Picture 1977. Disco is everywhere, punk is snarling in the basement, and somewhere between Philadelphia and Minneapolis two 19-year-olds are quietly re-wiring pop music without ever sharing a room.
Michael Jackson and Prince did not have a documented personal relationship that year. Yet the choices they made at 19 – in studios, contracts and image – set up one of the strangest, sharpest rivalries popular music would ever see.
Where Michael Jackson Was In 1977
By 1977, Michael Jackson was already a seasoned veteran with more than a decade of hits behind him, but still officially just the front man of The Jacksons. The family had left Motown for Epic, cutting their second Epic LP, Goin’ Places, at Sigma Sound in Philadelphia between late 1976 and August 1977.
Goin’ Places came out in October and underperformed, becoming one of the group’s weakest sellers even as it yielded the club-friendly “Different Kind of Lady” that the brothers wrote themselves. Commercially it was a wobble, but creatively it was a wake up call, convincing Michael that he could not coast forever on assembly line soul.
Sonically, Goin’ Places is pure late 70s Philadelphia: lush strings, horn stabs, polished rhythm sections. Michael’s instrument is his voice, gliding over orchestrated backdrops largely designed by Gamble and Huff’s team, with the young star having limited say in production decisions. He was a virtuoso soloist working inside someone else’s band and someone else’s sound.
At the same time, Jackson was stepping into film. He took his first movie role as the Scarecrow in The Wiz, an all Black retelling of The Wizard of Oz shot in New York and released the following year. The film flopped at the box office, but critics singled out Michael’s vulnerable, elastic performance as one of its few unqualified successes.
On that set he met Quincy Jones, who was producing and supervising the music. Their working relationship on The Wiz soundtrack opened the door to Off the Wall, the 1979 solo album that finally gave Michael Jackson adult artistic identity outside the family brand. In 1977, though, he was still a brilliantly gifted employee inside a big machine, not yet its architect.
Where Prince Was In 1977
While Michael was flying between Vegas, Philadelphia and New York, another 19-year-old was holed up in Minneapolis and California, plotting total control. That summer, Prince signed a three album deal with Warner Bros that required him to deliver the records quickly and, crucially, allowed him full creative control over the music.
For a completely unknown teenager, insisting on producing himself was close to suicidal. Manager Owen Husney later recalled taking Prince into a studio in front of Warner executives for a “test” session, where the kid calmly laid down drums, bass and more until the label agreed to give him exactly the power he wanted. Husney’s story underlines how the industry treated Michael as a sure thing while it gambled on Prince as a one man experiment.
In September 1977 Prince began recording his debut album For You, first at Sound 80 in Minneapolis and then at the Record Plant in Sausalito, finishing overdubs at Sound Labs in Hollywood by February 1978. He wrote, arranged, produced and performed everything, reportedly handling 27 different instruments in the process.
The sessions were obsessive. Prince blew through his recording budget, layered dozens of vocal tracks and left the studio physically exhausted, but he emerged with a calling card that fused funk, disco, rock and pop into a sleek, studio born sound. If Michael was still a star singer fronting other people’s productions, Prince at 19 had already turned himself into an entire band in one body.
He was also far less shy about erotic shock. The track “Soft and Wet” delivered a barely coded ode to sex, combining coy wordplay, intricate drumming and stacked harmonies that announced a teenager willing to be explicit where mainstream R&B still relied on polite euphemism. Prince was not interested in being the next Jackson 5 – he was already staking out the adult territory Michael would only occupy a few years later.
Same Age, Different Machines: 1977 Side By Side
Put their 1977 worlds next to each other and the contrast is startling. On paper both were 19 year old Black male singers signed to major labels; in practice, they lived on different planets.
| Aspect | Michael Jackson, 1977 | Prince, 1977 |
|---|---|---|
| Label situation | Part of The Jacksons on Epic, still marketed as a family act | New solo signee to Warner Bros with a three album deal |
| Creative control | Singing over material largely chosen and produced by others | Contractually guaranteed to self produce and oversee his music |
| Main 1977 project | Goin’ Places and filming The Wiz | Writing and recording For You |
| Core “instrument” | Voice, choreography and charisma | Guitar, keys, studio gear and multi tracking |
| Image | Clean cut former child star in matching tuxes with his brothers | Afroed mystery figure, already flirting with androgyny and sex |
One was learning how to push back gently inside a corporate soul system; the other had structured his entire contract as an act of rebellion. Those different approaches to control and authorship would later turn into real friction once they were competing for the same charts.
Did Michael And Prince Actually Meet In 1977?
There is no solid evidence that Michael Jackson and Prince met in 1977 or even paid each other much public attention. The first widely documented onstage encounter is the infamous James Brown show in Los Angeles in 1983, when Jackson whispered to Brown to call Prince up after his own turn, and Prince proceeded to flail through a chaotic cameo that Jackson later mocked in private.
Back in 1977, their “relationship” was mostly structural. Michael was a known quantity that every label watched; Prince was the kind of raw talent that executives hoped might someday tap the same crossover markets. If Prince was thinking about Michael at all, it was as a benchmark of what mainstream success for a Black male solo artist could look like – and how he might avoid being boxed in by it.
1977 As The Spark Of A Future Feud
Control freak vs controlled prodigy
The most provocative way to look at 1977 is this: the industry trusted the anonymous kid from Minneapolis more than the world famous kid from Gary, at least when it came to authorship. Prince walked into Warner insisting he produce himself and walked out with the power to do it; Michael would not truly seize production control until well after Thriller.
That imbalance fed into the way they later bristled at comparisons. When Jackson complained in private Moonwalker tapes that Prince had been “mean and nasty” to his family and was one of the rudest people he had met, what you hear under the gossip is a man who resented being treated as a mere entertainer next to a supposed “Renaissance man.” The seeds of that resentment were planted when one teenager was allowed to call all his own shots and the other was not.
Sound, sex and the stage
Listen to Goin’ Places and For You back to back and you hear two futures diverging. The Jacksons album is glossy, tasteful, and almost conservative in its romance; Prince’s debut is restless, synth sprinkled and already smuggling explicit desire into the grooves. One record says “we can still fit on variety TV,” the other says “this is bedroom music, and I am in charge.”
Even visually, the contrast is stark. Michael in 1977 is still in matching suits with his brothers and costumed as a literal scarecrow; Prince is sitting half naked on his debut’s inner sleeve, acoustic guitar strategically placed. For an older listener raised on 60s Motown, Jackson was the reassuring option. Prince looked like trouble, on purpose.
From parallel 1977 to open rivalry
Once both men hit their commercial peaks, that early contrast hardened into a cold war. After Jackson’s Thriller swept the 1983 Grammys, Prince reportedly watched the broadcast and told his drummer Bobby Z, “Next year, that’s gonna be us,” pouring competitive fury into what became the Purple Rain album and film. Jackson, for his part, invited Prince to duet on “Bad” years later, only to be rebuffed with a joke about who would sing the line “Your butt is mine.”
Cultural commentators noticed the polarity. One German profile went so far as to call Prince “Lucifer’s answer to Michael Jackson,” painting him as the dark, risk taking mirror of Jackson’s supposedly angelic pop persona. That antithesis framing stuck, and it traces right back to how differently those two 19 year olds approached power in 1977.
Why 1977 Still Matters For Fans
For listeners who grew up with 70s and 80s soul, revisiting 1977 is like finding an x ray of the decade to come. Goin’ Places shows you the end of the road for lush, producer led family soul; For You hints at the leaner, more synthetic and obsessive studio auteurism that would define Prince’s 80s.
Instrumentally, the difference is especially striking. On the Jacksons side you hear big studio bands tracked live, rhythm sections cut by pros who played on dozens of Philly sessions that month. On Prince’s side you hear one kid overdubbing himself on drums, guitars, keyboards and early synths, treating the studio as an instrument long before that became a cliché.
Most importantly, 1977 captures both men before the circus, when they were still primarily musicians chasing sound rather than defending empires. There is an intimacy to that moment that gets lost once the tabloid narratives and stadium tours take over.
Conclusion: 1977, The Fuse Before The Fire
So what was the relationship between Michael Jackson and Prince in 1977? Practically speaking, there was none. No duet, no handshake, no shared stage, just two 19 year olds working in different cities on very different terms.
Yet the contrast between those terms – a controlled prodigy in Philly studios and a control freak kid in Sausalito – lit the fuse for everything that followed. If you want to understand why their later rivalry felt so charged, start in 1977, when Michael Jackson and Prince were still just young men with something to prove and no idea how much they would come to define, and haunt, each other’s legends.
