While Prince is rightly remembered for his influential musical legacy, he was also famous
for sometimes being temperamental, petty, and a bit of a diva.
That all led to some deeply personal grudges.
From rookie pop stars to longtime rivals, here are the celebrities Prince couldn't stand.
A little thing like death couldn't stop Prince from sharing his views on music with the world.
In October 2019, three years after his death, his memoir The Beautiful Ones was released.
This wasn't just another straightforward rock star narrative.
We're talking about Prince, after all.
The book incorporates his cartoons, unseen photos, and handwritten notes alongside memories
from his life written in his own personal code.
One particularly incendiary passage comes when Prince notes,
"We need to tell [music execs] that they keep trying to ram Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran down
our throats and we don’t like it no matter how many times they play it."
This takedown must've been especially painful for Perry.
Back in 2009, she tweeted about how Prince and his movie Purple Rain were career inspirations
for her.
And in the aftermath of Prince's death in 2016, she tweeted,
"And just like that...the world lost a lot of magic.
Rest in peace Prince!
Thanks for giving us so much..."
What a way to ruin teenage dreams!
Justin Timberlake's assertion that he was bringing "SexyBack" in 2006 convinced a lot
of people.
The song was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, and it won the Grammy
for Best Dance Recording.
But at least one person took issue with Timberlake's claim.
During a performance at an Emmys afterparty in August 2006, Prince told the crowd,
"Whoever is claiming that they are bringing sexy back, sexy never left!"
Timberlake fired back at the 2007 Golden Globes by mocking Prince's height while accepting
an award on his behalf.
And then in February of that year he directly called Prince out in his verse on the Timbaland
song "Give It to Me."
Even after Prince's death, his fans have refused to let Timberlake off the hook.
In 2018, they called him out for holding a listening party at Prince's estate, Paisley
Park, which included alcohol, despite Prince's rules against drinking.
Timberlake ultimately paid his respects, though.
During a 2018 appearance on The Tonight Show, he called the late singer, quote, "the pinnacle
of musicianship."
"The GOAT of musicians."
In the 1980s, Madonna and Prince were two of the biggest pop stars in the world.
The two even dated for a couple of months in 1985, but afterwards they fell into a long-lasting
pattern of verbal sparring.
After their breakup, she reportedly screamed at him,
"How dare you dump me.
Don't you know who I am?"
She also insulted Prince's height, his outfits, and his eating habits.
They buried the hatchet long enough to record "Love Song" for her 1989 album Like a Prayer,
and Prince also played guitar on two tracks.
But in 1992, his competitive nature pushed him to top Madonna's $60 million record deal
with their shared label Warner Bros.
He won that round, signing a contract worth an estimated $100 million, although he later
fell out with the label in spectacular fashion.
This feud ultimately mostly settled into run-of-the-mill bickering.
In 2016, Prince's backup dancer Cat Glover recalled to GQ that Prince tried to persuade
Madonna to star in his 1990 movie Graffiti Bridge, but that ultimately didn't work out
because he couldn't deal with her.
One meeting derailed into insulting each other's shoes.
As Glover put it,
"This is what happens when you get two big egos in one room.
It was jokey and serious.
They're the same way."
Most people have said something they'd like to take back.
But most of us didn't say it to one of the most talented musicians in the world.
Pink, however, does have that dubious honor.
She and Prince met backstage in the late 90s, when she was 19 and had just signed a record
deal.
Living up to her bold image, the rookie singer asked the legend to collaborate with her.
Prince responded by asking if she owned her own masters, which are the original copies
of an artist's songs.
He'd spent the early 90s campaigning to get his back from Warner Bros., and they finally
gave him the chance under a new deal that he signed in 2014.
When Pink said "no," he told her to come back when she did own them.
Not one to take a slight lying down, she told him that he was, quote, "a rude f---."
However, she later realized that he was trying to teach her a lesson.
When she appeared on the Australian radio show Fitzy and Wippa in 2016, she said,
"I loved him, I totally loved him…Prince is everybody's genius...The world lost a lot
of sparkle this year, and it hurts my heart because I don’t know what's going to replace
it."
"He was and will be forever amazing."
Despite how the saying goes, Prince did not consider imitation to be the sincerest form
of flattery, as he was famously against other artists covering his songs.
In a 2013 interview with Billboard, he specifically called out Maroon 5's cover of "Kiss," which
was included on a deluxe version of the band's 2012 album Overexposed.
According to Prince,
"Why do we need to hear another cover of a song someone else did?
Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what's already
there."
In deference to musical royalty, Maroon 5 removed the song from iTunes and Spotify.
Frontman Adam Levine didn't take the barb personally.
In 2017, he explained to Howard Stern that he'd met Prince years before the "Kiss" spat.
A mutual friend invited Prince to a casual party that Levine was hosting, which turned
it from a relaxed jam session into a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that ultimately migrated to
Prince's house.
Levine noted,
"My experiences with him were genuinely really beautiful and special."
In 2014, Levine had another crack at a Prince song when he played "Purple Rain" live.
Prince was apparently less annoyed about live covers of his songs, and he offered Levine
the ultimate lukewarm praise by saying,
"You getting it."
"Him saying that is basically to be exactly the highest praise."
Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne saw the funny side of being rejected by Prince.
His band's encounter with the prickly Purple One happened at the 2006 Brit Awards.
Prince was scheduled to perform a set of four songs while reuniting with former Revolution
bandmates Wendy and Lisa and Purple Rain singer Sheila E. The Flaming Lips were hanging around
when Prince and his two security guards arrived and went to his dressing room.
They worked up the courage to give Prince's bodyguard a stack of CDs to pass on to him.
As Coyne recalled to The Independent,
"We were so thrilled at the possibility of him hearing our music.
But at the end of the night, the bodyguard came and found us and handed all the CDs back.
He said: 'Prince doesn't want these.'"
Luckily, Coyne and his bandmates were able to keep the whole thing in perspective as
they found the whole thing hilarious.
As Coyne put it,
"We loved him so much for being too cool for us."
In 2011, Prince officially debuted his anti-Kardashian stance.
He invited Kim onstage during his Welcome 2 Tour and then immediately kicked her off
when she refused to dance.
A few years later, he doubled down on the hostile sentiment when he appeared on a 2014
episode of New Girl.
The episode featured a party at Prince's house, where Jess, as played by Zooey Deschanel,
gets some love advice, pancakes, and a makeover from the singer.
Shortly after Prince's death, Deschanel appeared on Conan and discussed the Prince episode.
No Prince party is complete without celebrities, and some members of the Kardashian family
shot cameos for the episode.
However, Prince put the record scratch on that.
After finding out about the Kardashians' involvement, he had all the scripts and call sheets burned.
"And it turns out that someone from Prince's camp said like, 'Who are the celebrities?
I hope it's not a Kardashian.'"
Deschanel's costar Lamorne Morris told a similar story on an episode of the Doug Loves Movies
podcast, although he didn't mention the Kardashians by name.
As he explained,
"Prince shows up early, so he's sitting in video village, and he's watching the screen,
and he goes, 'What are the blank blanks doing here?'
They said, 'Well, they're in the show.
They've been invited to a Prince party.'
He goes, 'They would never be invited to a Prince party.'"
The crazy real-life story of funk singer Rick James includes a lot of hate aimed in Prince's
direction.
Both musicians released their first albums in 1978, but their rivalry really started
two years later when James invited Prince to open for him on his "Fire It Up" Tour.
It was dubbed the "Battle of Funk," and it turned into war.
The two would reportedly watch each other's performances from the wings.
James accused Prince of stealing his moves, his look, and his idea for a girl group.
He claimed that the musicians in Prince's band were snobs and that he once forced cognac
down Prince's throat, making him cry.
In his autobiography, James wrote that he started working for Eddie Murphy because he
wanted to give the comedian a hit song and, quote, "stick it in Prince's ear."
In 1982, when Prince refused to sign his autograph for James' mother, it so angered James that
he assaulted Prince.
The Purple One definitively won the Battle of Funk, and not only with his music career.
On the night of that fight in 1982, he met James's ex, Denise Matthews, who became Prince's
girlfriend and protege under the stage name Vanity.
Sinéad O'Connor's 1990 version of the song "Nothing Compares 2 U" is so famous that many
people don't even know it was written by Prince in 1984.
Prince hated other artists covering his songs, let alone being more successful with them,
and O'Connor has recalled having a very tense meeting with him.
She told three separate interviewers that after her cover came out, Prince invited her
to his house in Malibu and turned violent when she refused to become one of his proteges.
She accused him of trying to punch her, and she also claimed that she had to run away
from him at 5 AM and knock on the door of a neighboring house.
"We didn't get on very well.
We tried to beat each other up."
"Really?"
"We didn't get on too well."
"You tried to beat each other up?"
"Well, it was more he tried to beat me up and I was defending myself."
And the details of this story get even weirder.
When O'Connor was interviewed by the Carver, Minnesota County Sheriff's Office following
Prince's death, she claimed that Prince beat up The Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin
and worshiped the devil, all under the influence of hard drugs.
If there's one person more frank in his musical assessments than Prince was, it might just
be Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
In 2016, Stones drummer Charlie Watts told The Guardian about the time that Prince opened
for them at the Los Angeles Coliseum during their 1981 American tour.
Prince, being Prince, was wearing his trademark bikini bottoms.
As Watts recalled,
"Mick [Jagger] and I both loved [Prince's 1980 album Dirty Mind] Keith hated it and
we got him on our show.
Of course, being Prince he duly went on in his knickers and our audience booed him off.
Which didn't deter me from liking him."
Watts maintained his admiration for Prince, but Richards grew even more hostile.
In 1988 he told the Los Angeles Times,
"I think he's very clever at manipulating the music business and the entertainment business.
I think he's more into that than making music.
I don't see much substance in anything he does."
By the time Richards published his autobiography in 2010, he still hadn't warmed up.
He called Prince overrated, mocked his height, and claimed that he insulted Stones fans with
his presumptiveness.
As he wrote,
"Prince has to find out what it means to be a prince.
That's the trouble with conferring a title on yourself before you've proved it...He's
a prince who thinks he’s a king already."
Only after Prince's death did Richards appear to mellow, as he tweeted,
"A unique talent.
A true original.
So sad, so sudden and, I will add, a great guitar player.
We are all going to miss him."
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