Prince's entire catalog of obscure, hard-to-find music videos, collected and annotated



Prince's music videos are a lot more obscure than his catalog of 40 albums; he was ambivalent about the form and many of the videos he created were only released on VHS or interactive CD or as pop-up streams on his site; but recently Prince's estate released his whole video catalog in high-rez, prompting Prince superfan Anil Dash to write an appreciation that embeds the entire Prince video catalog.


Now, the truth is, most of Prince's videos just aren't that great. Especially when considered in comparison to the sheer mind-boggling breadth of Prince's genius, or the groundbreaking video innovation of his pop contemporaries like Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Madonna, the fact that Prince has fewer truly extraordinary music videos is a stark contrast. But as with all things Prince, when he was doing his best, there was absolutely nobody better.

Here, then, is a look at all of Prince's music videos, in chronological order. Most of these writeups began as an ongoing Twitter thread that I've been updating as the estate released new videos (Questlove said it was worthy of his NYU class!) but here I've updated and expanded all the information on each video.

Every Single Video Prince Ever Made [Anil Dash]