Purple Rain

Prior to Purple Rain, the backstory Prince had created for himself was that of a sex-obsessed R&B groove superstar, a multi-instrumentalist and prodigious musical upstart who used his considerable powers for the sole purposes of getting the club lit the fuck up. He presented himself as a kind of raunch alien bringing the divine soundtrack to your coke-fueled, crushed velour orgy, the musical equivalent of a fog machine and a black strobe light. He refused interviews and shied away from press profiles. He famously stonewalled music press royalty—even kingmaker Dick Clark on his own show. You were not to know who he was or where he was from. You were not to fully comprehend his race nor his gender. You were not to find pictures of him in Teen Beat buying apples and milk at the grocery store in sweatpants and a baseball cap. He was most decidedly not just like us. He was from some alternate dimension where it was always 2 a.m. on a misty full moon. You were to believe that he was as mysterious as god, something conjured, perhaps from your fantasies, a magical apparition descending from funk heaven, arriving on a cloud of purple smoke and adorned in little more than a guitar, a falsetto made of glitter, and a deeply intractable groove.

But as the wildly creative are wont to do, by 1983 Prince was looking to switch that whole thing up. Despite his acute talent, he was still viewed by the industry at large as little more than an extra-funky urban novelty act, someone in league with the likes of Rick James and Lipps Inc. His most successful song to date, “Little Red Corvette,” had peaked at number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, which simply was not good enough for the man who once described the musical training he received at the hands of his father as “almost like the Army.”

In 1982, Bruce Springsteen was devastating the country with the spare and stark depictions of a bankrupt American Dream on his darkened opus Nebraska. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet band were doubling down on white-man soul with the basic but wildly popular “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and Michael Jackson was re-wiring the industry with an album composed almost entirely of number 1 pop hits that spent 37 weeks lording over the Billboard charts. Prince’s keyboardist, Dr. Fink, recalls that during the 1999 tour, his band leader asked him what makes Seger’s music so popular. “Well, he's playing mainstream pop-rock,” Fink told him. “If you were to write something along these lines, it would cross things over for you even further.” Prince had already been carrying a purple notebook with him on the tour bus in which he had been scribbling the ideas, notes and images that would become his next movement. (Prince didn’t make albums, he made environments) and he was looking for something new.

That “something new” was Purple Rain, a sonic and visual experience that cracks open the shell of his reclusive sex alien persona to tell something of an origin story, one slightly more than loosely based on Prince’s real life. The film, directed by an unknown, produced by first timers and starring a bunch of people who had never acted in a movie before, has become an astronomical and enduring success against overwhelming odds. But it does so because it’s a film about America, about revolution and youth and anger and fucking. About not being like your dad. That is to say, it’s about rock’n’roll. It’s the tale of a kid from an abusive home in a cold, working-class city who has a shitload of talent and a dream. And he has to figure out, through tortuous trial and error, exactly what he needs to destroy in order to achieve it. Purple Rain is rough and vulnerable, common and funny, and at times even cute. It is the exact opposite of everything Prince had been before it. But let’s not kid ourselves. The movie is merely decently shot, competently directed, and not even passably acted. The real reason it works is because of the itinerant magnetism of its lead and of the music he can make.

Prince’s sixth studio offering, 1984’s Music From the Motion Picture Purple Rain, is Springsteen’s Nebraska laced with the violence of James Brown’s deepest grooves and liberally dusted with white dove feathers, dried rose petals, and scented candle wax. The album manages to deftly thread the needle between a dazzling array of genres: disaffected synth pop, tongue-wagging hair metal, dark R&B, and pleading soul. The result is something that isn’t a successful combination of genres as much as an effortless, almost incidental transcendence of the very idea of genre itself. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. It doesn’t matter what you like. You like this. It is wrong to say that Purple Rain blazes a new trail. Rather it beams a blinding light signal from a part of the forest that no one will be able to ever find again. You cannot make another album like it. The only way to get to where Purple Rain takes you is to play Purple Rain.

Given that the album is somewhat of an early-career look back for Prince, it gives us new access into his musical and cultural background. His hometown of Minneapolis boasted a black population of 4.3% in the 1970 census and, other than the low range KMOJ, didn’t have an urban formatted station until 2000. If you grew up listening to the radio in the Minneapolis of Prince’s youth, then you grew up listening to rock. Thusly the album’s opening salvo, “Let’s Go Crazy,” thematically picks up where the titular track from 1999 leaves off, namely: “We’re all going to die one way or another, so let’s rock while we’re here,” but musically is a dramatic departure from the slick, smokey grooves of its predecessor. It is set against a hyperactive American backbeat reminiscent of latter-day rockabilly, and features Prince ripping out the kind of ostentatiously speedy Van Halen-esque guitar work that would become the audio version of the generation’s early MTV aesthetic.

From there, the album drops into the closest thing it has to a dud in the Apollonia duet “Take Me With U.” But like another genius pop composer, Stevie Wonder, (to whom Prince is not compared nearly enough), his work brims with so many compelling musical ideas that they can be found hidden in even the weakest of tracks. “Take Me With U” is distinguished by a stellar intro and bridge played only on tom-tom and strings. On “The Beautiful Ones,” Prince the serpentine is at his most coiled, his falsetto vocals syrupy and tightly wound until they explode into a wounded animal scream. “Do you want him/Or do you want me/Cuz I want you!” he howls, bursting out of the song all together. In the movie’s plot, this is about a love triangle, but it feels more like Prince is at the throat of his listeners. “Do you want that bullshit on the radio? Or do you want this brilliance? Make up your goddamn mind!”

“Computer Blue” begins with a cryptic spoken exchange between guitarist Wendy Melvoin and Keyboardist Lisa Coleman that may either be about an impending sex act or an impending cup of tea, (vaguely pornographic ambiguity is an aesthetic calling card of the Revolution, Prince’s adroit, androgynous, and multi-racial backing band). The ensuing song is a club jam about the common ’80s theme of existential technological alienation. It flows smoothly into a melodic instrumental, the unlisted “Father’s Song” that showcases Prince’s talent for crafting a surprisingly emotional narrative out of a chord progression and a guitar solo (foreshadowing, perhaps?) before devolving into feedback, wordless screaming, and the intro to the crowning achievement of the first half.

That achievement is “Darling Nikki,” a track that is both thick and skimpy, dark and taut: a thumping, loping, grinding fuck song about getting dirty with and getting played by the timeless femme fatale. The denouement, a quivering undulating coda, impossibly finds the musical link between burlesque backing bands and thrash metal double bass pedal rumbles, and is topped off by a terse and violent guitar solo. The whole song seems to operate at three different tempos simultaneously, leaving no part of your body or spirit quite able to escape its savage grasp.

The second half of the album begins with the confessional “When Doves Cry,” the album’s first single (and Prince’s first ever Billboard #1) wherein he delivers his most pointedly personal lyrics yet, “Maybe I’m just like my father/Too bold/Maybe you’re just like my mother/She’s never satisfied.” In the hands of a lesser talent this could come off as maudlin public journal reading, but fortunately for all of us, “When Doves Cry” is one of Prince’s most affecting compositions to date, launching with a bristling guitar burst before dropping into a karst LM-1 drum pattern featuring the signature knocks he used to great effect on 1999. The ensuing groove provides a solid bed for a bouquet of rococo keyboard arpeggios and steadily unfolding melodic progressions that expertly capture the helpless confessional pleading of a man trying to figure out who he is and why it hurts so damn much. It is the the mid-show stopper, Prince as Rimbaud in pressed petals and lace, carefully gluing together a ransom note from a prison of his own beauty and emotion.

Having covered the tough stuff, we are free to party, and “I Would Die 4 U” is a celebratory, if lyrically morose, jam distinguished by a vast swaths of new wave synth, deep bounce and an insistent high hat. Following that is the impish and yet entirely earnest “Baby I’m a Star.” This is not Prince the character saying it, it is Prince the 26 year old serving notice that he’s greater than we could have ever imagined (turned out he was right) and that we need either get on board or get left.

Which brings us to the album’s title track, the epic and uncharacteristic arena jam “Purple Rain.” Prince here is part preacher, part guitar god. So deeply embedded in arena rock is this song that Prince reportedly called Jonathan Cain and Neal Schon of Journey to ask their blessing (and to ensure they wouldn’t sue over the song’s proximity to “Faithfully”). “Purple Rain” is a baptism, a washing clean of sins and a chance at redemption, even if the words don’t make any sense, (and to most people they don’t) the vastness of the arrangement, the grandiosity of the soloing, the pleading of the vocals reaches you, makes you cry, makes you feel free.

With Purple Rain, Prince bursts forth from the ghetto created by mainstream radio and launches himself directly onto the Mt. Rushmore of American music. He plays rock better than rock musicians, composes better than jazz guys, and performs better than everyone, all without ever abandoning his roots as a funk man, a party leader, a true MC.  The album and film brought him a fame greater and more frightening than even he imagined and he would eventually retreat into the reclusive and obtuse inscrutability for which he ultimately became known. But for the 24 weeks Purple Rain spent atop the charts in 1984, the black kid from the midwest had managed to become the most accurate expression we had of young America’s overabundance of angst, love, horniness, recklessness, idealism, and hope. For those 24 weeks at least, Prince was one of us.