Three kings bearing gifts: Prince, Jay-Z and Kanye

Three kings of American pop are coming to Tacoma Prince, Kanye West and Jay-Z. The ghosts of James Brown and Michael Jackson might hover over the Tacoma Dome. It's a lot of star power coming through one place at one time.

Jay-Z and West perform Friday, promoting last summer's "Watch the Throne" album. Prince performs Dec. 19, with no album out, but he's still filling arenas on his name and reputation as one of the best performers alive.

Both acts are on tours that have received rave reviews in Canadian newspapers and The New York Times Prince reportedly performing his hits, including "Purple Rain," West and Jay-Z displaying easy chemistry.

The same two concerts happen in Vancouver, B.C. the same week, flip-flopped, so it's conceivable the tour busses could pass each other on I-5. This kingly tour-crossing looks to be coincidental. And while it's not exactly fair to rate the artists against each other, if you did, you'd have to give this one to Prince. The multi-instrumentalist has made over 30 albums, while the other two have barely 20 between them, and Prince has created many more iconic moments, including the stark funk of "When Doves Cry," the buttless pants he wore on MTV in 1991 and the agony and ecstasy of "Purple Rain" song and movie.

West might be the biggest pop star in the world at the moment and Jay-Z might be President Obama's favorite rapper, but Prince has affected our thought patterns and pop music more. It's tough to isolate when he changed culture the most. But perhaps it was in 1984, when "Purple Rain" came out and Tipper Gore cited the song "Darling Nikki" and its sexual language as offensive to her Parents' Music Resource Center, which birthed the Parental Advisory sticker.

Gore singled out the song from the soundtrack as number one on her "Filthy Fifteen," and from that point on, Prince was at the forefront of a new conversation about censorship and profanity. The music was genius; the charge was serious. Everyone asked: "Where do you draw the! line?"< /p>

Later, Prince wrote "slave" on the side of his face and went on TV, and eventually changed his name for a time to an unpronounceable symbol. Those were statements to his record label, but felt broader.

In the '80s and '90s, it seemed like Prince was fighting for freedom of speech in general. Besides that, his sex music always came from a more interesting psychological place than most of the art branded with Gore's sticker, balancing all-out yearning with intense restraint and lots of thinking about God. Prince's identity as a (presumably socially conservative) Jehovah's Witness makes "Darling Nikki" a song about sex about masturbation more powerful on "Purple Rain" than it would be on another artist's album. Lots of rock stars might make a song with sexy content, but who else would follow it a few songs later with "I Would Die 4 U," which finds salvation in androgynous, self-sacrificing devotion?

Prince's albums these days aren't what they were, but Prince is still musically vital because of his high energy concerts, and because top-level American pop/R&B/rap artists borrow from him so often. His electronic dance-pop that sounds simultaneously slo-mo and superfast is currently imitated by The-Dream, and his way with grandiose songs ending in guitar solos is all over West's last solo album, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy."

West also juxtaposes raunchy sex songs and tracks about Jesus on his albums, but on "Watch the Throne," the sex is dirtier, Jesus more healing and the whole effect even more Prince-like. The album has been critically derided for being overly concerned with the whims and trials of the one percent and out of touch with the other 99. But it's hard to think the electronic music and complicated emotions on the album were ploys to make money. "Watch the Throne" seems motivated by something bigger: love, pain and a desire to make great art.

Prince is still inspired by those things, too. And though he doesn't play "Darling Nikki" anymore he might have a! little Gore in him, after all he still combines sexiness and spirituality in a way that is often imitated, but never duplicated.