Prince/YMMV

• Anvilicious: Prince started off with Dirty Mind and just grew less and less subtle from there, to the point that he actually went into Author Tract territory by his late career (hi, Rainbow Children).
• Archive Panic: Just look at all of the albums Prince released! Not to mention that some are double and triple albums! That's not even counting all of the B-sides Prince released, or the music made by his proteges or people otherwise associated with him. Or the stuff he put out on the web. Or the stuff he never released but got bootlegged.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: In 1984, Prince became the first and only person to simultaneously have the #1 album, #1 single and #1 film in the USA.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Purple Rain is the consensus choice, but 1999 and Sign '☮' the Times ain't too shabby either.
  • Batman is the best soundtrack for a movie based on a comic book superhero. Ever.
    • Flash Gordon would like a word with you about that...
  • Dirty Mind. In one fell swoop it set the tone for the rest of his 1980s output, in terms of lyrical content (it's one of the smuttiest albums ever recorded up to that time) and its musical styles (it mixes funk, rock, pop and R&B into a fully cohesive record).
  • Really, pick any Prince album, chances are somebody will nominate it for this.
• Ear Worm: OF COURSE!
  • "Partyman" from Batman being a great example.
  • Also... er, lots of his songs. One could even say most of them.
• Epic Riff: Most of his songs.
• Fetish Retardant + Erection Rejection - Your Mileage May Vary, but it can happen. See the covers above in particular.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Here's a fun activity for all. Go on the Internet and read as much as you can about how The Revolution broke up - pay attention to the role Wendy & Lisa played in it. Then go watch Purple Rain, and pay particular attention to what Wendy & Lisa do in the movie.
• Hype Backlash: The mismanagement of the Crystal Ball box set is legendary. Prince originally announced that the career-spanning collection of unreleased or bootlegged songs would come out in 1997, in a case shaped like a crystal ball. He later said it wouldn't be released until 50,000 pre-orders were obtained. It would finally be released in 1998 and fans who had pre-ordered got their copies up to a year later than that, if at all. The case ended up being cylindrical instead of spherical (getting dubbed "the Crystal Petri Dish") and came with a website link to print out the liner notes instead of an actual booklet. On top of this, the album got released in stores (something fans were told wasn't going to happen) and that version actually came with a booklet. Then came the music itself, which was taken mainly from his 90s phase. All older songs were edited, remixed or re-recorded in his 90s style, which negated the entire purpose of Crystal Ball quashing bootlegs, since fans still needed them to hear unedited versions of songs. The length (45 minutes per CD) was also criticized. In an attempt to calm his pre-ordering fans, he shipped them his orchestral wedding soundtrack, Kamasutra, as well as a T-shirt and/or a cassette of the 25 minute jam "The War". The additional music got shat on by fans as well. At this point, fans know that if Prince hypes something up, it's either going to be total shit or will never get released at all.
• Memetic Mutation: The Trope Formerly Known as X
• Narm: The dialogue between Prince and God in "Temptation", but there's more than just that. Like that time he compares love to surgery in "I Love You in Me", the entirety of "Scarlet Pussy", or the amount of times he crosses from Intercourse with You territory to what Cracked.com's The 10 Least Romantic Love Song Lyrics calls "ball-kneeing idiocy".
  • Or to double the fun, for The Rainbow Children Prince re-uses the slowed-down, slurred monologue voice from "Bob George", the one previously responsible for gems of wisdom like "I'll slap yo ass to the middle of next week" and "Bob, ain't that a bitch?", and most definitely not meant to be taken seriously, to deliver long rambling incoherent quasi-religious monologues.
  • "Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife" off of Emancipation.
  • To critics, and even many fans, his flirtations with rap fall here. Not to say that the other people he hired to do it can't Narm it up as well, as proved by Tony M., Robin Power and Cat Glover.
  • His wedding soundtrack, Kamasutra.
• Older Than They Think: A good chunk of Prince's official discography was written and recorded well before it actually got released. Two notable examples are "Tick, Tick, Bang", a synth-punk song from 1980 that got transformed into a new jack swing-style song for 1991's Graffiti Bridge; and "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic", a song from 1988 that was released in 1999 with absolutely no changes made to it.
  • Graffiti Bridge itself is made up almost entirely of songs that had been written long beforehand:
  • "We Can Funk" had been started in 1983 as "We Can Fuck", for instance, and it took three years for it to be revisited to feature George Clinton for the first time.
  • "Can't Stop This Feeling I Got" had been demoed in 1982 and re-recorded in 1986 for a proposed musical. The Bridge version itself was another re-recording from 1989.
  • "Joy in Repetition" was recorded first in 1986 slated for the Crystal Ball project (not to be confused with the 1998 compilation). When put on Graffiti Bridge Prince didn't bother to remove its introductory segue (which happened to mention another outtake, "Soul Psychodelicide").
• Protection From Editors: Once he gained this after splitting from Warner Bros., he barreled straight towards Seasonal Rot territory.
• Seasonal Rot: Critics and fans don't love his nineties work as much as his eighties. Protection From Editors will do that to a guy...
• Tastes Like Diabetes: The second disc of Emancipation was filled with ballads and jams dedicated to then-wife Mayte Garcia and as such, is capable of rotting your full skull out of your head. The nadir of this is the disc closer, "Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife".