It’s no secret that Michael Jackson and Prince didn’t exactly like each other. Prince was more forthcoming about the fact that he viewed Jackson as a rival, but newly unearthed audiotapes from when Jackson was working on his autobiography Moonwalker show that the King of Pop had no love for The Purple One.
“I don’t like to be compared to Prince at all,” Jackson said, according to The Mirror. “I have proven myself since I was real little. It’s not fair. He feels like I’m his opponent. I hope he changes because boy, he’s gonna get hurt. He’s the type that might commit suicide or something.”
Jackson added that Prince was “one of the rudest people [he] had ever met” and said that the Purple Rain singer had been “very mean and nasty” to Jackson’s family.
MJ also made fun of Prince for a mistake the singer made during that performance with James Brown that caught fire in the wake of the news of Prince’s death. Prince fell into the crowd after confusing a prop lamppost for a real one and Jackson took a lot of joy in calling him out on it.
“He made a fool of himself. He was a joke,” he said. “People were running and screaming. I was so embarrassed. It was all on video.”
(via Consequence of Sound)
