In 1983, James Brown asked Michael Jackson to perform with him on stage. At the time, Michael Jackson was already a pop icon, following Thriller, and it would be another year before Prince‘s bigger breakthrough with Purple Rain, yet he had already made some noise with his 1982 album, 1999, its title track and “Little Red Corvette.”
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Brown first beckoned Jackson on stage. Jackson sang and shared some of his signature dance moves before Brown invited Prince to join them. “Prince, you gotta do something,” said Brown. “You gotta do something.” At first, Prince played some riffs on guitar before stripping off pieces of his clothing and moving around the stage like Brown’s lifelong prodigy. The performance marked the first and only time Jackson and Prince would share the stage together since both artists would continue to have a rift in their relationship throughout both their lifetimes.
Throughout the 1980s, Michael Jackson and Prince were the biggest male black figures in pop. Naturally, the two artists were often compared to one another, which shifted their more professional rivalry into a decades-long feud among the two.
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“I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” Michael Jackson reportedly said in an audio interview while working on his 1988 Moonwalk memoir. Jackson’s alleged comments never made the final edit of the book, but were unearthed by The Daily Mirror, following Prince’s death in 2016. “I have proven myself since I was real little,” added Jackson. “He feels like he’s my opponent. I hope he changes because, boy, he’s gonna get hurt. He’s the type that might commit suicide or something.”
Jackson reportedly added that Prince was also rude to the Jackson family. “He was so rude, one of rudest people I have ever met,” Jackson said. “Prince is very competitive. He has been very mean and nasty to my family.”
He also referenced Prince’s stage antics during their performance with Brown years earlier. At one point, Prince mistook a stage lamp post as a prop and fell into the audience. “He made a fool of himself,” Jackson reportedly said in his Moonwalk audio. “He was a joke. People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video.”
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“We Are the World” and “Bad”
The root of the animosity between the two is unclear, but it may have started in 1985 when Jackson asked Prince to participate in the USA for Africa charity hit, ‘We Are The World.” Prince declined to participate in the supergroup’s song.
Shortly after, Jackson wanted Prince to duet with him on his 1987 hit “Bad” and appear in the video; the role eventually went to Wesley Snipes after Prince turned it down. “That Wesley Snipes character, that would have been me,” joked Prince in an interview with comedian Chris Rock in 1997. “Now, you run that video in your mind.”
Prince was initially interested in working with Jackson but collaboration fell through after he rerecorded an early demo of “Bad” and sent it back to Jackson and producer Quincy Jones.
“The first line of that song is ‘Your butt is mine,'” added Prince. “Now I said, ‘Who’s gonna sing that to whom? ‘Cause you sure ain’t singing it to me. And I sure ain’t singing it to you, so right there we got a problem.'”
“Camille,” a “Voodoo” Box, and the Limousine
When they were first in talks to work on “Bad,” Prince would also call Jackson “Camille” to his face, according to Jones. “We invited [Prince] over to Michael’s house at Hayvenhurst,” said Jones. “He came in and he had an overcoat on, and he had a big white box labeled ‘Camille.’ He called Michael ‘Camille.'”
Jones added, “The box had all kinds of stuff — some cuff links with Tootsie Rolls on them. Michael was scared to death. He thought there was some voodoo in there. I wanted to take it because I knew Michael was gonna throw it away.”
Jones also said that Prince tried to run Jackson over with his limousine. “He knew,” said Jones of the incident. “Michael knows shit. He was there. He said that was his intention.”
The two artists never publicly acknowledged any animosity towards one another, but there was a clear division of powers.
Photo (l to r): Prince by Frank Micelotta / Getty Images; Michael Jackson by Kevin Mazur / WireImage
