Actors - Prince

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	Actors - Prince

Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958), known as (or, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince) from 1993 to 2000, is a popular and influential American musician. His music has spanned myriad styles including funk, pop, rock, R&B/soul, and hip hop, and is widely regarded as a 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 was black and part American Indian and white. In an pervious interview dated back June 1981 in the UK. New Musical Express/Melody Maker and Sounds all publish interviews with Prince. It was quite obvious Prince didn't like being interviewed. Responses to questions about his childhood and musical influences were very guarded. Prince has stated that his background are from lineage of ethnicities, his father is black and part Italian and his mother is Italian with other lineage.

After the birth of his sister, Tika Evene in 1960, Prince saw his parents gradually drift apart. Prince's parents formally separated and he had a troubled relationship with his stepfather causing him to run away from home. He lived briefly with his father, who bought him his first guitar. Later, Prince moved in with a neighborhood family, the Andersons, and became friends with their son, Andre Anderson (later called Andre Cymone).

Prince and Anderson joined Prince's cousin Charles Smith in a band called Grand Central, formed in junior high school. Initially his involvement was just part of a mainly instrumental band that played clubs and parties in the Minneapolis area. As time went by and Prince's musical knowledge broadened he found himself dictating the arrangements to the rest of the band. Before long he had become the band's frontman. By the time Prince had entered high school, Grand Central evolved into Champagne and started playing original music already drawing on a range of influences including Sly Stone, James Brown, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

In 1976, he started working on a demo tape with producer Chris Moon in a Minneapolis studio. He also had the patronage of Owen Husney, to whom Moon introduced him, allowing him to produce a quality demo. Husney started contacting major labels and ran a campaign promoting Prince as a star of the future, resulting in a bidding war eventually won by Warner Brothers Records. They were the only label to give Prince creative control of his songs and offered him a contract.

Controversy: 1975–1981

Pepe Willie, husband of Prince's cousin, was an influential presence in Prince's early career. Willie acted as mentor and manager, along with Husney, for Prince in the Grand Central days, and employed Prince in the studio for his own recordings. In 1977, Willie formed 94 East, a band with Marcy Ingvoldstad and Kristie Lazenberry. Willie enlisted the talents of Prince and Andre Cymone as session musicians for their studio recordings and in 1986 released the re-recorded tracks (except for Prince and Cymone's parts) from 1975–1977 as Minneapolis Genius. In 1995, the original recordings with Prince and Cymone were released by Willie as 94 East featuring Prince, Symbolic Beginning.

Prince's first album for Warner Bros, released in 1978, was titled For You. The majority of the album was written and performed by Prince. Prince spent twice his initial advance recording the first album, which sold modestly, making the bottom reaches of the Billboard 200, while the single "Soft and Wet" performed well on the R&B charts. Prince used Ecnirp Music - BMI for publishing his songs, which he would also use for his following two albums.

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Actors - Prince

Biography

Uptown: Early years

Controversy: 1975–1981

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