The only difference is that Mike had been in the business much longer(1969) and Prince came in 1978.
Mike was a great singer and entertainer but did not write all the music he sang on. Prince played almost every instrument on everything he created. And on top of that he has a vault inside his Paisley Park museum that has thousands of unreleased songs. So from a musician standpoint, Prince was the genius.
Mike had more appeal because he had been entertaining the world for much longer.
Originally Posted by kerwil62
wow ker, i didn't know all that backstory on prince. i remain unimpressed with purple rain-to me it's like listening to whales singing lol-but maybe if i looked at his whole musical corpus, i'd change my mind.
some musicians, say like probably brittany spears, don't write any of their songs. so you have a song ghostwriter, a producer who smooths out the rough edges to make sure it's a hit, probably a choreographer to write the dance moves for the video, and then you have the singer, who should at least be attractive and have a good voice.
and then you have a beyonce or rihanna, who i know zero backstory on, but i suspect both gals write their own shit. if so, they are both musical and dance geniuses. maybe someone who knows can fill us in. beyonce is an h-town girl, so someone local should know her backstory.
whoever wrote the music for "they don't care about us" is a musical genius. whether that was MJ or a ghost writer, i have no idea. but based on nothing more than my intuition, i'd bet anyone 100 pelosi bucks right now that it was MJ and not a ghost writer. but of course i could be 100% wrong. i think he was more like say a beyonce and less like a brittany spears, a legit creative genius.
epilogue: from a 5 minute google search, it looks like beyonce writes much of her own work, and she has a dedicated choreographer, as does rihanna. rihanna writes maybe a bit less of her own music than Beyonce. it appears that MJ wrote all of his own music, and had a sort of dance coach guru who taught him his famous moves, but then MJ did basically his own choreography.
if anyone has better intel, please give us the scoop.