In 1984, there was only one man in America more popular than Ronald Reagan. His name was Prince, and he was funky.
Had Prince run for president that year, he would have certainly carried his native Minnesota—the only state Ronnie lost—and he probably would’ve cleaned up most other places. The reason: “Purple Rain,” his groundbreaking, genre-blurring, utterly genius sixth album. It was a massive seller wherever there were radios and people with pulses.
Kenneth Partridge for Billboard
So, this is it. Our annual trawl through Prince’s albums reaches 1984 and His sixth release. His place in eternal pop culture, His position as music’s most influential figure of the past 50 years, His most abiding songs, His eternal iconography and His cultural footprint. They all come from this era. One of the best selling records ever. Prince said that ‘Purple Rain’ is what people shouted at Him in airports rather than His name. For forty years afterwards, if pop culture was going reference Prince, it would be this era, This album.
If you only own one Prince album, it’s this one. It was the first one I bought, as a spotty teen in Glossop Woolworths back in the early to mid nineties. It’s also your favourite Prince album. If you’ve only heard a couple more. It’s the non-Prince fans’ favourite Prince album. It’s massively overrated. It’s massively underrated. It’s impossible to rate at all. It’s just a bigger deal than almost every other record ever released. I was born six months before the album was released. It’s impossible for me to properly assess it because I can’t remember a reality before this record was released. And that isn’t too big a claim: for the last 39 years and six months we have all absolutely been living in a world, a reality where ‘Purple Rain’ exists. Me being expected to critically analyse it is like you asking my opinions on my own liver. I don’t really have an opinion. It’s just there. I can’t offer any opinions on it because I can’t picture life without it.
Hey, look me over Tell me do you like what you see? Hey, I ain't got no money But honey, I'm rich on personalityBaby I’m a Star
Lol, “ain’t got no money”, Prince? Yeah don’t get used to that.
I’ve already spoken in my piece on the (awful… AMAZING!!) accompanying film what an insane risk the whole project was in terms of an artist with middling commercial success previously getting a whole freaking movie, but the accompanying soundtrack* was also a huge artistic risk. The problem with history is that we’re kind of stuck viewing it from only one direction. It’s difficult to fully appreciate the risk of the movie now: What risk?? Prince is one of the biggest artists ever and that movie was huge! It’s also difficult to appreciate what a shot in the dark the soundtrack album was. What?? This is just what Prince sounds like?! What’s the risk here??
(*and ‘Purple Rain’ is a soundtrack album, a fact often disregarded because it means it would then need to be ranked among other soundtrack albums and be so far away the best ever that it hardly seems fair)
The Revolution – Wendy Melvoin on guitar; Brown Mark on bass guitar and vocals; Lisa Coleman and Doctor Fink on keyboards; Bobby Z. on drums at the time of the record’s release – had been a thing since 1980. Essentially just Prince’s backing band at first, they had begun appearing in press photos around the ‘1999’ period, and even got a teeny weeny shout out on that album’s cover (seriously, I noticed it for the first time while writing my 2022 post). ‘Purple Rain’ though, wouldn’t be just a ‘Prince’ album. It would be credited to ‘Prince and the Revolution’. Every song was produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince and the Revolution. Because they had to be. The film that the album is soundtracking is about an amazing rock band learning to appreciate one another so that they could play together as best they could, the soundtrack to that can’t be Prince fucking about on His own in His own recording studio again. The sound on ‘Purple Rain’ is far bigger than anything He had previously recorded, a full, dense live band feel (because it’s soundtracking live performances, Duh!). The full band appear on six tracks on the album (though perhaps His greatest ever song was again just knocked up by Him at home on his own). It knocked Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’* off the top of the US album charts, and that was how big it needed to sound. Hell, in the movie Prince even pretends that Purple Rain was written by Lisa and Wendy! It’s “a song the girls in the band wrote”! They were all in this together!
(*22 million worldwide sales to ‘Purple Rain’s 15 million. ‘Back in Black’ -31 million – and ‘Thriller’ – 51 million – had also been released recently. Pop music was fucking huge back then)
And of course it was fucking huge. Americans may have been voting for a war criminal with a death count that can be conservatively (hey!) estimated at 325k direct kills, but is essentially responsible for everything that’s wrong with the world today, but they still had two ears and a heart, didn’t they?? And ‘Purple Rain’ might have a say in the discussion of greatest collection of popular music ever committed to tape. ‘Purple Rain’ might have a dog in that fight. Only ‘Purple Rain’s dog would actually be a huge fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex. Dressed in a white floral shirt and a floor length, purple vinyl coat. And that T-Rex would fucking devour all these pathetic little dogs. ‘Purple Rain’ is the greatest collection of pop songs ever made, is what I’m getting around to. So it might be underrated in that sense. It’s not one of the best albums of the 80’s. It’s not the best soundtrack album ever. It contains more perfect pop than any Beatles album. It marries commercial appeal with expansive experimentation better than any Radiohead or Pink Floyd album. David Bowie?? That cockney fraud was like the inoffensive starter to ‘Purple Rain’s main course. ‘Purple Rain’ is a Heston Blumenthal created deer’s pussy pumped full of caviar semen. 82nd best album of all time?? Get to absolute and infinite GTFO!!
But then… I would say that, wouldn’t I? Yes, these tracks are perfect, there’s not a song here that’s less than a 9/10. I think the weakest song is actually Darling Nikki and – holy shit – that song has its own lore and historical importance that I’ve not even got time to get into here! But Darling Nikki, even apart from its jaw dropping horniness and the doors it opened for mainstream art*, is an astonishingly experimental track! Like I said, 9/10, regardless. In his ‘Prince’ biography, Matt Thorne even says I Would Die 4 U is “the weakest track on the album”! Can you imagine?! But, fuck, high standards, still 9/10. But I can’t rate these songs. They’ve always just been a part of me, I don’t know if they’re good or bad. That bit at the end of Darling Nikki that breaks down into random electric noises and Prince singing backward “Hello, how are you?/Fine, fine, ’cause I know that the Lord is coming soon/Coming, coming soon”)? Well I can do that bit acapella I know it so well! These are not just songs to me, these are my sacred scriptures!
(*SZA does not get to sing about how she’s ovulating and needs rough sex now had Prince not sang about Nikki masturbating in a hotel lobby with a magazine in 1984. So, wait… is she masturbating ‘with’ a magazine as in ‘inspiration’ or is she… Shit, better ask Tipper Gore’s daughter)
And… it is slightly overrated.
It’s by a long way the most highly regarded Prince album amongst the normies, the people who only bought one Prince album, the people who would say fucking ‘Thriller‘ is the best album ever. Because this is Prince as people pleaser. This is Prince attempting to make as big an album as humanly possible. It’s a pop album. It’s essentially a commercialised rock metal album. It has an eye on ‘Thriller’, but it also has an eye on ‘Back in Black’. It’s genius – of course it’s genius – but it’s also ever so slightly compromised and simulated. It’s unmistakably and absolutely Prince, but it’s the Prince that Prince thought the mainstream would accept. Sure, there was that one line in Darling Nikki that Mrs Gore got her fanny in a twist about, but on the last album He was gyrating in a thong and threatening to fuck the taste out of people’s mouths. The album that launched censorship in music was already censored ‘Purple Rain’ is kinda overwrought. It’s kinda corny. Artistically, it pales next to ‘1999’. Among the normies, it should probably be considered the greatest album of all time. I’m not sure I’d rank it in my top five Prince albums, and the places that He’s about to take us in the next few years will cause ‘Purple Rain’ to suffer in comparison. Not just artistically, but audibly – this will be the last Prince album that sounds like it was made in the 80s – because that was what He was going for – as Prince would vastly improve his studio set up and start producing some of the richest and most lush sounding records of His career.
‘Purple Rain’ may have also been the last time we got Prince singing free and non-judgemental songs about unabashed sexuality. The allusions to God that had always been a part of His music were starting to become a larger part of His personality and His stage show. Publicist Howard Bloom tells a story of seeing Prince at the Nassau Collision in 1984:
Prince had immaculate taste in light shows, but in the middle of that tour all of a sudden a voice came from five storeys above your head and it was the voice of God. That was the first time Prince was having an inner conversation. Prince was going through a transition from the rebel to the moralist. And as a moralist he was judging himself very harshly
quoted in Matt Thorne’s book
Having conversations with God? Going from ‘rebel to moralist’? This is going to be fine, I’m sure…
Legit Bosses: 7 (+1)
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The Story so Far
Necessary Evil 
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