April 21--Taking a look at some of the milestones in Prince's four-decade, award-winning career:
Dirty Mind (1980): Beyond the provocative pose on the album cover, Prince creates a stir with music that filters his lusty funk and R into terse new wave and post-punk.
1999 (1982): The sprawling run-up to his biggest album spills over with ambition, including the apocalyptic title track and the zippy "Little Red Corvette."
Purple Rain (1984): Prince's defining guitar solo on the title track, and a great example of how the artist could bring his band -- which included the button-pushing duo Lisa Wendy -- into a more collaborative role.
Parade (1986): Lean, psychedelic, and built to last -- "Kiss" sounded positively avant-garde against the over-produced hits that it jumped past on the charts.
Sign O' the Times (1987): Other albums had bigger hits, but this is Prince's best work start to finish. It's a tour of his many musical fascinations and a resounding testament to his curiosity as a listener and appreciator of everyone from Sly Stone to Joni Mitchell.
Emancipation (1996): A three-disc celebration of Prince's arrival as an independent artist, including a brilliant take on Joan Osborne's "One of Us."
Art Official Age (2014): One of Prince's strangest and better latter-day albums, in the Afro-futuristic tradition of Sun Ra and Parliament-Funkadelic.
HITnRUN Phase Two (2015): One of two erratic albums released simultaneously only a few months ago, "Phase Two" contains one of his best recent songs, "Baltimore," a moving tribute to African-American victims of police violence, with Chicago singer Eryn Allen Kane
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