Michael Jackson and Prince spent much of the 1980s locked in an unspoken rivalry, each the other’s most obvious point of comparison at the peak of pop. Publicly, both men consistently denied any real animosity. Privately, according to recordings unearthed years later, Jackson felt very differently.
In 2016, months after Prince’s death, the Daily Mirror published excerpts of audio Jackson had recorded in 1988 during interviews for his autobiography, Moonwalk. The comments never made it into the finished book.
“I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” Jackson said in the recording. “I have proven myself since I was real little. It’s not fair. He feels like I’m his opponent. I hope he changes because boy, he’s gonna get hurt. He’s the type that might commit suicide or something.”
He went further, calling Prince “so rude, one of rudest people I have ever met,” and accusing him of being “very mean and nasty” to the Jackson family.
Much of the tension traced back to a single, widely circulated piece of grainy videotape: a 1983 James Brown concert at the Beverly Theatre in Los Angeles, where Brown called both stars up on stage. Jackson moonwalked across the stage and slipped effortlessly into Brown’s own dance moves. When Brown then summoned Prince up too, Jackson largely ignored him. In the Moonwalk recordings, Jackson mocked the moment, saying Prince “made a fool of himself. He was a joke. People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video.”
The rivalry wasn’t one-sided in its consequences, either. In 1985, Prince was criticised for declining to take part in Jackson’s charity single, ‘We Are the World’. Two years later, Jackson offered Prince a guest duet on his forthcoming album, Bad. Prince turned him down.
Later encounters did little to thaw things. According to the 2015 biography MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson, Prince invited Jackson to one of his Las Vegas shows in 2006, then walked into the audience, found Jackson, and played what was described as “aggressive slap bass” inches from his face.
Both men remained careful, in public at least, never to confirm a feud outright. But the recordings unearthed after Prince’s death offered the clearest picture yet of how Jackson genuinely felt about the man he spent two decades being measured against.
