, sometimes without realizing they’re quoting his war.

5. Minneapolis and the ecosystem model.

Prince didn’t just escape his hometown for the coasts; he turned Minneapolis itself into a creative ecosystem:

The Time
Vanity 6 / Apollonia 6
Sheila E.

Producers and players who carried that sound into Janet Jackson’s breakthrough records and beyond.

He proved you could build a scene—and an empire—far from traditional centers, if the work was undeniable.

The contradictions: why he stays interesting
Like every figure in this series, Prince is not a plaster saint.

He could be controlling.
He could be difficult.
He made choices collaborators criticized.
He had blind spots, failures, and human limits.

And that’s important.

Because if we only talk about him as a purple-clad superhero, we miss the real creative lesson:

Prince’s genius wasn’t that he descended fully formed from some cosmic paisley cloud.

It was that he worked—obsessively.
He studied everyone.
He learned instruments, tools, contracts.
He took enormous risks with his image and career.
He absorbed influences and then refused to become anyone’s copy.

He kept asking:
“What if I don’t accept the default setting?”

That question is available to every creative person, on a smaller, saner scale.

Prince shows what happens when you learn the system so well you can bend it.

He turned a shy, asthmatic kid from Minneapolis into a global symbol by insisting on three things:

radical control of his craft,
radical freedom in his presentation,
and radical seriousness about the value of his art.

You don’t have to wear purple, or shred guitar, or sleep in the studio.

But you can borrow his stubbornness:

The refusal to shrink yourself to fit someone else’s category.
The courage to mix influences no one said were “supposed” to go together.
The belief that your work deserves care, ownership, and intention.

That is Prince’s invitation.

This has been Celebrate Creativity.
I’m George Bartley.

In our next episodes, we’ll stay with artists who didn’t just chase trends—they bent whole worlds around them.

Until then: protect your masters, mix your colors, and don’t be afraid to blow up the script they hand you.