Michael Jackson or Prince

I had meant to write this and post it last week on August 29th. It’s darn cool that the debate about who is better, Michael Jackson or Prince, is still going on in 2026. Why do so many people compare two uniquely different artists? It is beyond me. It’s like comparing the color red to the color purple. It’s like comparing orange juice to Pepsi or pancakes to enchiladas or Reddit to TikTok, which are two of the platforms that heavily discuss this debate. Let’s decide right now, and unanimously, George Michael the winner. Yes? Ok, let’s leave Yog alone. He was great too.

There are many reasons for the debate resurgence between Michael Jackson and Prince. The two of them have been linked together like a DNA strand due to the successful Michael movie, the Purple Rain songs in the Stranger Things series finale, the Super Bowl performances, the lyrics in the rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, tons of rumors and myths, and the fictional feud created in magazines like Right On! and Black Beat back in the 1980s by none other than Cynthia Horner. Michael Jackson and Prince have both accomplished things that the other didn’t, and they both inspired each other at different times in their careers. The ones that seem to have the most problem are Michael Jackson fans. Many of these fans are simply Prince haters. They don’t like Prince being compared to Michael Jackson at all.

Whenever I was in Prince spaces with fans discussing Prince’s work, a Michael Jackson fan had to say something about Michael’s greatness for some reason. This doesn’t happen in Michael Jackson spaces too much except to bash Prince. In observation, Prince fans don’t seem to bash Michael Jackson too much. Michael Jackson’s fans’ defense, however, is that he had sold more albums than Prince. And he had more number one hits than Prince. But to be fair, Michael Jackson did better than pretty much everyone in the music industry except for a few like The Beatles and Eagles. This debate about who is better is going to continue for a very long time. It doesn’t matter at this point who you favor. They both deserve their flowers. This is the greatest music debate of all time between fans, artists, musicians, and critics. This trumps debates about The Beatles versus The Rolling Stones, 2Pac versus The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z versus Nas, and Drake versus Kendrick Lamar. We will never see two great artists like Michael Jackson and Prince ever again. I cannot promise that, of course.

So who do you think is better? And how do you decide that for you?