Music icon Prince has been found dead at his home in suburban Minneapolis, his publicist said. He was 57.
His publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, told the Associated Press that the pop superstar died on Thursday at his home in Chanhassen. No details were immediately released.
Prince is widely acclaimed as one of the most inventive musicians of his era, drawing upon influences ranging from James Brown to the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix. His hits included “Little Red Corvette,” ”Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry.”
Born in 1958 as Prince Rogers Nelson, the Minneapolis native broke through in the late 1970s with the hits “Wanna Be Your Lover” and soared over the following decade with such albums as “1999” and “Purple Rain.”
The title song from “1999” includes one of the most widely quoted refrains of popular culture: “Tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.”
“You can’t even calculate the impact on what he did for pop music, for pop culture, for fashion,” Leah Greenblatt with Entertainment Weekly told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos. “I think he really was living as an artist right up until the end.”
He was also fiercely protective of his independence, battling his record company over control of his material and even his name. Prince once wrote “slave” on his face in protest of not owning his work and famously battled and then departed his label, Warner Bros., before returning a few years ago.
Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll of Fame in 2004.
“He rewrote the rulebook, forging a synthesis of black funk and white rock that served as a blueprint for cutting-edge music in the Eighties,” reads the Hall’s dedication. “Prince made dance music that rocked and rock music that had a bristling, funky backbone. From the beginning, Prince and his music were androgynous, sly, sexy and provocative.”
Prince was reported to have been hospitalized in Illinois on Friday on his way back from a concert in Atlanta. He subsequently appeared at a dance party at Paisley Park.
A small group of fans quickly gathered in the rain Thursday outside his music studio, Paisley Park, where Prince’s gold records are on the walls and the purple motorcycle he rode in his 1984 breakout movie, “Purple Rain,” is on display.
The white building surrounded by a fence is about 20 miles southwest of Minneapolis.
