Prince Trolled Michael Jackson. A Lot.
Prince frequently took the piss out of the King of Pop, and the King called Prince a “meanie.”
Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty
Among all the wonderful things to remember about Prince, let’s not overlook this one: He had a history of messing with Michael Jackson.
There were the suggestive lyrics, like “My voice is getting higher/And I ain’t never had my nose done/That’s the other guy.”
There was the time Prince refused to appear in Jackson’s video for “Bad,” because he said there was no way he’d let Jackson sing the words “Your butt is mine” to him.
And there was also the bizarre 2006 incident when Jackson attended a Las Vegas Prince concert, and Prince showed his appreciation by walking right up to MJ’s seat and playing slap bass aggressively in his face.
“Prince has always been a meanie,” Jackson fumed to will.i.am the next day, according to Jackson biographer Steve Knopper in an interview with Esquire. “He’s just a big meanie. He’s always been not nice to me.”
Prince, however, maintained that there was no beef between him and Jackson. Asked by Chris Rock in a 1997 MTV interview if there was a rivalry between them, Prince answered, “Not to me, no.”
“Nobody really quite knows the full extent of their rivalry, and I think both of those guys had an interest in keeping it somewhat mysterious because they are both mysterious dudes,” Knopper told Esquire. “Before I die, I want to know what the full deal was between the two of them.”