A dying breed of entertainers took its last breath on April 21, 2016 with the death of musical icon Prince Rogers Nelson.
At the age of 57, Prince was found in his Paisley Park compound unconscious and unresponsive, eventually pronounced dead.
The Carver County Sheriff’s Dep. and the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office are investigating the cause of death.
A week prior, Prince was forced to make an emergency landing from his private plane and was admitted into the Emergency Room due to an overdose.
However, TMZ recently proclaimed that the musician regularly took the painkiller Percocet to relieve hip pain and he may have overdosed, but nothing is assured yet.
Prince was born June 7, 1958 in Minneapolis.
His parents were John Nelson AKA Prince Rogers (stage name) and Mattie Shaw, who were jazz band members from the Prince Rogers Band.
With musical parents, Prince was introduced to music from the start and he ran with it.
By the time he was a teenager, he taught himself to play the piano, guitar and drums.
As a young teen, Prince ran away from his broken home to the basement of his eventual bandmate and lifelong friend Andre Anderson AKA Andre Cymone.
Prince and Cymone formed a band with future The Times band leader, Morris Day.
In 1978, as a solo artist, Prince signed a deal with Warner Brothers and followed it with his debut album, “For You.”
It’s not usual that movie soundtracks launch musicians to stardom but when Prince dropped Purple Rain, soundtrack to movie of the same title, he rose to global success.
Purple Rain went on to win an Academy Award for best original score.
Prince went on to have plentiful success with future tracks such as Kiss, Raspberry Beret and so on.
In 1992, he signed a 100 million dollar deal with Warner Brothers, a record at the time, compared to Michael Jackson’s 60 million dollar deal.
The musical genius ran into a rough patch. In the same year, Warner Brothers was displeased with the Love Symbol Album and it’s lack of success in comparisons to Prince’s previous work.
He began to feel controlled by his label and ensued to change his name to glyph O(+>, a symbol combining male and female astrological symbols.
For obvious reasons, people recognized him as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and this stayed until the year 2000.
2010 was a year to remember when he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, BET Awards honored him with the lifetime achievement award and he was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
On April 23, his closest family and friends held a private funeral to give their last farewells to the artist forever known as Prince.
