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Tolkien vs. Disney and Other Major Historic Feuds

Khalid Elhassan August 20, 2021 37 min

Michael Jackson and Prince had a decades-long feud. YouTube

28. The King of Pop vs The Purple One

Michael Jackson and Prince were two of modern music’s greatest icons. Both hit their respective peaks at roughly the same time, and shared the 1980s as that decade’s biggest stars. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that rumors soon swirled that they had developed a rivalry. Rumors were eventually confirmed as true. What is surprising is just how bitter that rivalry got: it grew into a feud so extreme that at one point, Prince tried to run MJ over with his limousine.

Michael Jackson and Prince took different paths to reach the top. MJ was a successful prodigy as a child singer with his brothers in the Jackson 5, and he made a smooth transition into an even more successful adult singer when he went solo and released Off the Wall in 1979. He followed that up with the best-selling album of all time, Thriller. Prince took a grittier path, with a series of underground albums, before he had his first hit single. By the early 1980s, when Prince was about to take off, MJ was already an unequaled cultural juggernaut.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.