A paean 2 Prince.

"Purple Rain" is remembered for its music - the soundtrack album produced four Top 40 hits and is a beloved pop masterpiece - but the movie, released on July 27, 1984, remains the nerviest act of Prince's quixotic career. (Originally published in July 2009.)

In a powerful essay, the Roots leader goes deep on the genius, loneliness and the secret hip-hop heart of his idol.

Remembering the night the two guitar greats spent hours talking technique.

Prnce, the 21-year-old singer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist who is performing tonight at the Palladium, is the most controversial contemporary rock star precisely because he challenges sexual and racial stereotypes. (Originally published Dec. 2, 1981.)

Michaelangelo Matos on a singular career.

People far more eloquent and accomplished than myself have eulogized Prince. His work and his power are unquestionable. I am writing this about a specific two minutes and fifty seconds of Prince’s life.

Here's our attempt to sort out the legacy left by one of pop music's most prolific recording artists. The following list of 37 albums is as complete as we can make it, omitting best-ofs, remixes and fan-club releases.

A refusal to be labeled R&B, a rivalry with Rick James and a very dirty song called 'Head': the groundbreaking arrival of 1980's 'Dirty Mind.'

A tribute to Prince's queerest, most mixed-up album.

It was Michael Jackson’s self-imposed struggle for supremacy over Prince that inspired the concept of "Bad," incited him to outwork and out-create his peers, and impelled Jackson’s final act–his "This Is It" concerts. Similarly, Prince looked to Jackson as a source of competitive and creative fuel, resulting in one of the greatest periods of artistic genius in music history.

Salon speaks to Prince biographer Touré about how his music reconciled sex with religion, Gen X and MJ.

Though he was a puzzle at times, the rocker was a true Minnesotan who revolutionized music more than once in a nearly 40-year career.

While there's nothing wrong with a Prince hits anthology or two, this doesn't even begin to tell the story. Petra Davis, Joe Stannard, Al Denney, Wyndham Wallace, David Moats and John Tatlock choose their favourite non-single tracks... (republished 21st April 2016 -- RIP Prince)

Music icon Prince died on Thursday (Apr. 21) at the age of 57. NYU professor Zaheer Ali and Prince biographer Toure talk about some of the artist's lesser-known classics.

Prince made it easy to ignore his later work. For starters, there was simply a lot of it, more perhaps than even his most devoted were looking to consume.

Prince had so many ideas for hit songs that sometimes he just gave them away.

Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg was a teenage punk-rocker when he had his first life-altering experience listening to Prince. Decades later, after playing the same clubs as the late star and recording frequently at Paisley Park, he's still in awe. "He was like a ray of light in a very cautious place," the singer-songwriter told us.

The pop star who seems to shock everyone is Prince, one of the biggest names in rock history, and a very strange young man. Prince helped change the nature of romantic lyrics in pop music--he’s a master of the single entendre.

I'm interested in the question of Prince and genre because I'm interested in the question of Prince and time, and I'm interested in the question of Prince and time because I do not know how he did it, this beautiful, strange, sultry, shining thing that he did.

The majestic flood that began at Super Bowl XLI in 2007 never stopped.

Prince is dead. It sounds implausible, even in a world where the only kinds of people are those who will die and those who already have. But if there were two types of people on the planet, Prince always seemed to belong to a third.

With the death of Prince, let's celebrate "this thing called life," as His Purpleness himself put it. For him it was inseparable from love -- his second and most heartfelt subject -- and from sex, his third and most lascivious. They were all part of the same thing.

He was a genuine original, a genius, an artist with a dirty mind - and musically, no one could come anywhere near him.

In the 1990s, Fafu moved to Minneapolis, where his dad was living, to pursue music, chasing the funk scene that you see in "Purple Rain." There, he met and befriended Michael Bland, who was Prince's drummer at the time.

How the artist took an autobiographical tale and turned into one of the most enduring rock movies ever

Since his death I've spent many hours replaying "The Dawn," somebody's insanely elaborate reconstruction of an album Prince kept revising but never completed.

Why Prince's run at his creative peak ranks among the greatest in music history.

Roots drummer and Tonight Show musical director Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson tells us how.

Here's how a Super Bowl halftime show traditionally works: A band or a musician plays a 12-minute condensation of a Vegas revue. The set list usually consists of Predictable Hits, sometimes sandwiching a Brand New Song from Current Album They're Hawking.

"Imagine if Michael Jackson had played the solo on 'Beat It'?!" guitarist says. "That was Prince on a Tuesday."

Prince was such a masterful showman, songwriter, singer, and performer, it’s sometimes easy to forget that he was also one of the greatest guitarists working in any music field. When

Songwriter Jonathan Cain & guitarist Neal Schon recall Prince reaching out about similarities to their song "Faithfully": "I just thought it seriously showed the kind of caring, classy guy Prince was," Cain tells Billboard.

Pepé Willie looks back on inviting teenaged Purple One to record with 94 East.

Paisley Park Studios, the factory-sized bunker where Prince recorded 30 of his own and many other albums is a 65,000 square-foot, $10 million complex that housed recording suites, sound stages, ballrooms and more. It has been alternately described as a museum and a jail, with few windows and a chainlink fence perimeter.

When Prince went on the road in the UK in 2014, he played random venues without warning, charging £70, £10 or sometimes nothing at all. The unpredictability was almost as dazzling as the shows.

Last week, the not "fully human" Prince played back-to-back 80-minute sets just one week after contracting the flu.

Prince's 39 studio albums spread only represent one portion of the Purple One's output, with dozens of collaborators both playing in his bands -- at various times, the Revolution, New Power Generation and 3rdEyeGirl -- and performing songs produced and written for other outfits such as The Time, Vanity 6 and Madhouse.