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.