#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The brilliant
coming-of-age-and-into-superstardom story of one of the greatest artists
of all time, in his own words--featuring never-before-seen photos,
original scrapbooks and lyric sheets, and the exquisite memoir he began
writing before his tragic death
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST MUSIC BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
BOOK REVIEW AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON
POST AND THE GUARDIAN - NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD
Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and
acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary
with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy,
gritty funk paradise of "Uptown" to the mythical landscape of Purple
Rain to the psychedelia of "Paisley Park." But his most ambitious
creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into
Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era.
The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince--a
first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then
creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and
fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The
first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages
that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose.
The second part takes us through Prince's early years as a musician,
before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of
writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince's evolution
through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest
achievement, which we see in the book's fourth section: his original
handwritten treatment for Purple Rain--the final stage in Prince's
self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three
parts as a heroic journey.
The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring's riveting and moving
introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final
months--a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more
of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and
mystique he'd so carefully cultivated--and annotations that provide
context to the book's images.
This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and
energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince's ideas and
vision, his voice and image--his undying gift to the world.
