5 Reasons Why... Prince would run rings round Michael Jackson even if the latter weren’t a corpse.

1.       Prince has a higher concentration of aceness per cm². At 157 centimetres (or 5 feet two inches, if that’s how you choose to live your life), Prince is a renowned short-arse, whereas Jackson was a comparatively colossal 5 foot 11. With 22 songs rated Very Good Indeed by the 5 Reasons Why Music Database, Jackson manages a creditable score of 7.5 tunes/cm². However, Prince’s 20 Very Good Indeed songs scores him 7.85 tunes/cm². This is mathematical fact. Some say the 5 Reasons Why Music Database makes no sense at all, but to those people I say, “WELL IF YOU’RE SO CLEVER THEN MAKE YOUR OWN BLOODY DATABASE RANKING SYSTEM,” while flicking V-signs and blowing raspberries at them.

2.       Prince out-absurds Jackson without breaking sweat. Jackson may have thought he was the king of odd, but Prince defeated him at every turn. In London in 1998, he dressed as an old man so he could go to the pub unharassed, wandered around Hyde Park for a bit then got taken to McDonald’s by some fans. It was also claimed that Prince tried to establish mind control over Jackson’s monkey Bubbles in order to make the chimp attack him. Even Jackson at his most crackers – aptly illustrated by the flotation of a 10 metre-tall statue of himself down the Thames – is bested by Prince changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol. Jackson always seemed to be trying so hard to be otherworldly; Prince trounced him without trying.

3.       Jackson might as well have died in 1991. Bad stands as Jackson’s last decent album. From then on, it was a litany of ever more disappointing efforts and false-starts, his career sputtering to a turgid close with the posthumous Michael, which featured Akon and Lenny Kravitz. I need say no more. Prince has managed at least 2 good albums since then. There was also one which was really quite bad, but since it was given away free with the Daily Mail it was at least inflicted on people who deserved it.

4.       Prince’s effigy is not propped awkwardly outside Craven Cottage. When your artistic legacy is reduced to a mannequin outside Fulham F.C., as Jackson’s has, you have surely done something terribly wrong. Everyone knows Fulham fans are massive nerds. Their team play at a cottage, for crying out loud. I’m amazed the club shop hasn’t been turned into a National Trust tearoom. The statue’s not even historically accurate: the clothes are early-80s, the hair early-90s and the nose mid-00s. It looks like a cheap action figurine blown up to grotesque size. Understandably, many Fulham fans are peeved; earlier this season the statue was subject to a frenzied attack led by an enraged fan armed with bottles of mustard from a nearby hot dog stand.

5.       The thought of playing the O₂ didn’t kill Prince. He powered through his 21 consecutive nights there in 2007. While a trial might have found Dr Conrad Murray guilty of Jackson’s manslaughter, the court of 5 Reasons Why convicts Jackson of being a lazy sod and dying on purpose to get out of his 50 dates.