I very much agree. He made the top 100 guitarists of all time in a recent Rolling Stone issue, but I thought he was still considerably underranked still.
If I have to guess to why he's underrated, I'll chalk it up to this. If you mention Santana or Hendrix to most folks, their first thought (probably only one) is their guitars.
Mention Prince to most folks, maybe they'll mention his symbol deal or maybe his name-changing melodrama or maybe him writing "slave" on his cheek during his feud with Warner Bros., or him wearing assless chaps, or the Jehovah's Witness connection or maybe those SNL skits mocking his eccentric reputation, whatever. Point is, his guitar work would probably be very low on such a list. Plus being tied to the hip forever with 80s MTV pop, namely Michael Jackson and Madonna, does him absolutely no favors either in that department.
It's a lot of different things, I think. Of course any ranking is subjective, yes? I mean unless you're talking of the very best or the absolute worst, it all comes down to taste. I'm not a big country music fan. As far as country guitar I know of Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, Lee Roy Parnell, Jerry Douglas and that's about it. So if I owned a magazine it probably wouldn't be directed at country music fans or musicians. So when someone wrote in upset because I hadn't included Clarence White or Marty Stuart on my list of greatest guitarists I'd be like WHO???
Post Beatles, what is generically referred to as rock, generally hasn't been music to dance to. Prince usually makes music you can dance to. This is often not considered "important". Again, a question of taste. Prince brought the "roll" back to rock-n-roll. There is just as much skill at driving a band, chopping a beat up 10,000 different ways and keeping a groove going as there is in playing loud legato lines. Prince CAN do both as is obvious from his earliest work -check out the twisted BB King solo on "Automatic" or "Bambi" but again a lot of the people (writers and fans) in mainstream magazines think that anything you dance to is by definition simplistic and not worth their time.
Then of course the elephants in the room, race and sex. Prince became commercially successful right around the time that racial categories in music had ossified. "Everyone" knew that blacks didn't play guitar. So who the hell was Prince? Whatever he was doing it wasn't rock. And rock was the only genre where guitar was doing anything worth listening to. I know there are people who think like this because I run into so many of them. As as mentioned his gender blending, integrated bands and hiring of open lesbians at a time when such things weren't done took attention away from his musical skills.
I can't rank him. I think he's a really good guitarist but an even better bandleader.
PS. I would like to know what effect he's using on the song "Free". Sounds like the solo is slowed down a lot. It also sounds very similar to Brian May's tone on "We Will Rock You".
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
