The Most Controversial Guitar Take: Why Prince Belongs on the Short List

He could outplay almost anyone alive. So why does putting him at the top still start arguments?

When Rolling Stone ranked Prince the third greatest guitarist of all time in 2023, the comments sections lit up. Not because people thought he was bad. Because a significant portion of the guitar world still cannot fully accept what he was. A pop star. A funk musician. A showman who wore heels and played behind his back and made it look easy. The resistance to Prince as a guitarist is not really about his playing. It is about what guitar players think guitar playing is supposed to look like.

What He Actually Did at the Super Bowl

If you need a single piece of evidence, the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show is it. Prince played "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" in a downpour, in front of 140 million people, and delivered one of the most ferocious guitar solos in the history of live performance. Not one of the most ferocious Super Bowl solos. One of the most ferocious solos, full stop.

The tone was perfect. The phrasing was perfect. He built the solo like a story, starting melodic and restrained, pushing into something rawer and more urgent, then releasing into a passage of pure controlled fire that left the stadium stunned. Tom Petty was on that stage. Jeff Lynne was on that stage. Prince made them both irrelevant for about ninety seconds.

And then the internet argued about it for a week because he was wearing a purple suit.

The Genre Problem

Prince's reputation as a guitarist suffers from a genre classification problem. Guitar greatness, in the popular imagination, belongs to rock and blues. The canonical list runs through Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen. These are players whose entire identities were built around the guitar as a primary instrument, in genres where the guitar is the central voice.

Prince was a pop artist. A funk artist. An R&B artist. His biggest commercial hits were not guitar showcases. "When Doves Cry" does not have a bass line. "Kiss" is built around a minimal two-chord vamp. The productions were dense and layered and the guitar was one element among many, not the thing you were supposed to be listening for.

This is exactly backwards as a reason to discount him. Playing guitar brilliantly inside a complete musical vision, serving the song rather than dominating it, is harder than fronting a rock band where the guitar is expected to be the loudest thing in the room. Prince chose to use less guitar than he was capable of because the songs required it. That is a sign of musical intelligence, not a limitation.

What He Could Actually Do

Strip away the productions and the pop context and look at what Prince could do on the instrument.

He had complete command of multiple styles. His blues playing was authentic and deeply felt, rooted in the same tradition as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Billy Gibbons. His rock playing was aggressive and precise. His funk rhythm work was as good as anyone who ever played the style, with a right hand that could lock into a groove and hold it with the patience of a man who understood that rhythm is the whole thing. His jazz vocabulary was sophisticated enough that serious jazz musicians took him seriously, which is perhaps the hardest audience to impress.

He also wrote everything. Every guitar part on his records, across dozens of albums and hundreds of songs, was composed and performed by Prince. The range of what he wrote is staggering. The gentle fingerpicking on "Sometimes It Snows in April." The savage wah-drenched attack of "Let's Go Crazy." The slow-burn blues of "Nothing Compares 2 U," a song he wrote for Sinead O'Connor and never received proper credit for. These are not the works of a guitarist who got lucky. They are the works of a musician who understood the guitar as a complete expressive instrument.

The Hendrix Comparison

Prince grew up worshipping Jimi Hendrix, and the comparison is instructive. Both were from the Pacific Northwest. Both had extraordinary natural talent that transcended any formal training. Both used the guitar as a vehicle for a complete musical and visual identity that went beyond the instrument itself. Both made the guitar sound like something it had never sounded like before.

The difference is context. Hendrix arrived at a moment when rock was the dominant cultural form and the guitar was its symbol. His genius was immediately legible to the rock audience because it arrived in a package the rock audience recognized. Prince arrived later, in a more fragmented musical landscape, and chose to work across genres in ways that made him harder to categorize. The guitar world never quite knew what to do with him.

But Hendrix himself knew. In one of the most famous anecdotes in rock history, Hendrix walked offstage after a show and told the people around him that a young Prince had just embarrassed him. The story may be apocryphal. The sentiment is not. Hendrix would have recognized what Prince was.

Why It Still Starts Arguments

The controversy around Prince as a guitarist is really a conversation about what guitar playing is for. If you believe guitar playing is primarily a technical and athletic pursuit, a demonstration of what human hands can do on six strings, then Prince is impressive but not quite at the top. There are players with more speed, more theoretical knowledge, more conventional technique.

If you believe guitar playing is a form of expression, a way of saying something that cannot be said any other way, then the conversation looks completely different. By that standard, Prince belongs on the shortest of short lists. His guitar had a voice that was entirely his own. You could identify him in two notes. He could make an audience feel something with a single bent string that most players cannot achieve in an entire solo.

The resistance is not really about the playing. It is about the image, the pop context, the purple suits and the high heels and the general refusal to look like what a serious guitarist is supposed to look like. Guitar culture has a type. Prince was not it.

That is guitar culture's problem, not Prince's.

What He Left Behind

Prince died in 2016 and left behind an archive so vast that it still has not been fully released. Hundreds of unreleased recordings, including, by most accounts, hours of guitar work that the public has never heard. The Vault, as it became known, reportedly contains performances that would reframe how the guitar world thinks about him.

What is already public is enough. The Super Bowl solo. The live performances at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony where he took a solo that had the other guitarists on stage staring at their shoes. The guitar work on "Purple Rain," which is one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of playing in the rock canon. The live shows where he routinely played for four hours without stopping, covering everything from deep blues to hard funk to orchestral balladry.

He was not a guitar hero in the way the term is usually meant. He was something rarer. A musician for whom the guitar was simply the most natural way to say what he had to say. The argument about whether that makes him one of the greatest is, in the end, an argument about what greatness actually means.

Prince already knew the answer.

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