One of the more impressive artifacts making the Internet rounds in the last 24 hours is a video, recorded at the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, of an all-star band playing the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The performance is a tribute to George Harrison, a posthumous honoree that evening, by a group that includes his son Dhani, along with old bandmates and collaborators like Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Steve Winwood. Then there’s another person on stage, too, standing a bit apart from the rest, bent over an electric guitar. He’s a small man, in a dark pinstriped suit, a scarlet red shirt and matching derby hat — a look that splits the difference between toreador and pimp. For a while, the guy hangs back in the shadows, strumming and looking a bit bored. But three and a half minutes in, he saunters into the spotlight to take a guitar solo.

The guitarist is Prince, and what ensues is something like a cyclone. A huge sound comes roaring out of his Telecaster, an onslaught of notes and riffs and block chords that continues rippling and lashing for nearly three minutes. It’s an attack that seems intended not just to extinguish all memory of Eric Clapton’s famous solo on the original recording, but to vanquish George Harrison and the Beatles for good measure. It’s a brazen hijacking of an In Memoriam tribute, a breach of etiquette — and a wondrous exhibition of pure showmanship and ego. When the song ends, Prince whips off his guitar, flings it in the air and peacocks off, stage left.

To mount a proscenium in the company of Prince, who died Thursday at age 57, was to bask in greatness and to risk humiliation. On occasions like this one, Prince’s performances had a way of shifting from show business as usual — a star’s prerogative to entertain and strut his stuff — into the realm of pure blood sport. He aimed not only to put on a great show but also to show others up, to singe lesser mortals with pyrotechnic displays of musicianship and charisma. His competitive instincts could overwhelm his gentler, courtlier ones. A month before the Rock Hall gig, he appeared on the Grammy Awards, charging through a medley of his hits alongside Beyoncé. You could see him straining to be courteous, to cede the spotlight a bit. But after a few minutes, he appeared to lose patience and cranked up the virtuosity — dancing, shredding on guitar, sliding from the depth-sounder bottom end of his vocal register into an otherworldly falsetto. The spectacle concluded with another guitar toss, and Beyoncé, one of the world’s more unflappable performers, was left looking rather windblown, teetering on her high heels.

Antagonism has always been one of music’s animating forces. It runs through history: the cutting contests of Storyville jazz musicians, Bronx street corner battle-rap showdowns, Mozart versus Salieri, Beatles versus Stones, Whitney versus Mariah. But Prince may have been the most tenacious musical competitor of them all. His ambition was outrageous: With every song, every note, he aimed to be the best, the baddest, the most wizardly, the most unimpeachable. He seemed to have swallowed an encyclopedia of music history and developed world-historical ambition to go with it. He was a one-man band extraordinaire, the world’s best rhythm section and the world’s best background vocal choir. He could sing like Al Green or, if the mood struck, John Lennon; he could work a bandstand as fearsomely as James Brown and play a guitar as well as Jimi Hendrix. His death came as a shock because he had strode into his sixth decade in apparently undiminished form, with the waistline and hairline of a man half his age and the stamina of a man even younger than that. His hitmaking days were behind him, and his pop-culture profile waxed and waned, but whenever he resurfaced, he served notice that he was indomitable: He could still sing, dance, play instruments, write songs and produce records better than everyone else.