Everyone has a rock bottom.
—Prince
In a way, the clash between Rick and Prince was all Rick’s fault. He made the mistake of booking Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson in 1958) as one of his opening acts in 1979 on his Fire It Up tour and on subsequent tours, giving the musician his first national exposure and reinforcing the younger man’s apparent belief in the potential of pornographic flamboyance. One of Rick’s motives may have been that Prince reminded Rick of himself. The problem was that pretty soon Prince was more famous than Rick.
Even on their first tour together, to Rick’s great annoyance, Prince started imitating some of Rick’s trademark moves. This would have seemed mere flattery if Prince weren’t directly preceding Rick onstage, making Rick look like the copycat. Prince, although not a Motown performer, appeared to have stolen a page from Diana Ross’s playbook. When Ross and her fellow Supremes were warm-up acts on the Motown Revue tours in the early 1960s, Ross would sit in the audience after performing and memorize the trademark moves of the tour’s stars. She’d then perform their moves in her own act the next day before the stars appeared, making them look imitative and ridiculous.
The resulting hostility of some Motown artists toward Ross was nothing compared to that between Prince and Rick, who went on to spend years harassing and imitating each other. Each accused the other of being second, rather than first, with every innovation each made. “Everything that Prince did, I’ve already done,” Rick once told Richard Wesley. “He was always biting off me.”
Despite their obvious dislike for each other, it became apparent that neither man covered his ears in the presence of the other man’s performances. For the rest of Rick’s career, he and Prince competed intensely to see which of them could produce the most pornographic song.
Almost immediately, Prince won this race to the bottom (in all senses) with his 1980 album Dirty Mind, which included the song “Sister,” with such lines as “I was only sixteen, but I guess that’s no excuse / My sister was burnin’ to love me, and loose . . . / Showed me where it’s supposed to go / A blow job doesn’t mean blow / Incest is everything it’s said to be.” Rick’s songs seemed tame by comparison. The problem with “Sister,” as with all Prince’s semipornographic songs, was that he was too serious; he didn’t lighten his shocking message with Rick’s winking humor.
Rick had a serious problem with this particular song, calling it “dangerous for the race” and linking it in The Confessions of Rick James with songs about devil worship or gangsta rap. Black writers and recording artists, he said, should be more concerned with the influence they have on younger generations. Having sex with your own sister was going too far even for Rick. Rick’s references to cunnilingus on many of his songs were similarly outdone by Prince’s ode to oral sex, another song on his Dirty Mind album, fittingly titled “Head.” In it, Prince meets a woman who is not only technically a virgin but on the way to her wedding ceremony. She takes a gander at the singer, talks for a couple minutes, and then tells him, “You’re such a hunk, so full of spunk, I’ll give you head.” Prince, or the character he’s singing about, then “came on her wedding gown,” forcing her to admit she wants to go to bed with him, and she marries him instead of the man waiting at the altar. Then, according to the song, he gives her head.
Prince upped the ante while singing onstage in London, switching viewpoints between seducer and seduced, woman and man, something Rick would have done only if the alternative was slow castration. As the Washington Post noted, Rick’s idea of singing about sex was to “pander to sexual fantasies by exaggerating traditional gender roles,” while Prince’s sex songs, along with those of Boy George and Chrissie Hynde, blurred those roles.
Some of Prince’s songwriting ideas may have been stimulated by the Hollywood environment in which both he and Rick moved. Ruffin recalls an occasion on which Rick took him to his first Hollywood party, a wedding reception. “It was beautiful!” Ruffin says. “The couples were fantastic-looking. . . .There’s drugs, but there’s also caviar. . . . I’d never been a part of this kind of atmosphere.” He continues, “Next thing I know, the husband and wife are dancing, they’re so cute, then they break off and they each go to their partner, him to his boyfriend and her to her girlfriend, and begin slapping tongues [French kissing]. I said, ‘Rick, get me the fuck out of here.’ Rick said, ‘Levi, we just can’t walk out, come on, man.’” They eventually left.
Rick had been teased for the sexually ambiguous nature of some of the outfits he wore on his album covers, but Prince went him one better early on when he wore only black jockstrap-type underwear, an open overcoat, and a scarf on the cover of his Dirty Mind album. He also occasionally wore panties and high heels when performing.
Prince may have produced purer porno, but Rick’s semipornographic tunes were generally more popular, since radio stations shied away from Prince’s more explicit songs. New Musical Express, in fact, awarded the prize in the Rick v. Prince competition to Rick. Reviewing one of Rick’s onstage performances, NME claimed that Rick “took on Prince man-to-man, trampling over the short-legged one’s plastic sensuality with a labial lasciviousness which somehow managed to equate cold blood with wild freaky sex.” That must have been quite a show.
Creem magazine disagreed, arguing that Rick was less perverse than Prince. When Rick sang about being “kinky” or “freaky,” the Creem reviewer wrote, he was probably referring only to oral-genital contact. He added that “Prince’s bizarre [sexual] scenarios don’t occur to him, and if they do, he keeps them out of his music.”
To say the least, none of Prince’s activities pleased Rick one iota. Rick “was obsessed with Prince and thought himself in a rivalry” with the younger man, according to screenwriter Richard Wesley. Each man harassed the other. At one of Rick’s concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, Prince was seen entering the amphitheater just before Rick came onstage. Rather than sit down and wait for the show to begin, Prince, a small man, leapt into the arms of his own burly bodyguard, a typical Prince feminine act, and had the man carry him to his seat. This attracted so much attention that Prince’s fans began swarming around him, driving him to decide to leave the auditorium. Rather than just walk, however, he jumped onto his bodyguard’s back and rode out piggyback style, arousing the crowd once again. Rick was appropriately furious, calling Prince’s actions “a pathetic attempt to steal the show.”
Rick took his revenge by humiliating Prince in public whenever he had the opportunity. Once, taking Prince by surprise, Rick grabbed his hair, pulled his head back, and poured liquor down his throat, causing the younger man to choke and spit.
But Prince beat Rick in the larger arena. As early as 1983, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate pointed out that Prince was in better physical shape than Rick, provided a flashier show, and “served his raunch in a more literate and melodic dish.” He also became a more popular performer than Rick had ever been, and lived longer, dying in 2016 at age fifty-seven.