Legendary, innovative and hugely influential musician Prince has died at age 57, his publicist confirmed Thursday.
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Prince won seven Grammy Awards, earning 30 nominations.
Carver County officials have not yet confirmed that the deceased is Prince, saying only that a death investigation is underway.
Prince is a music legend.
According to TMZ.com, Prince had also cancelled a pair of shows prior to his Atlanta performance due to illness.
Pop superstar Prince has died in the United States, aged 57. Prince had been suffering from flu-like symptoms for several weeks leading up to his death.
He later told the Guardian: “What I meant was that the internet was over for anyone who wants to get paid, and I was right about that”, he says. Often ranked as one of the greatest albums in music history, Prince achieved numerous hits including the title track and two number one hits “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry”. He won an Oscar for best original song score for “Purple Rain”, the 1984 movie whose music was based on his album of the same name. Although his motivations may sometimes seem mysterious, Prince is never uninteresting and always capable one more hit record or a return to stardom.
In between he starred in one more film, 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon, in which he stars as a gigolo wooing Kristin Scott Thomas in the south of France.
The dedication adds: “Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone”. He describes watching Prince rehearse in the basement of his mother-figure Bernadette Anderson, and the watching him perform his early shows.
Later in his career Prince was among the first artists to protest the treatment of artists in the age of internet music distribution.
Prince, finally, was also famous as a Midwesterner, a Minnesotan by birth who continued to call the Minneapolis area home for most of his life.
The singer was taken to a nearby hospital by ambulance, where he was treated and released hours later.
Update, 12 p.m. PT: The story has been updated to indicate that three Prince songs topped the list of iTunes downloads Thursday.
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Four albums into his career, and without a huge hit yet, he began breaking the rules of spelling and grammar; 1981’s Controversy ended with a song called “Jack U Off”, the first time he began spelling things his own way.
