For me, it was actually the Purple Rain film.

I loved WDC and LGC, but the rest of the album actually didn't make that much of an impression on me at first (hardly surprising, it playing on the crappy little tape recorder I had at the time). But then when I went to the movie, it was like everything just snapped into focus. Not only was the music the greatest stuff I'd ever heard thus far, but also Prince and his whole world just seemed so fascinating.

I ran to the mall the very next day and stole 1999! The rest is history...

Controversy.

Then I became uninterested after 1999 and became interested again with SOTT.

soft & wet

"Call My Name" beautiful song, that was 6 years ago, but i'm still gettin into Prince, right now discoverin his Dream Factory era

The Little Red Corvette and 1999 videos, in 1983. Went to buy the album, then two weeks later, I bought Dirty Mind and Controversy. Let my sister listen to my mixed tape on my Walkman while she was sunbathing in the backyard. When she got to Do Me Baby, she took off the headphones at the end and let out a "Damnnnn! That's hot!"

robertgeorgeakabob said:

Probably U Got The Look. Don't understand the flak it gets here. The production is amazing.

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It was probably his first song that also won over the squares, and old folks, getting steady wedding dj play. (I'm not calling you a square, just saying that's one reason it might get flak)

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I can't remember if it was LRC or 1991, for me, but then once I associated the older stuff like Controversy, and When you were mine, I realized I'd already loved his music.

[Edited 6/15/14 14:21pm]

Musicology turned my head, came out when I was in high school.

Get Off made the introduction, thevault channel always played it.

Then I watched When doves cry video, became a FAN

EyeHatechu said:

Im young so some of yall will have to excuse me for I dont have the same experiences but I remember asking my dad about Prince because I heard Adore on the radio. He told me that Prince was the best thing out there in the 80s but that was it. The next day I woke up and there was a Sign O the Times album on my night stand. My dad put it there while I was asleep. I popped it in my dvd player which also played CDs and I immediately fell in love. My dad let me keep the album and thats how it all started. So Sign O the Times was more like the first album that got me hooked.

Wow - you listened to the crappy-sounding SOTT CD and still fell in love with Prince? That's impressive!

He didn't exist for me in 1982-1984 (I was 4 in 1982);

I laughed at him in 1986:

ignored him in 1987 (in favour of MJ);

had a hard time admitting to my elder brother that I thought The Future and Electric Chair blew me away;

got to love him in 1991.

MC Hammer's Soft And Wet

Easy. The first song I heard... Jack U Off. I was 13... need I say more?

Hello from all other fans from Down Under

The song that made me a fan - U Got the Look. The first record I ever bought where the B side was better than the A side (Housequake).

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The thing that made me obsessive? - 2 things:

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1. Seeing Prince live...I was 15 and had only previously seen Bananarama and Erasure (forgive me I was young). Prince was in another league altogether!

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2. At school I felt I had to constantly defend my love of Prince's music. In short, not many people at my school 'got it' and I was ribbed mercifully of my love of all things Prince. I defended him with all my worth and this, in part, made me love Prince and obsess about his talent even more.

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Interestingly, 25 years on, people from my school days are amazed that I'm still into him but I've had many people who 'taunted' me admit that I was right all those years ago

Partyman for sure, as well as Laydown.

I remember the first time I heard Partyman while watching Batman (1989) without knowing

P done the soundtrack (and of his existance)

I looked it up (lucky with guessing with the song title)

and played it whenever I was bored and then, BOOM I fell deeply in love.

and when we moved, I found a copy of 20Ten (free from the paper we had from 2010)

saw it was by P and played it . . . by 1st Sept. 13, I was a full-time hardcore Purple Politician

if you guys want, I'll do a more in depth YouTube video and post? thoughts?

I was more or less raised on Prince. My father used to play Prince almost every day ever since before I was born. He would sit there turning up the volume on songs like God, Do Me Baby, Solo etc when I was getting a bit older, and discussing the details and different parts in the music that he meant set him apart from about everyone else. He had me convinced that this dude was the shit. However when I was a teen I would discover other aritsts that I personally was digging more than Prince for quite a while... then after I got grown I rediscovered Prince through finding out that all of my favourite artists were heavily inspired by Prince. I started making sample based beats when I was about 19 years old, bought myself a vinyl record player and an mpc... I put on this album called Dirty Mind... I was literally BLOWN AWAY. This was the one album my father didn't own on cd. And it was one of the few albums where prince was playing real drums etc... this was the time when I didn't really love the linn sound, since I was a sampling dude that would be crate digging for 60s and 70s jazz/funk/soul samples. Dirty Mind was right in my valley at the same time as it was SOMETHING ELSE. The whole album, but maybe in particular Head was the song that change everything for me. The minimalistic and simple groove teached me that music can be made from almost nothing. Prince was to me the person that could make nothing sound like everything.

When Doves Cry. I was 6 years old....7 years ago. Im so young lol

When Doves Cry in 1984....

'Something in the Water', 'Free' or 'International Lover', or all three, all the way back in... 2010. I found a copy of 20ten that someone had got free in the paper and gave it a listen. I didn't really like it. Yet, it made me think to look into Prince a little, because I knew some of the big songs and knew a little bit about his reputation. So I decided to buy an album at random and it ended up being 1999. I kept revisiting the album because of those three songs and a few months later something clicked and I went on a gigantic Prince splurge.

When they showed "Gett Off" on YO! MTV Raps.

I would say I'd discovered Prince and turned into a fan more than once. First song to get me was Mountains, I was in my early-mid teens and someones older brother was a fan, so I guess I assumed they knew what good music was. I had just a Parade CD for ages and still rate Mountains as one of my favourite tracks. (I recall having ATWIAD on my walkman while delivering papers too). Another standout song I feel drew me in, later, was When You Were Mine, which encouraged wider listening to more albums.

After not listening for ages -2nd half of the 90s through to 2010 -I got to hear ‘20ten’, listened through several times, enjoyed it, but left it there.

Today, in 2014, over the past few weeks I’ve got more excited about going back over my WB years CDs, and maybe checking out albums I’ve never heard (almost everything after Graffiti Bridge). I had been obsessing over Blood Orange (try 'You're Not Good Enough' if you haven't already) when he tweeted about 3EG & Prince, so I thought ‘Is Prince still doing his thing? If so, I’m interested’. So I bought Lotusflow3r triple CD pack, I’ve only had it a few weeks but the standout songs for me (and the ones that are drawing me back into active fan mode) are actually from the MPL Sound disc (which doesn’t seem to get much love around here, am I right?) I just really enjoy '’Ure Gonna C Me’ (seriously, ppl should be playing this for soppy moments at weddings) and ‘Here’. (‘Dreamer’ from the Lotusflow3r disc hit the spot in the car the other night too).

edits: song names bolded

[Edited 6/20/14 5:25am]

It's so neat to hear the perspective of the younger fans in this thread. The idea of having Prince pushed on me by my own parents is certainly foreign to me! He was like the 'anti-parents' when I got into him (and quite literally, when you think about the creation of Tipper Gore's PMRC).

I've resisted the urge to push Prince on my own son, because I wanted to see what sort of music he'd be drawn to. Unfortunately, he only seems interested in music from his favourite video games.

Cream, when it came out in late 1991. It was the video and the song that did it for me at the same time. I bought the single and then another one (Diamonds and Pearls) then Gett Off and Insatiable and then I put two and two together and realised he was the Purple Rain/Batdance guy and I kind of liked all his songs anyway.

I knew that buying Diamonds and Pearls (the album) would make me a fan, and it did, after that not only did I want more Prince music, I wanted books, films, posters and virtually anything related to Prince. Basically I became obsessed about Prince overnight and he has been my preoccupation from age 15 to 38.

When Doves Cry

Still my favorite song of all time, still can´t get enough of it.

Pure genius, pure Prince. Just Prince in the studio, all by himself.

Closely followed by The Beautiful Ones.....another solo masterpiece for eternity.

I was rasied on classic Michael Jackson, I'm talking Destiny-Off The Wall-Triumph. He was huge for me, but occasionally I'd here this "other guy" on the radio with songs like Delirous, Little Red Corvette, Raspberry Berret and When Doves Cry.

But it was the song 1999 that first got me fascinated with Prince. I'm 20 years old, born in 94, so growing up in the late 90s there was this mounting paranoia about y2k by the year 99. I must have heard the song 1999 around 97 or 98, but it caught my attention hard, I asked my Pops who it was and he gleefully replies:

"Oh this is Prince, he's the man!"

He was a big fan himself, but wouldn't play Prince for me and my siblings due to some of the lyrical content, so for the early years it was mostly MJ (not a bad thing since most of the current pop stars were Britany Spears, Nsync or Aaron Carter )

Around 2004 Musicology was on the radio and my parents expressed shock that Prince was back, they seemed pretty happy. A couple of years later it's late 2006 and my Dad got us season tickets to Carowinds, an amusment park that sits on the NC/SC border. He played the album Purple Rain a lot whenever we'd leave a day full of roller coasters and funnel cakes, I loved the whole album, especially the song Purple Rain. It was really majestic and made for good highway memories.

But to answer the OP's question: Mountains is what converted me into a fan for life. Once again my Dad played a Prince album on a road trip, this time on the way to the beach and it was Parade. That album hooked me more so than PR and i had to know more about the guy after that first listen. The extended version of Mounatains remains my favorite track by him, and in 2011 I got to see him live during the W2A Tour, best concert ever yo

Genesia said: