WHY NOTHING WILL EVER COMPARE TO PRINCE

There's always been a notion that if we could emulate the lives of those we admire, then our lives would have the same outcomes as theirs – talented, successful, rich, famous, happy, whatever. That, of course, explains all the "Seven Secrets of…." books and the popularity of biographies as treasure maps to our desired fortunes. Although the lives of successful music artists fall into that same category and there are certainly crafts and skills to be mastered, there are two areas that cannot be duplicated, which are, unfortunately, the two most important things required for success – artistry and luck. Which is why nothing compares to Prince. His was the perfect storm of skills, artistry and luck.

His talents were unparalleled in the world of popular music and so heralded so much recently that there's really no reason for me to list them here again. Know that each of the skills he mastered required the now-proverbial 10,000 hours of learning, practice, and self-discipline – each of them. All the talent in the world still requires that amount of woodshedding, trial and error and back to the drawing board perseverance. Who among us has that drive? Who's out there now picking up the torch?
 
Even putting in that kind of life-long work doesn't necessarily produce a successful career in the arts. You have to have the inborn talent to take those well-honed crafts and elevate them into art. Prince had that kind of talent. I don't and, probably, neither do you, at least to the extent that he did.

And even putting that innate talent aside, there's the inevitable requirement to be in the right place at the right time with the right thing. Here's where luck favoured Prince. His heritage was black music from Louisiana, but he grew up in white bread Minneapolis. That meant he had parental music influence from an early age but wasn't hampered by local customs of what music he should or shouldn't be doing. That way, much as the Beatles in Liverpool, he opened out of town so that when his time came, he was ready.
 
His artistry was influenced by the immediately previous two decades of black music crossover and he blatantly stole from the best of them (a la the Beatles again) – Little Richard, Elvis, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Sly Stone and, of course, Jimi Hendrix. The time was ripe for someone to combine all of those performance elements with the music of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. And that's where he set himself apart from all of those who preceded him and apparently all of those who followed – live performance.

His shows were non-stop music – no between-song tunings or swigs of water from plastic bottles – non-stop music. Just as an example, you can click here and find video of the opening numbers. During the course of the first song, "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?" he went from an a cappella gospel intro, into a funky pop/rock band groove, to an Allman Brothers twin guitar break with Dez Dickerson, to a James Brown thing with the mic stand, to a Hendrix-inspired solo guitar break, to a hair band pose with Dez and bassist Mark Brown, to a stage right stunt playing guitar with his left hand on the fretboard and his right hand banging out a riff on a synthesizer, back to centre stage for a heavy metal band bombastic ending, which included a directed vamp to the final chord, à la James Brown on the TAMI show. All in the 12-minute version of the first song! And it went on from there – stopping along the way to visit every possible 20th century musical style – all done seamlessly and with professional panache.

And that's why nothing compares to Prince. It's hard enough to imagine that such an artist actually existed and, in our lifetime, let alone thinking someone might be able to duplicate his artistry. Although the luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right thing certainly played a part, this guy had it all. He taught himself how to do it all. He had the drive and the talent to do it all. When his big break came, he was ready. Like no one before him and, from what I can tell, no one since.

Author

​Hangi Tavakoli is our in-house established and professional music producer with more than 14 years of experience in music production, mix and mastering, recording engineering, live sound designing/engineering, lyrics writing and music arrangement. He has produced more than 800 and written more than 2000 published songs to-date, including some major hits in international scale.Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.