(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 12 December 2025 3:00, UK
It’s not exactly fair for anyone to compare themselves to the standards that Prince set for everyone.
As much as people might have liked being at the top of the charts and learning from ‘The Purple One’, he was already a seasoned pro before he was out of his teens and was halfway to making classics miles ahead of everyone else in his path. But when he entered the next generation of pop, he was looking around the charts and wondering why everything had become so bland.
You have to remember that the version of pop that Prince grew up listening to was miles different from what everyone is listening to in the modern age. It was totally natural for him to pull from everyone, from James Brown to Sly and the Family Stone to Santana to Led Zeppelin, within the span of a single album, but he knew that the true legends weren’t going to come from those who were selling millions in stadiums.
Granted, this is a world that Prince did have a small hand in creating. Most people wouldn’t like to admit it, but the kind of excitement that came out of listening to an album like Purple Rain is the same kind of energy that every pop artist has been trying to capture just as much as they are copying from Madonna’s Like A Virgin or Michael Jackson’s Thriller from around the same time.
But whereas Prince’s contemporaries did have a distinctive sound whenever they performed, a lot of what floated to the top in the modern age was too safe for his tastes. There would be the occasional artist that broke through to the mainstream and got his seal of approval, like Kendrick Lamar or Lizzo, a few years before she even blew up, but when it came to stars like Katy Perry, he figured that they would be flashes in the pan within a matter of years.
As far as ‘The Purple One’ could see, people like Perry and Ed Sheeran were nothing but disposable junk for fairweather music fans, saying, “They keep trying to ram Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran down our throats and we don’t like it no matter how many times they play it.” But the problem with Perry and Sheeran wasn’t always about the music in general. It was about what they stood for.
Because, really, there’s nothing exactly wrong with either artist to begin with. Both of them are inoffensive enough for the mainstream, and they both have a string of decent songs on the charts that have the potential to resonate with people, but Prince was arguing about why the pop charts should have been considered that safe when it came to the hits that people wanted to hear.
There had been plenty of artists that disturbed the mainstream back in the day, and if everyone kept rewarding people like Perry and Sheeran, that was a sign that record labels could print money making songs that weren’t nearly as strong as what Prince heard back when he was a kid. Even if you went back to a decade prior, there was no way that a song like ‘Firework’ was going to have the same impact as Whitney Houston did when everyone heard ‘I Will Always Love You’ for the first time.
So while Prince’s condemnation of people like Perry and Sheeran could be seen as callous and cold, it was about him looking out for the mavericks of the industry. Both of them may have been perfectly decent musicians in their own right, but the minute that they start getting rewarded with the biggest accolades possible, that leaves less room for the Princes, Madonnas, and even the Cobains of the world to break through.
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