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Prince
Prince wrote, produced, and often played nearly every instrument on his own recordings, a level of total creative and technical control over his music that was unusual even among the era's most ambitious pop artists, and his 1984 album and film Purple Rain became both a commercial blockbuster and a critical landmark for the way it blended rock, funk, and pop into a singularly distinctive sound. His decision in the 1990s to publicly change his name to an unpronounceable symbol, in protest of a contract dispute with his record label, became one of the more famous artist-label conflicts in music history and reflected Prince's broader, career-long insistence on maintaining ownership and control over his own work. Prince's guitar playing, showcased memorably in his solo during the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute performance of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," is frequently cited among the greatest single guitar solos ever performed, reflecting a level of instrumental virtuosity that his flamboyant pop stardom sometimes overshadowed. His famously prolific output — Prince reportedly left behind a vault containing thousands of unreleased songs upon his 2016 death — has continued generating posthumous releases years after his death, reflecting a level of sustained creative production across his lifetime that few pop artists of any era have matched.
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Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston holds the record for the most consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 by any artist, with seven straight chart-topping songs between 1985 and 1988, a run of consecutive dominance no other solo artist has matched before or since. Her vocal range and technical control, honed partly through her mother Cissy Houston's gospel background and Whitney's own early years singing in church choirs, made her one of the most technically admired vocalists in pop music history, with her rendition of "I Will Always Love You" for The Bodyguard soundtrack becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time. Houston's 1991 performance of the national anthem at Super Bowl XXV, delivered shortly after the start of the Gulf War, is widely regarded as one of the greatest renditions of the anthem ever performed and was re-released as a charity single following the September 11 attacks a decade later. Houston's struggles with substance abuse became increasingly public in the years before her 2012 death at 48, a decline that stood in stark contrast to her earlier career as one of the cleanest, most universally acclaimed vocal talents in the industry, and her death remains one of the more significant losses in modern pop music history.
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