Prince’s Six Silent Rivalries: The Artists He Could Never Forgive

“You know that Wesley Snipes character—that would have been me.”
A chilling statement. A man with an ego too large to bend, an artist who lived like a flame, burning brilliantly until the very last second. That was Prince—uncompromising, unyielding, and unwilling to bow to anything he deemed false.

For all his genius, Prince was never an easy man. Once standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Michael Jackson, once refusing to shake hands with entire industries over a misplaced glance, he carried with him a private list—a ledger of scars, grudges, and names he could never forgive. Six names in particular lingered like wounds in his soul. Michael Jackson. Madonna. Whitney Houston. Mariah Carey. And two more who, in his mind, stood as reminders that music had drifted from sacred fire to packaged commodity.

To understand Prince’s resentments is to understand his religion: art. To him, music was not simply entertainment; it was survival. It was rebellion. It was prayer. Anyone who borrowed the language of pain without carrying its scars was, to him, a thief of authenticity.

The King of Pop: A Rival Born of Opposites

The world knows of Prince’s rivalry with Michael Jackson. But what most misunderstand is that it was never about envy—it was about principle.

Backstage in 1983, the two men shared a dressing room in New York. Michael walked in, gentle and unanchored. Prince sat by the window, silent, his eyes cold. Neither man spoke. The rivalry had become mythic, but at its core was a deep disapproval.

Prince once told Sheila E., “He puts the funk in a bottle and sells it at Macy’s.” For him, Michael wasn’t making music to heal; he was making music to sell. Michael grew up in the spotlight, polished into an image that could never offend. Prince, raised largely on his own, wrote songs as prayer and rebellion.

Their brief attempt to collaborate in 1986 ended after forty minutes. Michael performed a moonwalk, trying to set the mood. Prince sat on the floor with his guitar and refused to play a single note. When Michael died in 2009, Prince issued no condolences—only a request that flashing white lights be cut from his own shows. Silence was his eulogy.

“He ruled the charts,” Prince once said quietly. “I ruled the silence.”

Madonna: The Mirror That Bled

“She dances like me, but she never burns like I do.” That was Prince’s silent judgment of Madonna.

The two once shared synergy, meals, even unreleased tracks like Love Song. Yet for Prince, Madonna was the embodiment of what he despised: art packaged as product. “She doesn’t bleed, she packages,” he once told Sheila E.

In 1985, a planned joint single fizzled into nothing. By 2007, when Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Prince did not attend, did not send flowers, did not speak. Asked about her, he smiled faintly and said, “I don’t mind being misunderstood. I mind being misused.”

To him, Madonna was not malicious—but she represented pop’s decline, from liberation to machine. When she approached him at a party in 2011, he politely touched his male-female harmony pendant, spoke briefly, and walked away. A quiet parting.

In one of his notebooks, a fan later found the words: “I loved her brilliance, but I feared her ease.”

Whitney Houston: The Voice Too Perfect

Prince never publicly attacked Whitney Houston, but his silence told the story.

He once muted a performance of I Will Always Love You midway through, turning to a friend and saying, “She sang, but I didn’t hear her.” Whitney’s voice, he felt, was flawless—too flawless. Every note seemed sculpted, polished to perfection, leaving no cracks where vulnerability could seep in.

“She sings to be loved,” he whispered once backstage. “But sometimes the deepest songs are sung in whispers.”

When Whitney invited him to join her 1997 tour, he refused quietly. Not out of arrogance, but because he couldn’t find himself in her music. He believed she sang for recognition, not survival.

When Whitney died, he wrote no tribute, but during a Paisley Park performance he played a nine-minute guitar piece with no lights, no words, only choked sound fading into silence. It was his farewell—his way of acknowledging a voice he respected but never truly connected with.

Mariah Carey: The Perfume of Pop

In 1998, Prince sat in his studio listening to Mariah Carey’s latest album. After forty seconds, he removed his headphones. “Too clean. Too perfect,” he muttered. “She sings like she’s afraid of herself.”

He had once been urged to collaborate with her. His answer was swift: “I don’t duet with a perfume.”

To him, Mariah embodied “diva culture”—voices cultivated in studios, polished by producers, stripped of scars. She could soar into whistle notes, but Prince believed a scream without sorrow was just noise. “She sings like a diamond,” he once said. “No scratch, no bruise, no history.”

At an award show in 1995, when both were introduced as musical geniuses, Prince took a half step back, coldly refusing the comparison. Later, in his notebook, he wrote: “Some women sing about heartbreak like it’s glitter. Real heartbreak is smoke. It chokes. It never sparkles.”

Beyond the Notes: Prince’s Philosophy of Pain

For Prince, music was not technique, nor polish, nor trend. It was survival. It was how the wounded screamed, how the queer and the oppressed found voice, how he himself endured a world that once called him strange.

Every resentment he carried toward these legends came from that belief. Michael turned scars into perfume. Madonna packaged authenticity as a trend. Whitney sang to be loved. Mariah sang without wounds.

Prince, meanwhile, sang to survive.

His grudges were not gossip; they were the shadow side of his faith in art. He was not threatened by these stars—he was disappointed in them. They reminded him of what music could become when stripped of its raw soul: commodity.

The Sixth Name

Prince’s list is said to hold six names. Four have surfaced clearly—Michael, Madonna, Whitney, Mariah. The remaining two may never be confirmed, though whispers among his former collaborators suggest they, too, were artists who represented pop’s polished surface over its bleeding heart. Perhaps other divas, perhaps former collaborators who betrayed his trust. Perhaps the sixth was not a person at all, but the industry itself.

Whatever the truth, the ledger remained private, scribbled in notebooks, hinted in cryptic interviews, and carried in silences that spoke louder than words.

A Legacy of Fire

When Prince died in 2016, he left behind not only some of the most profound music of the 20th century, but also an uncompromising philosophy. For him, music was not meant to please. It was meant to bleed.

That’s why his rivalries mattered. They were not petty celebrity feuds. They were statements of artistic principle—protests against the sanitization of suffering, the commercialization of rebellion, the commodification of soul.

To love Prince was to understand that he never sought perfection. He sought truth. And truth, to him, was jagged, painful, raw.

He once said, “True art doesn’t need to be popular. It needs to be real.”

And perhaps that is the final word on why he could never forgive certain names. They weren’t his enemies. They were reflections of the world he spent his whole life resisting.

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