Prince's music is a guide to this thing called life. Over the course of his impossibly fruitful career, the Minneapolis maestro fleshed out a philosophy grounded in the belief that humanity's purpose is to realize the unity of body and spirit, through pleasure, relationships and music itself. It's all laid out musically in his manifesto "D.M.S.R.," from 1999: "Take a deeper breath and sing along with me," Prince exhorts, "Dance music sex romance!"
In honor of Prince's Warner Bros. catalog returning to Spotify and other streaming services Sunday, we've created four playlists to highlight the fundamentals of the Prince ideology. DANCE features some of his funkiest tracks, designed to move you on the dance floor. MUSIC highlights Prince the virtuoso, the great crafter of riffs and melodies and the experimentalist. SEX — that's self-evident. And ROMANCE shows the Purple One at his most heartfelt and dreamy: a lover who believed in a better world created one soft touch at a time. This is Prince, never 2 B 4gotten: the man who made music divine.
DANCE
Get ready to sweat with these very funky tracks.
MUSIC
Godly guitar solos, fantastic falsetto, synth parts that redefined what popular music can do — it's all here in this playlist of Prince's most virtuosic moments.
SEX
No one got nasty better than Prince. These tracks highlight his erotic inventiveness.
ROMANCE
Songs to make lovers swoon and smile — this selection highlights the Prince who believed in love above all else.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
