He was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis on June 7th, 1958, the son of two musicians. He started writing music while he was still in elementary school, banging out songs on his father’s piano, and he was playing and recording with local bands by the time he was a teenager. He signed a record contract when most people are preparing for their high school graduations, and he was one of the most popular musicians in the world within half a decade, overcoming initial reservations regarding his provocative appearance and speculation regarding his sexuality. (He tossed them aside with a laugh on albums like 1981’s sublime Controversy.) Thanks to mid-'80s hits like "Little Red Corvette," "When Doves Cry," and "Kiss," he kept pace with megastars like Michael Jackson and Madonna during one of the most of competitive periods in pop music history, and he remained a commercial and creative force well into the twilight of his career. Even as the relevance of his musical work waned, he remained a ferocious performer and a beloved guardian of musical tradition.

The timing of his passing is already earning his life and work comparisons to that of David Bowie, another iconoclastic giant who passed away this year. It’s a natural line to draw: arriving as a star a decade earlier, Bowie blazed a trail for Prince in terms of musical breadth, transgressive power, and the malleability of gender. If Bowie exposed gender and sexuality’s performative cores with his library of characters and personae, then it’s hard to imagine a better follow-up than Prince recording an entire album’s worth of tracks as Camille, an alter-ego with a pitch-shifted voice and a freaky temperament. (You can hear what could’ve been on "If I Was Your Girlfriend," a strange and scary highlight from 1987’s landmark Sign o’ the Times.) The two were always the coolest people in the room, no matter the room. Prince covered "Heroes" live in Toronto less than a month ago.

He was the most talented musician on the planet

If Bowie’s career was a testament to the power of self-determination — you can be anything you want, and you can have fun with it — then Prince’s was a monument to the undeniability of genius. There was no transforming Prince, no disguising him in symbols or names like Jamie Starr. He could strip himself of his name entirely — render himself the Artist Formerly Known As Prince — and it wouldn’t do anything to compromise his unflinching brilliance or his singular vision. He was a prodigy the way Mozart was a prodigy, and describing him as the most talented singer, guitarist, pianist, and producer on the planet was both completely reasonable and possibly true.

Bowie was a mimic and a sponge, a considerate listener who hopped from genre to genre with the help of skilled collaborators and a voracious appetite for new sounds. Prince was a synthesist, taking all of the genres he loved — rock n roll, funk, R&B, pop, even the folk and jazz-fusion of his beloved Joni Mitchell — and mixing them into one electric cocktail. He did it on his own from his first album — For You, released in 1978 at the tender age of 19 — to his last, last year’s two-part HITnRUN collection. In between, he pushed the boundaries of genre and style to their absolute limits with albums like Dirty Mind — economical, explicit, and rough-hewn — and Sign o’ the Times, a sprawling, sensual, and socially conscious double LP. And while his popularity peaked with the 1984 album-movie combo of Purple Rain, his discography was rich enough that it’s hard to pinpoint any one release as his true creative peak. Like Roger Federer or Frank Gehry, the quality of his work was only overshadowed by the length of his golden age.