5 Essential Prince Albums

Prince
Prince’s first success, while modest by his career standards, was his self-titled album, released in 1979 and performed entirely by Prince. No, really: with the exception of some vocal work by bassist André Cymone, all of the singing and instrumentation were done by Prince himself, which seems almost impossible given how good—from both a technical and pop standpoint—the album is. Prince’s sound was tight, clean funk that was almost disco, with lots of keyboards and high-pitched vocals, standing at the crossroads between Michael Jackson and Rick James. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Sexy Dancer” are the best known tracks from the album, but “Bambi” is no slouch, either.

1999
1999, released in October 1982, is often hailed as Prince’s most influential album; not only was it his first album with the Revolution (although they were not officially credited as such), it was the first top ten album of his career, attaining multiplatinum sales numbers and making dozens of the year’s best-of lists. Singles like the title track and “Little Red Corvette” account for a lot of the album’s popularity, but make no mistake, this album predicted big things for Prince. His use of synthesizers and drum machines influenced two decades’ worth of R&B and electronic music, and his band—the multiracial, Sly Stone–influenced Revolution—was one of the best in the industry.

Purple Rain
This is the big one! Purple Rain isn’t the only soundtrack in Prince’s discography (he also put together the soundtrack to the 1989 Batman film), but it’s his most famous and successful, and widely considered his best album ever. Prince augmented his already impressive band with electronic musical embellishments for a dense sound that influenced new wave as much as it freshened up soul and R&B, and he showed off his formidable guitar chops on tracks like “Darling Nikki.” Other tracks from this album, namely the title track and “When Doves Cry,” are what ultimately defined Prince’s sound in the popular consciousness and cemented his legacy as a pop music genius.

Around the World in a Day
This record was Prince’s follow-up to Purple Rain, released with minimal advance promotion at his insistence, and it’s basically Prince’s psychedelic album. Critics compare it to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the amount of different instruments and musical styles Prince experiments with, but funk and R&B are at the album’s heart. That said, one of Prince’s all-time best pop jams, “Raspberry Beret,” appears on this album, and was one of its two hugely successful singles; “Pop Life” was the other, becoming a top ten single despite being withheld until a month after the full album’s release.

Art Official Age
Released just two years ago, in 2014, this album is seen as a minor evolution in Prince’s style (specifically his use of digital production) and a return to form, in that Art Official Age is a smooth, funky, and strange concept album. It also confounded critics, who have long insisted Prince had fallen short of the reputation he’d built up in the 1980s. Tracks like “This Could Be Us,” “Breakfast Can Wait,” and “Funknroll” should make it clear to everyone that, despite any creative missteps Prince made over the course of his long career, his abilities as a musician, producer, arranger, and performer can’t really be questioned, nor can his impact on popular music.