Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died Thursday at his residence, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., according to a statement from his publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. He was 57.<\/p>\n
No cause of death has been given. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that sheriff\u2019s deputies responded to an emergency call at 9:43 a.m.: \u201cWhen deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide life-saving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 a.m.\u201d The sheriff\u2019s office said it would continue to investigate his death.<\/p>\n
Last week, responding to news reports that Prince\u2019s plane had made an emergency landing because of a health scare, Ms. Noel-Schure said Prince was \u201cfighting the flu.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson on June 7, 1958, was a man bursting with music \u2014 a wildly prolific songwriter, a virtuoso on guitars, keyboards and drums and a master architect of funk, rock, R&B and pop, even as his music defied genres. In a career that lasted from the late 1970s until the arena tour this year, he was acclaimed as a sex symbol, a musical prodigy and an artist who shaped his career his way, often battling with accepted music-business practices.<\/p>\n
Prince\u2019s Top 10 hits included \u201cLittle Red Corvette,\u201d \u201cWhen Doves Cry,\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy,\u201d \u201cKiss,\u201d and \u201cThe Most Beautiful Girl in the World\u201d; albums like \u201cDirty Mind,\u201d \u201c1999\u201d and \u201cSign O\u2019 the Times\u201d were full-length statements. His songs also became hits for others, among them \u201cNothing Compares 2 U\u201d for Sinead O\u2019Connor and \u201cI Feel for You\u201d for Chaka Khan. With the\u00a01984 film and album \u201cPurple Rain,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Prince told a fictionalized version of his own story: biracial, gifted, spectacularly ambitious. Its music won him an Academy Award and the album sold more than 13 million copies in the United States alone.<\/p>\n Prince recorded the great majority of his music entirely on his own, playing every instrument and singing every vocal line. Then, performing those songs onstage, he worked as a bandleader in the polished, athletic, ecstatic tradition of James Brown, at once spontaneous and utterly precise, riveting enough to open a\u00a0Grammy Awards<\/a>\u00a0telecast and play the\u00a0Super Bowl halftime show<\/a>. Often, Prince would follow a full-tilt arena concert with a late-night club show, pouring out even more music.<\/p>\n In Prince\u2019s biggest hits, he sang passionately, affectionately and playfully about sex and seduction. With deep bedroom eyes and a sly, knowing smile, he was one of pop\u2019s ultimate flirts. But elsewhere in his catalog were songs that addressed social issues and delved into mysticism and science fiction. He made himself a unifier of dualities \u2014 racial, sexual, musical, cultural \u2014 teasing at them in songs like \u201cControversy\u201d and transcending them in his career.<\/p>\n He had plenty of eccentricities: his fondness for the color purple, using \u201cU\u201d for \u201cyou\u201d and a drawn eye for \u201cI\u201d long before textspeak, his vigilant policing of his music online, his penchant for releasing huge troves of music at once, his intensely private persona. Yet among musicians and listeners of multiple generations, he was admired well-nigh universally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prince, the songwriter, singer, producer, one-man studio band and consummate showman, died Thursday at his residence, Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minn., according to a statement from his publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure. He was 57. No cause of death has been given. In a statement, the Carver County sheriff, Jim Olson, said that sheriff\u2019s deputies responded to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.madcat.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}