The Beatles are one of the first major artists to single-handedly change the world of rock and roll. Artists like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were more or less ambassadors for the genre in its inception, but as soon as the Fab Four graced the Ed Sullivan stage, it felt like the air smelled different once you were finished watching everything. That came from the band breaking down barriers no one had ever thought possible, but Paul McCartney thought the new school was in for a switch-up when he saw Prince for the first time.
While Prince did have a fair bit of influence from the Fab Four, it was always a lot more subtle than every rock band. Sure, everyone who has ever tried to write a hit in the past half century could take cues from The Beatles, but Prince seemed to put every influence into a musical stew and walked out with something no one had ever heard.
Across his first few albums, Prince combined everything from funk to soul to rock to pop under one roof and actually managed to stick the landing more often than not. Regardless of how many albums he was able to pump out, very few artists were able to make people dance, sing, and cry, as well as ‘The Purple One’ could in his prime.
Just like The Beatles, that wasn’t enough for Prince. He wanted to have his name in lights, and that meant taking everything to the big screen. Despite only being signed as a recording artist, Purple Rain gave us the best of both worlds of musical genius, showing the meteoric rise of an up-and-coming musician while delivering the greatest soundtrack album of all time.
Compared to the rest of the MTV generation, though, Macca was going through another major switchup. He may have started the decade with two of his greatest albums, McCartney II and Tug of War, but albums like Pipes of Peace were the first time that everything started to wane for him.
Still, he had to admit that he was witnessing greatness whenever he saw Prince, recalling, “He’s probably my favourite modern act. I like him because he’s an innovator, and he doesn’t go the way everyone else goes. He seems to stand out in the crowd. He sings good, looks good, he plays great guitar. I like a lot of his albums, even the ones that don’t do that well.”
McCartney does make a good point about Prince’s lesser albums as well. Although a record like Dirty Mind might not have been as radio-friendly as his later projects, the fact that he had something as unique as ‘When You Were Mine’ on the record just isn’t fair to the rest of the rising stars of the time.
If you look at some of the songs that McCartney released later, there are even some blink-or-you’ll-miss-them references to Prince, like some of the dancier grooves on Pipes of Peace. More than anything, McCartney may have seen a bit of himself in Prince at that age. They both knew how to make hits, but they were just as interested to see where their music would take them whenever they went into the studio.
