Prince Was Always Compared To Michael Jackson, But He Was More Like David Bowie  (2024)

A lot has been made of the rivalry between Prince and Michael Jackson, and it’s easy to understand why. They were two of the biggest pop stars of the ‘80s (along with Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and George Michael, among a few others).

For one thing, they were two of the first non-white artists to get significant airtime on MTV. Musical Youth, Herbie Hanco*ck, Eddy Grant and the Bus Boys got some play, but Prince and Michael were the first to be treated as stars, not novelties or one-hit wonders. Prince’s breakthrough to MTV was his fifth album, 1999, released in October of 1982, about a month before Michael Jackson’s Thriller. “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” got some MTV attention as well, but not on the level of Thriller’s “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and “Thriller” – the latter had a budget of $1 million in an era where most music videos were relatively low budget affairs.

The Jackson and Prince rivalry wasn’t a media concoction; there was actual friction there. Jackson discussed it in a conversation he recorded for his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalker. The segment wasn’t used in the book, but the British tabloid The Mirror got possession of the tapes in 2016, shortly after Prince’s passing. “I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” he said. “I have proven myself since I was real little. It’s not fair. He feels like I’m his opponent. I hope he changes because, boy, he’s gonna get hurt… He was so rude, one of the rudest people I have ever met. Prince is very competitive. He has been very mean and nasty to my family.”

The two were almost the exact same age, but of course, as a child star, Jackson’s career started over a decade before Prince’s. Still, Prince said in a 1997 interview with Chris Rock, “[He] was never my contemporary.” Rock protested, “He’s got to be a contemporary! [Was there] any rivalry between you and Mr. Jackson?” Prince responded flatly, “Not to me. I’m a musician. I live for playing and creating songs.”

This was the original “I don’t know her.” Of course they were contemporaries. And, of course, there was a rivalry. Thriller spent over 20 non-consecutive weeks at #1 on the album charts in 1983, and the first 15 straight weeks of 1984 in the top slot. But 1984 would ultimately belong to Prince: Purple Rain was the number-one album in the country for 22 weeks in a row, from the beginning of August through the year’s end.

The rivalry didn’t end there: Prince didn’t participate in USA For Africa’s “We Are The World.” The song, of course, was co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie. Richie discussed Prince’s absence from the song with Jimmy Kimmel in 2019. The Netflix documentary on the song goes into more detail about why Prince wasn’t involved in the recording.

Despite that, Jackson wanted to work with Prince. He invited Prince to perform on the song “Bad.” This also came up in Prince interview with Chris Rock. He took issue with the line “Your butt is mine.” “I said, ‘Who’s gonna sing that to whom? ‘Cause you sure ain’t singing that to me. And I sure ain’t singing that to you.’ So, right there we got a problem.” Apparently, Prince sent Michael and producer Quincy Jones a demo of how he thought the song would go; this wasn’t well received. Needless to say, Prince isn’t on Jackson’s “Bad.”

Not that any artists need to be compared to anyone, but a closer comparison to Prince was David Bowie. Both enjoyed being massive stars, and they both used that currency to give them the space to do less commercial projects. Prince followed up 1984’s Purple Rain with 1985’s Around The World In A Day, an album that marked a 180-degree artistic turn. Now a marquee idol, Prince wasn’t visible on the album’s cover, he did minimal press and almost seemed to want to get away from the success of Purple Rain. Bowie did a number of drastic left turns throughout his career. After his biggest album, 1983’s Let’s Dance, Bowie did a few more (less successful) albums in that vein but then formed a new band, Tin Machine, that sounded like nothing he’d ever done before.

They both veered back and forth between more popular and less accessible projects over the decades, changing their backing bands based on their artistic visions and who could best execute on that. They were able, to varying degrees, to incorporate newer genres into their music. (Prince embraced hip-hop on 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls, and Bowie incorporated drum and bass/jungle/techno on 1997’s Earthling). And they enjoyed working with younger artists who they’d influenced (Bowie worked with Trent Reznor, Prince with Gwen Stefani, Sheryl Crow and Eve).

Some of those things are true of Michael as well, and none of this is to disparage him. And, ultimately, Prince likely would not have wanted us to. As his friend, the writer Tavis Smiley revealed, when the news of Jackson’s passing circulated, Prince took it hard. He told ExtraTV, “Prince was in rehearsal at Paisley Park; Prince cancels rehearsals, sent the band home, and for days, locked himself in his bedroom, wouldn’t come out, really didn’t talk to people.”

Smiley elaborated in a later interview. He noted that those rehearsals were for the Montreaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, which took place just weeks after Jackson’s passing. Smiley accompanied Prince to Switzerland for the festival and recalled that after the show, he and Prince hung out on the roof of the hotel: “We walked there at about two in the morning, and we sat on the rooftop of that hotel, looking at the Swiss Alps ‘til the sun came up, and all Prince talked about for hours was Michael Jackson…. I don’t know if I said ten words that night, but Prince just had to get it out of his system. It was so surreal to hear him talk for hours about his respect for Michael’s genius, for Michael’s gift, for Michael’s showmanship.”

Michael’s genius and gift were about doing things at the highest and biggest levels: he wasn’t about weird, against-the-grain projects. He was the grain! Everything had to be number one for him. And there was an excitement to that. Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad and Dangerous were all huge moments in pop culture. But what Prince and Bowie had in common was that they’d have huge mainstream successes and then do something that wasn’t nearly as accessible, with the confidence that they could always have another hit when they wanted to.

Brian has been working in pop culture and media for about three decades: he’s worked at MTV, VH1, SiriusXM, CBS and Loudwire. Besides working as a writer and an editor-in-chief, he’s also appeared on air as a pundit, guested on radio shows and hosted podcasts. Over the years, he’s interviewed the surviving members of Led Zeppelin, the members of U2, Beyonce, Pink, Usher, Stevie Nicks, Lorde… and is grateful to have had the chance to interview Joe Strummer of the Clash and Tom Petty.