Prince

94 East was a Minneapolis-based funk group formed in December 1975 by Pepe Willie, the former husband of Prince's cousin. Willie was one of the... people responsible for getting Prince's career up and running, and soon enlisted the talents of a young Prince and his childhood best friend, André Cymone. Prince also composed one song for them, "Just Another Sucker". The band disbanded when Prince became a star in his own right. The 94 East recordings were recorded between December 1975 and February 1979. 94 East was named after Interstate 94. All albums are variations and comprehensive versions of Minneapolis Genius.
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The Revolution was an American rock band formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1979 by Prince. Although widely associated with rock music, the band's... sound incorporated heavy metal, pop, funk, R&B and hard rock elements. Before their official break-up, The Revolution had released one studio album, two soundtracks, and two videos. The band is known for its many members, varied in race and gender. The Revolution rose to international fame in the mid 1980s with Purple Rain, selling over 16 million albums in the United States alone. The band achieved two number-one Billboard 200 albums , six top ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and won three Grammy Awards. The band officially disbanded in 1986 after the Hit n Run – Parade Tour, which supported Parade, the soundtrack for Under the Cherry Moon. When Prince formed his backing band after the release of his first album, he followed in the footsteps of one of his idols, Sly Stone by creating a multi-racial, multi-gendered musical ensemble.
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Arista was an American record label. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment and operated under the RCA Music Group. The label was founded in 1974 by Clive Davis, who formerly worked for CBS Records . Until its demise in 2011, it was a major distributor and promoter of albums... throughout the United States and United Kingdom. After being fired from CBS Records, Clive Davis was hired by Columbia Pictures to be a consultant for the company’s record and music operations. Assuming the presidency of this division in late 1974, Davis would fold the various Columbia legacy labels into a new entity named Arista Records, ultimately buying a percentage of the company from Columbia Pictures. The label was named Arista after New York City's secondary school honor society . In early 1975, most of the artists who had been signed to Bell were let go, except David Cassidy , Tony Orlando and Dawn , and The 5th Dimension .
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NPG Records is the current active record label owned by Prince, founded in 1993 to release his music after Paisley Park Records. Paisley Park was shut down by Warner Bros. Records in 1993. Warner Bros. distributed one NPG release in 1995, The Gold Experience. "NPG" is short for "New Power... Generation", also the name of his backing band. Though the 1994 compilation 1-800-NEW-FUNK featured several artists, NPG Records never developed into a full label like Paisley Park did: instead, it exclusively released Prince's albums or side-projects.
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Universal Records was a record label owned by Universal Music Group and operated as part of the Universal Motown Republic Group. Founded in 1995 as Rising Tide Records, the label would ultimately begin to thrive the following year when its name was changed to Universal Records to complement the... branding overhaul of the Universal Studios structure since MCA Inc. was purchased from Matsushita Electric by The Seagram Company Ltd.. The label, which is actually the second incarnation was created by current Universal Music Group chairman Doug Morris and Daniel Glass, who became its president. Universal Records had success in breaking new artists, including the multi-platinum debut of Erykah Badu, Billie Myers, Goldfinger, Akon and the Lost Boyz. Recognizing the changing landscape of the industry, Glass strategically aligned Universal Records with such independent record labels as Kedar Entertainment, home to Erykah Badu, and Mojo Records, home to platinum artist Reel Big Fish and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.
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Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has... its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically, rock has centered around the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with bass guitar and drums. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature utilizing a verse-chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse and common musical characteristics are difficult to define. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. The dominance of rock by white, male musicians has been seen as one of the key factors shaping the themes explored in rock music. Rock places a higher degree of emphasis on musicianship, live performance, and an ideology of authenticity than pop music.
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B and RnB, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was... originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B". Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world.
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Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the... United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues chord progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes are sung or played flattened or gradually bent in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound. The blues genre is based on the blues form but possesses other characteristics such as specific lyrics, bass lines and instruments. Blues can be subdivided into several subgenres ranging from country to urban blues that were more or less popular during different periods of the 20th century. Best known are the Delta, Piedmont, Jump and Chicago blues styles.
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Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a... mix of African and European music traditions. Its black African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music. As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music. In a 1988 interview, trombonist J.J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless.
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