CENTRAL HIGH PIONEER, 13 FEBRUARY 1976

“I play with Grand Central Corporation. I’ve been playing with them for two years,” Prince Nelson, senior at Central, said. Prince started playing piano at age seven and guitar when he got out of eighth grade.

Prince was born in Minneapolis. When asked, he said, “I was born here, unfortunately.” Why? “I think it is very hard for a band to make it in this state, even if they’re good. Mainly because there aren’t any big record companies or studios in this state. I really feel that if we would have lived in Los Angeles or New York or some other big city, we would have gotten over by now.”

He likes Central a great deal, because his music teachers let him work on his own. He now is working with Mr. Bickham, a music teacher at Central, but has been working with Mrs. Doepkes.

He plays several instruments, such as guitar, bass, all key-boards, and drums. He also sings sometimes, which he picked up recently. He played saxophone in seventh grade but gave it up. He regrets he did. He quit playing sax when school ended one summer. He never had time to practice sax anymore when he went back to school. He does not play in the school band. Why? “I really don’t have time to make the concerts.”

Prince has a brother that goes to Central whose name is Duane Nelson, who is more athletically enthusiastic. He plays on the basket-ball team and played on the football team. Duane is also a senior.

Prince plays by ear. “I’ve had about two lessons, but they didn’t help much. I think you’ll always be able to do what your ear tells you, so just think how great you’d be with lessons also,” he said.

“I advise anyone who wants to learn guitar to get a teacher unless they are very musically inclined. One should learn all their scales too. That is very important,” he continued.

Prince would also like to say that his band is in the process of recording an album containing songs they have composed. It should be released during the early part of the summer.

“Eventually I would like to go to college and start lessons again when I’m much older.”



https://sites.google.com/site/prninterviews/home/central-high-pioneer-13-february-1976

RIGHT ON!, JANUARY 1979


Prince is a mystery man. His record company biography is a collection of information similar to a Right On! fact sheet. It simply tells his name (the name he chooses to use), his age, and the fact that he’s the youngest producer in the history of Warner Bros. Records.

When you finally meet him; he’s still a mystery. It’s no wonder that Right On! (one of his favorite magazines) is one of the few publications that’s granted the opportunity to meet him, because those who have, have gone away unsatisfied. hy? Because Prince refuses to talk about himself. Getting answers from him is like trying to pry open a clam.

It’s not that he’s trying to keep himself a mystery, he just doesn’t have much to say. Sometimes it’s because he’s being a tease, and other times because he really doesn’t know what to say.

When I was sitting in a recording studio listening to him play an intricate piece of music on equipment I’ve never even seen before, I was amazed at the talents this eighteen-year-old genius possesses. His finesse on these instruments is better than musicians twice his age. Sunglasses temporarily hide his resemblance to one of the Sylvers, but outside in the bright sunlight, your struck by his handsome looks, his wistful, longing expression, and his glorious head of hair. Surprisingly, this strong masculine figure is really short—no more than about 5'2" probably.

“Prince’s home is in Minneapolis, Minn., a city, not typically known for producing music giants the way California and New York churn them out. His musical background consists of pianoplaying father (the person who insisted his first name be Prince) and a mother who sings. No, he didn’t grow up taking music lessons. “I took one piano lesson and one guitar lesson/’ he recalls. “I didn’t learn anything. I taught myself.”

Thinking back, he laughs for a second and reveals a tiny part of his nature. “I’m stubborn,” he said, his brown eyes boring right through me. ”I took a few music classes in school but mainly, I worked on my own.”

As the amazing success story unfolds I find it necessary to tell you that Prince not only wrote, composed, arranged, and produced all the tunes on his debut album, For You, but he also played all the instruments. Funny that he never had. anybody teach him how to use any of them. When questioned about the amount of instruments he plays, he shrugs nonchalantly and says, ’I don’t know, I never counted. I am learning to play the flute, though,” he offered.

A teenager’s deep immersion into the recording business is indeed rare. While other young men are exploring the wonder of the opposite sex or trying to prepare themselves for a career, Prince was creating an album which was so exciting, that it immediately drew interest from multiple record companies. The fact that his parents aren’t musical giants on a level of Maurice White or a Stevie Wonder makes it even more of a phenomenon. His personal manager Owen Husney, the person Prince turns to the most, explains.

"Prince is from a regular family, depending on how you define ‘regular,’ Compared to having been born in a Maurice White family, yes. But I think that the best thing Prince had was that he knew how to work with the right people intuitively in making the kinds of decisions that furthered him. This know-how helps him get to the right places at the right time.’’

Besides being at the right place at the right time, Prince’s self-confidence (even though outwardly he appears to be very withdrawn and reticent) has taken him to unbelievable heights. After all, how many musicians would be bold enough to produce their very first album?

As Prince sees it, “I thought I knew my material better than any other producer and it seemed like I was best suited for the job,”

Obviously, Warner Bros. agreed since there was no hesitation in allowing this Gemini to produce his package the way he saw fit. In fact, his disco tune “Soft And Wet” which incidentally, is one of the tunes he sent to the record companies on demo tapes, is rapidly climbing record charts as well as being played constantly. How does he feel about it?

“It doesn’t seem like me,” Prince admitted, moistening his lips. Without meaning to, he does it very sensually. “Mainly because where I live is kind of isolated from the musical scene in itself. I can only tell what’s going on from reading magazines. When I hear ’Soft And Wet’ on the radio, it seems like someone else is singing.”

I’m inclined to agree because even though Prince, the singer, belts out his tune in a very high falsetto tone, his speaking voice is low and deep.

On a not-so-serious side, I ask Prince what are his interests besides music? Not a bit hesitantly, he replies, “Women, all kinds.” When prodded, he elaborates, “I like the ones with nice personalities.”

“Do you get out much?”

“No. Not really.”

“What age range of young ladies do you like?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

What are some of his “favorites"? He ponders but can’t think of any special activities or movies.

No favorite musicians either because as he puts it, “I haven’t had a lot of time to develop a favorite artist. I try not to listen to too many people. It’s distracting.”

Spoken like a dedicated musician.

“What kinds of clothes do you like to wear?”

“I hate clothes.”

Then you Probably seldom shop.”

“Well, no, not really, somebody goes for me.”

He looks down at his slacks and his nearly open-to-the-navel shirt over which a scarf rests fashionably.

“And foods?”

“Mashed yeast,” he says seriously, with eyes sparkling in humor. “I don’t know,” he laughs.”

“You just like to play around. Now tell me some of your favorite foods.”

“Bubble yum.”

“Okay, you win,” I tell him. “Tell me what your favorite subjects were in school besides music and I’ll stop.”

“Dismissal,” he says. “I didn’t like school or sports. Only when I was younger.”

Has success changed the Minneapolis boy wonder?

He shakes his head no. “But it changes everybody else,” ,he observed. “How they treat you. It’s not bad though,” he screws up his brow trying to figure out how to explain the phoniness of people involved with show business. “I don’t dislike it yet. The only thing I have disliked is the late hours. Not that I like to go to bed early, it’s just that when I’m working, it gets pretty weird.”

When told he’s becoming a sex symbol probably faster than he’s becoming a respected musician, his eyes naively widen in amazement. He’s not sure how he feels about it but he does know he won’t be getting married soon. When? “By the time I’m ready to get married, there won’t be marriage,” he said philosophically. “Probably in the year 2066.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a child though, a test tube baby,” he said looking at me through those , that could turn a body to jelly.
“And I just want to say one last thing,“ added, taking over the tape recorder " I really want to thank everybody for buying my album.”

After all, it was written for you!

LOS ANGELES TIMES, 21 DECEMBER 1980

Prince: More than just a ‘Dirty Mind’


When he was a precious 9-year old in Minneapolis, Prince, pop music’s new boy wonder, used to sneak into his mother’s bedroom and read her spicy novels. "They were underneath that Better Homes and Gardens and places like that,” recall the 20-year-old pop/rhythm and blues musician.

Soon, reading such novels wasn’t enough for him: “once I got tired of reading those stories, I wrote my own. For a while I thought that’s what I wanted to do in life. But I realized as I got a little older I wasn’t going to make any money writing does not hold. I think I would have been a failure at writing them.”

Being a prepubescent porn addict left its mark on him: ’"I think reading those novels has a lot to do with my sexuality in my openness about it. I think it affects you when you have a very early awareness about sexual issues.”

Prince interest in the subject, which may be a byproduct of an erratic home life, didn’t lead to a writing career but it influenced his music. A sexual thread runs through his three Warner Bros. albums the first two—"For You” and "Prince"—are merely suggestive. However, certain songs on his latest album, appropriately titled “Dirty Mind,” are seamy as anything in those novels he used to read. For one, “Sister” is about an incestuous relationship between a teen-ager and a sister twice his age: “it’s part of life. It’s something that’s inside of all of us to some degree, whether we like it or not. We may think about it or encounter it in some form or other.”

It’s rare to see an album from a major label by a well-known artist that is littered with such sexually explicit lyrics. Other artists, Prince observed, are just too timid to roam in this range. “They bypass a lot of heavy things, particularly sexual things,
he said. ’"I’m not about to do that.”

There’s more to “Dirty Mind” than X-rated lyrics. It’s exceptional in every area—vocals, instrumentation, production, arrangement and composition. Remarkably, Prince, a one-man studio gang, does all these things by himself.

Prince, Charleston, S.C., at the time, did the interview by phone. Unlike just about every other artist, he prefers phone interviews. “No one can see me on the phone,” he explained.

His problem has always been extreme shyness: “I would wonder what it would be like if you were sitting here with me?” He inquired. “I don’t seem shy now but I would if you were here. I’m really shy when I meet someone for the first time. I like to listen. I think other people are more interesting than I am. An interview means I have to do all the talking.”

Until the last few weeks he had done very few interviews. As a result a Prince mystique sprang up. “When people couldn’t talk to me or find out much about me, they starting making things up,” he said. “I’m supposed to be mysterious person but I’m not mysterious.”

But now he’s talking to the media mainly to help people understand his album: “my first two albums were self-explanatory but this one isn’t,” he said. Skeptics, of course, are saying he isn’t so much interested in explaining “Dirty Mind” as he is in bolstering its lagging sales. The album, stalled at No. 46 on the Billboard chart, does need a boost because most of it, no matter how excellent, is unsuitable for radio. If fans don’t hear it often on the radio, they are less likely to buy it. Media attention could prod some stations to play the album.

"That’s not the idea behind me talking to the media,” he insisted. “I never thought the album would get a lot of airplay. Maybe I can help those who buy it to understand it better. Anyway, it’s time I step forward and started making myself heard.”

Prince maybe sorry: “I’ve been spilling my guts more to the media then I ever have to my friends,” he had made it. “They’ll find out things from these interviews they didn’t know about.”

One reason Prince is so dedicated to music is that as a child in Minneapolis singing and playing piano was his refuge against unhappiness. His boyhood chronicle belongs in a primer on how not to raise a child.

"I have four brothers and sisters by different fathers and mothers,” he said. “We were never an immediate family. When I was 12 I ran away for the first time because of problems with my stepfather. I went to live with my real father but that didn’t last too long because he’s as stubborn as I am. I lived with my aunt for a while. I was constantly running from family to family. It was nice on the one hand because I always had a new family, but I didn’t like being shuffled around. I was bitter for a while but I adjusted.”

Prince is his real first name but he won’t reveal his last name. He speculated he was named Prince —the stage name off his father, a jazz band leader—for an odd reason: “I think my father was kind of lashing out at my mother when he named me Prince.”

He felt he was ridiculed by his mother for getting into music. “I was into it a little too much for her.” Prince recalled. “My father left home when I was 7

That’s when I got into music. She didn’t like that because music is what broke up her marriage. My father was too serious about music. “I was considered strange. I recall having a lot of strange dreams. I spend a lot of time alone. I turned to music. In some ways it was more important than people.”

Prince started his own band at 12 and by the time he was out of high school was a good enough musician to be signed to a Warner Bros. contract. A self-taught musician, he plays every instrument on his albums—keyboards, drums, guitar and bass. “I learned how to play so many things out of boredom,” Prince said. “I got bored with one and then I could go on and learn something else.” This musical expertise is all the more remarkable considering he doesn’t read music.

Prince is one of those Jekyll-and-Hyde’s types. Offstage he shy; on stage is a torrid performer who even strips down to his bikini underwear. However, he doesn’t read car is persona us as being all that different: “I don’t say death march on stage. I’m still shy on stage. But it’s easy because it’s music. I’m just interpreting music, which is still that one thing in life I feel good about.”

For Prince, A Resurgence Accompanied By Spirituality

CHANHASSEN, Minnestota

The sound of someone knocking out a funk drumbeat thumped down a hallway as a visitor walked into Paisley Park, the studio complex Prince built in this Minneapolis suburb. Soon afterward the drummer emerged, wearing a white jacket of Chinese silk, tight white pants with buttons up the leg, white shoes and a red T-shirt lettered NPGMC. It was Prince, who had been using the time before an interview to record one more track for one more song in progress.

Prince has been virtually a one-man studio band since he released his first album in 1978, and in the years since he has recorded funk and rock, pop ballads and jazzy excursions; he has written streamlined, straightfoward hits and complex experiments. His skill and versatility have made him a model for musicians as different as D’Angelo, Beck and OutKast, and his storehouse of unreleased material, which he calls the Vault, may well hold thousands of songs.

“I record all the time,” he said simply. But this afternoon he paused to reflect on what has been his best year in at least a decade.

Prince led off this year’s Grammy Awards broadcast in February, joined onstage by Beyoncé, and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. His current album, “Musicology” (Paisley Park/Columbia), has sold more than a million copies in the United States since it was released in June, and it is lodged in the Top 20 of the Billboard album chart. Meanwhile, Prince is selling out arenas on tour.

On Monday Prince starts a three-night stand at Madison Square Garden, followed by shows at the Continental Arena in East Rutherford, N.J. (July 16 and 18), the Hartford Civic Center (July 17) and Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y. (July 20). He usually follows arena shows with late-night jam sessions at clubs. He has also renovated Paisley Park to change it from two recording studios to four. And on Dec. 31, 2001, he quietly married Manuela Testolini, a former Paisley Park employee.

Prince, 46, said he was a bit sleepy as he led his visitor into Studio A and settled in behind the 48-track mixing console. But on “Musicology” he boasted that he didn’t have an Off switch, and he grew more animated as he spoke: jumping to his feet, picking up a guitar to play a funk vamp, declaiming and gesticulating like a gospel preacher.

The lascivious young man who recorded albums like “Dirty Mind” (1980) has affirmed a newfound faith. “I always knew I had a relationship with God,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure God had a relationship with me.”

One of the new rooms in Paisley Park has the word “Knowledge” painted outside it. Its shelves hold books and pamphlets from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a Bible sits open on a lectern. Prince has stopped using profanity and has stopped singing about casual sex.

“I’ve always understood the two to be intertwined, sexuality and spirituality,” he said. “That never changed. What became more clear-cut to me was the importance of monogamy. And that was in the Scriptures many years ago.”

“The word sex has been turned into something so. . . . it means so many things to so many different people,” he added. “I don’t use it much anymore. It’s been sullied.”

On tour, he has been reaching into his old repertory for songs like “Purple Rain” and “D.M.S.R.,” which stands for “Dance Music Sex Romance.” Is he embarrassed now by some of the raunchier songs in his catalog? “Embarrassed?” he said with a smile. “I don’t know that word. Have you seen my outfits?"

Tabulating Prince’s current success has been contentious. On his current tour, concertgoers receive copies of the album as part of the price of the ticket, and those albums have been counted for Billboard’s chart rankings. “Once the ticket is sold, the CD is sold,” Prince said. “It’s one-stop shopping.” According to Sony Music, those albums account for about 27 percent of sales of “Musicology.” Yet even during the week ending July 4, when Prince was not playing concerts, the album sold 61,000 copies, keeping it at No. 15.

“One has been spurring the other, which is exactly what Prince thought it would do,” said Michelle Anthony, executive vice president of Sony Music. “With someone like Prince, you almost have cover to break all the rules.”

After complaints that Prince was giving the album away, Billboard and SoundScan, which compiles the charts, changed the method for counting album sales. If an album is sold with a concert ticket, the buyer now has to specifically authorize a surcharge for the price of the album if the sale is to be counted. Yet the rule is not retroactive, so Prince is likely to remain near the top of the chart for as long as he is on tour.

“I didn’t do this to usurp power from Billboard or SoundScan,” he said. “But the real power is in community, in actually connecting with people.”

Prince’s new visibility is not exactly a comeback. He never stopped making albums or touring, but for years he left behind the star-making machinery of the major labels. His longtime contract with Warner Brothers Records turned sour in 1993 as he changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph and appeared with the word “Slave” written on his face. Albums credited to Prince, with songs from the Vault and titles like “Chaos and Disorder,” continued to appear on Warner until the contract ran out, while albums credited to the glyph were released independently. He is now negotiating with Warner Brothers over the release of remastered versions of his old albums, including a 20th-anniversary edition of “Purple Rain.”

Prince formed his own company, NPG Records (for New Power Generation, the name of his band). Fans can subscribe to the NPG Music Club (www.npgmusicclub.com), which offers music to download and advance notice and discounts on concert tickets. After the Warner contract ended, Prince resumed using his old name.

By then he had decided on a new business model. In a typical recording contract, the label finances the recording of an album and other costs, then recoups its investment from the musicians’ royalties, typically about 15 percent of the album’s wholesale price. After costs are recouped, the label still owns the master recording, an agreement some musicians have compared to paying off a mortgage but having the bank still own the house. “There are a bunch of laws on the books that allow them to rape artists,” Prince said.

Prince refuses to accept that arrangement anymore. In his current deal with Sony Music USA—Don Ienner, the president of Sony Music USA, called it unique—Prince pays for recording and promotional costs, and Columbia presses, distributes and markets the album, receiving a percentage of each sale. It is not a long-term or exclusive agreement, although Columbia would be happy to repeat it. “No one can come and claim ownership of my work,” Prince said. “I am the creator of it, and it lives within me.”

“It’s the way it should have been a long time ago,” he added. “The whole paradigm has got to shift. But I’m free now.”

He tried a similar one-shot deal with Arista, in 1999, for “Rave un2 the Joy Fantastic,” credited to the glyph, but its songs were more convoluted than those on “Musicology,” which puts its funk and hooks on the surface. The album has made it easy for old fans to rediscover him and younger ones to connect.

“I make all kinds of records,” Prince said. “For this album, I didn’t feel like making some grand statement. It ain’t like me trying to pull the trigger back and annihilate something. I’m just chillin’.”

By this time, friends and family had drifted into Studio A: Prince’s wife, the funk bass player Larry Graham and Mr. Graham’s wife, daughter, son-in-law and grandson. The grandson, Jaiden Eittreim, 19 months old, was poking at a keyboard while Prince pushed buttons to trigger rhythm tracks, approving of the child’s timing: “He is definitely going to be funky,” Prince said.

Eventually it was bedtime, and Jaiden started to fuss and pout as he was dislodged from the keyboard. Ms. Testolini looked on with a smile: “That’s just how Prince is,” she said fondly of her husband, “when you try to take him out of the studio.”

The Artist Formally Known As Prince plans to party until it’s 2999

Neva Chonin



THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS PRINCE IS STARVING. He and the Woman Formerly Known as Prince’s Wife, Mayte, have spent the afternoon foraging through the menu of New York’s Palace Hotel, looking for food items that don’t offend their shared palate. Being vegan is tough in a red-meat town.

Have you seen The Matrix?” he asks wearily, settling back into a plush couch in a suite high above the honking madness of Manhattan. “Life is just like that. We’d better be careful. Pretty soon it’s gonna be more like Big Brother than it already is. They tell us what to eat, what to think, what to believe in, even what to worship.”

When it’s noted that a good number of people seem to worship him, The Artist smiles. He brushes his long chestnut bangs from his exquisitely dark eyes and drapes one black-trousered leg over the other. “I can only speculate on why people deify other people,” he says innocently. “Maybe it’s because that’s what they’ve been told they should do.”

This particular autumn weekend, the Man Who Will Not Be Deified is accessible only by appointment or mutual fame: Today he’s holding court for journalists; last night he partied with Janet Jackson and Q-Tip. Even if his latest album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (Arista) – a luscious blend of new recording technology and the old Minneapolis Prince sound – did get shut out of Billboard’s Top 10 by the likes of Rage Against the Machine, the Paisley Prince is still the apex of pop royalty. Now if he could only find a decent salad.

Looking young and lovely in a pink minidress, Mayte returns from the restaurant downstairs, bare-legged, high-heeled and empty-handed. The relationship between the former Prince and his princess is replete with the kind of high drama gossips love: Together they recorded Mayte’s self-titled debut album, which bombed. Together they had a baby who died soon after birth, and managed to keep the death a secret for weeks while speculation ran wild. Together they decided to divorce, citing a mutual distrust of contracts, but remain a common-law couple. Together they’re trying to start an orphanage in their home outside Gibraltar, Spain, in a location The Artist extols as “completely serene.”

Now, sitting together on the couch, their hands clasp like clamshells. They could be a lost Keene portrait of two wide-eyed, famished and impossibly gorgeous vegan kittens.

If The Artist’s stomach is empty, however, his spirit is sated. He’s spent the past year studying the Bible (New World edition) with his musical collaborator and spiritual mentor, former Sly & the Family Stone bassist and current Jehovah’s Witness Larry Graham. After much theological pondering and soul-searching, The Artist has adopted many of the Jehovah’s Witness tenets. And while he isn’t ringing doorbells or standing on corners hawking the Watch Tower yet, he’s more than game to preach.

“Larry Graham looks the way he did at Woodstock,” he enthuses. “He’s 52, but he looks 30 because he has a sparkle in his eye. There’s a light shining through. He don’t have to believe anything. No one does. We already know everything.”

As The Artist bounces in excitement, the heavy gold pendants around his neck – one bearing the NPG logo, the other his personal glyph – swing like pendulums. “Have you read the Bible?” he asks. “They talk about people living for 300, 400 years. But people now are so insane about age and time.”

This is one pilgrim, it seems, who doesn’t intend to see the inside of a pine box anytime soon. Whether through fear or the same will to power that enabled him to walk away from mega-stardom, he plans to party until it’s 2999. He’s off to a good start: With his oversized black sweater and shaggy, terrier hair, the 41-year-old could pass as his flamboyant 1984 incarnation’s Bohemian kid brother.

“People die because they give up,” he insists. “They’ve been told they’re going to die, and they accept that. Expectation has a lot to do with it. If someone tells you you’re going to live to be 1000 and you accept that, then you’re outside of time. You’re not counting anymore.”

The Artist begins ticking off points on his slim fingers as if reciting an ontological shopping list. “I don’t count time. I don’t count holidays. I’ve grown up, and I’ve gotten younger and smarter.”

The doorbell chimes. Without missing a beat, he bounds up from the couch and half-dances, half-skips to the door, where his publicist stands waiting with a fresh pot of cappuccino. “When I met Larry, I was searching,” he says, ushering her in. “I still saw a little simple God as being the matrix of truth. But we don’t need to get into a being or a spirit. We decide whether we’re going to live or die. We either create bad or we create good.”

The only person closer to The Artist than Graham is Mayte, whose support he credits for the success of his spiritual search. Raised in Puerto Rico, she was only 16 when they met. The aspiring singer immediately made an impression by being unimpressed by his fame. “I knew who he was,” she remembers, “but it was more like, ŒWow, you’re great. Let’s go eat.”’

The pampered star loved it. “She looked at me for who I was,” he says, regarding her lovingly. Mayte beams. “If I was being a jerk, she’d say, ŒYou know, you’re really being a jerk.’ She was my friend for years before everything started going click, click, click. She mothered me. She’s the only person I’ve never had an argument with. “Mayte may have seen through her future husband’s many façades, but for the rest of the pop world he remains a cipher. With the guilelessness of a holy fool, The Artist has pursued his shifting destinies with a combined disregard for public opinion and a keen awareness of his ongoing celebrity. The harder he tries to escape his own enigma the more he feeds it, and his career moves and personal life inspire the kind of microscopic scrutiny reserved for the very famous and the very weird.

By design as much as by nature, everything The Artist does smacks of unconventional melodrama. In a bid for artistic freedom, he blew off a contract with Warner Brothers to found NPG Records only to become an Internet-distributed recluse known as much for his peculiarities as for his hyper-prolific musical output. His bid to retain rights to last year’s signature song, “1999,” quickly moved from a question of songwriter’s rights to a high-profile verbal shootout that featured wildly entertaining and often abstract rants on his www.love4oneanother.com Web site.

And while The Artist doubtlessly sees himself as a crusader for all artists’ rights, he’s handicapped by his own guarded persona – he wants to save the world without ever venturing into it. Leave it to Eddie Vedder to publicly rail against corporate greed. The Artist fights his battles privately, through attorneys and cryptic Internet messages. Still, the goals are similar, even if the performers are not. Both want to wrest the recording industry from faceless corporations and give it back, if not to fans, at least to musical entrepreneurs.

Alas, the ex-Prince’s reputation for eccentricity often eclipses his good works. For years now, critics and fans alike have had a field day hooting over the speechless glyph he chose to replace his birth name. But his motivation was both justifiable and politically keen. He simply wanted to separate his sense of self from the marketing logo known as “Prince.”

“The first time I realized what was happening was the day of the Purple Rain premiere,” he recalls, shaking his head. “There’s a picture of me from then, and my eyes are just glazed over. I had just got out of a purple limousine, and I looked up and saw this huge image of myself. At that moment I realized the whole world is an illusion.”

If his output from his Internet-only label has been critically spotty, he has nonetheless established himself as something of an online music pioneer. NPG bypassed major labels and distributors to peddle The Artist’s works to the public at a time when MP3 technology was just a glimmer in some computer geek’s eye. Just because he’s deigned to release Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic on an outside label doesn’t mean he’s abandoned his Web strategy.

“The cool thing about the Internet is that you can get information for and by yourself,” he says. “People are more sophisticated now. They’ve got a direct line, and they don’t have to go through other people to find the music they want.”

Finding the music they want doesn’t include sampling his, though. The Artist’s fiercely protective stance toward copyright control isn’t just directed at the record industry. The idea of having his songs sampled and remixed – even through the proper legal channels – makes his perfect coif stand on end.

“Excuse me, but I’ll be the judge of what you do to my child,” he fumes when asked about DJs borrowing his beats. “You gonna take my creation from me? It ain’t about money, y’all. You’re messing with God. That music’s mine, I created it.” As a halfway measure, this year he’s releasing an officially sanctioned sampling disc of his work. “You can pay a one-time fee and do with it what you will.”

While The Artist always has several burners going, the expansive project that became Rave Un2 the Joy Fantasticarrived like an unplanned pregnancy. He had figured on taking the year off, “just sitting and kicking back. It had been 20 years since I’d had a break and I felt I was due.” But workaholic habits soon prevailed. Collaborators ranging from Maceo Parker to Ani DiFranco began dropping by, and the new CD was off and running.

The sessions yielded their share of sonic epiphanies. “After finishing in the studio one evening, Ani, Larry, Maceo and I jammed all night long,” The Artist recalls, staring dreamily out the window at the crisp autumn sunshine. “Maceo was lying on the stairs as the sun was coming up, and he started playing this lonely saxophone. I thought, If the world ended now, it would be perfect.” The album marked a return to vintage Purple Rain-era funk, right down to a production credit for The Artist’s alter-ego, Prince. Don’t expect the Former One to make a full-fledged comeback, though. “I just thought it would be interesting to show that genesis, to make the album sound like Prince again,” he says. “So I went down and blew the dust off all the old instruments.” In another gesture of rapprochement, the major-label-shy star released Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic on Arista Records after striking a deal that allowed him to retain control of the masters.

The Artist’s next project is a classically Quixotic one: A rerecording of Prince’s entire Warner Brothers catalog. “People should have a choice. There’ll be two versions of the albums, and they’ll be identical – except mine will sound better,” he says. Yet despite such ongoing skirmishes, he insists he bears the recording industry no animosity. “I can’t be mad at them. But [the VH1 documentary] ’Behind the Music’ with TLC should be required viewing for musicians everywhere. Left Eye walks you through it – how you can make millions and go bankrupt.”

It’s unlikely that The Artist – or Prince, for that matter – will go bankrupt anytime soon. His new albums sell well and his back catalog still moves hugely and steadily. As the grand master of fin de siècle funk, he has been as influential as any musician in a post-Elvis, post-Beatles world can be. And like Icarus flying toward the sun, he’s perpetually trying to transcend himself.

It’s unlikely that The Artist – or Prince, for that matter – will go bankrupt anytime soon. His new albums sell well and his back catalog still moves hugely and steadily. As the grand master of fin de siècle funk, he has been as influential as any musician in a post-Elvis, post-Beatles world can be. And like Icarus flying toward the sun, he’s perpetually trying to transcend himself.

Asked his expectations for the new century, he flashes a smile both inscrutable and charming. “I expect to live forever,” he says smoothly. “Life is so much more sexy when there’s no ceiling on it.

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