Prince Rogers Nelson remains one of the most popular and
influential musical acts of all time. Known for his style and
range, Prince’s prolific music career included an ever-evolving
sound that blended pop, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and soul. Prince
sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, making him one of the
bestselling artists of all time. He won seven GRAMMY® Awards, a
Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award® for the film Purple Rain.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, the
first year of his eligibility. Prince tragically passed away at his
Paisley Park home on April 21, 2016. His legacy lives on through
the timeless messages of love in his music and the countless ways
his work has touched lives.
Dan Piepenbring is an advisory editor at The Paris Review
and the coauthor, with Tom O’Neill, of Chaos: Charles Manson,
the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Prince fanatic or if your
interest is simply piqued by all things music or pop culture: The
book is worth picking up. . . . The Beautiful Ones is not a read,
but an experience, an immersion inside the mind of a musical
genius. You are steeped in Prince’s images, his words, his essence.
. . . The way the book is structured simply makes one want to read
it again, to leaf through the pages and be immersed in Prince’s
world. . . . The book can be a starting point for a Prince
fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. Either
way, it will deepen the connection of any reader with the musical
icon.”—USA Today (★★★★ out of four stars)
“Everything Piepenbring shares about being a fan chosen to work
with one of his idols resonates. . . . [He] doesn't just want to
write this memoir with Prince, he wants to do it right. . . . This
means we get a memoir that is written by Prince, literally.
Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1,
taking us from his first memory—his mother’s eyes—through the early
days of his career. . . . We also get a memoir that is carefully
curated by Piepenbring, who writes that he was able to go through
Paisley Park, room-by-room, sorting through Prince’s life. . . .
The Beautiful Ones doesn't paint a perfect picture. . . . It’s not
definitive. It can’t be. It shouldn’t be and, thankfully, it
doesn’t try to be. . . . It’s up to us to take what’s there and
make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince
wanted.”—NPR
“[The Beautiful Ones] delivers much, much more than we had any
reason to expect. . . . Prince took the project very seriously, and
it shows in the work he delivered. . . . It shines an intimate and
revealing light on the least-known period of his life—his
childhood—which is embellished with family photos, notes and other
ephemera. The book does not scrimp on detail: Prince’s handwritten
manuscript, rendered in his famously precise cursive script . . .
is reproduced in full. . . . The initial segment of that closing
section is one of the most fascinating parts of the book: a
reproduction of a photo album, with captions by a presumably young
Prince, containing a couple dozen pictures from his trip to
California to record his debut album, ranging from shots of him in
the studio to candids of him and his friends. . . . The Beautiful
Ones brings so much new information to light that it’s hard to
imagine anyone being disappointed.”—Variety
“[The Beautiful Ones] is an affirmation of Prince’s Blackness and
humanity. . . . The memoir is a ‘handbook for the brilliant
community, wrapped in autobiography, wrapped in biography’—and
thus, it’s an inspiration. . . . Prince writes about his childhood
with clarity and poetic flair, effortlessly combining humorous
anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis. . . .
Prince is one of us—he just worked to manifest dreams that took him
from the North Side of Minneapolis to the Super Bowl. [The book]
encourages us to tap into our power to design the lives we envision
for ourselves and set a precedent for future generations to do the
same.”—HuffPost
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