Prince Valiant

He’s a funny little enigma, that Prince guy. You could say he’s the original metrosexual. You could say he’s a religious freak. You could say he’s a sex god and a genius.

In his early years, Prince pranced around in lingerie and hip boots, singing dirty lyrics like a nasty girl (“Jack U Off,” anyone?). Though androgynous, it seemed he got as many foxy chicks as an NBA superstar. With some deep mysterious aura, he not only won the women over, but he changed their names. Remember Vanity and Apollonia? Under his tutelage, even Wendy and Lisa seemed weirdly exotic.

Prince has always been about breaking preconceived perceptions, even after he blew up into a bona-fide pop star with the film and soundtrack Purple Rain. He brought a perfect mix of seemingly incompatible ingredients to the charts by infusing mink-lined funk with screaming psychedelia and then bouncing it with New Wave. The grounding force through his music has been a lavender shade of sex; unmitigated, unapologetic, dirty-talking, soul-stirring sex (think “International Lover”).

“Sexuality,” from his fourth release, Controversy, seems to say it all: “Sexuality is all you’ll ever need/Sexuality, let your mind and body be free.”

Artistically he’s stuck to that principle. He’s never folded into the music industry rot. He rebelled against Warner Bros. over distribution contracts. Having to produce music under a contract he didn’t like, Prince began calling himself “slave”; afterward he legally changed his name to a symbol. With the release of Emancipation in 1996, Prince emerged as an independent artist working under his own label, NPG.

The little freak (he’s a Jehovah’s Witness to boot) continues to blend cultural influences and push envelopes. It’s easy to lose track of all the music he’s produced since Purple Rain (more than twenty releases in twenty years). Still he’s a cultural tour-de-force, an ageless musical sage working independently and always searching for a sign of the times.