January 28th 1985 was a shade over seven months since Prince had released one of the greatest selling albums of the year – which would eventually grow to a 25 millioner amongst the best selling albums of all time – ‘Purple Rain‘ – and He had ten nominations at that night’s American Music Awards that He was attending. There was a special buzz around that night’s particular AMAs, part of which revolved around Prince going up against His eternal rival Michael Jackson in several categories. This was a non event though, as Prince won awards for Favorite Pop/Rock Album, Favorite Soul/R&B Album and Favorite Soul/R&B Song for When Doves Cry, while Jackson (moon)walked away with nothing. Anyway, in a series of decisions that history was sure to look kindly on, neither Prince nor Jackson could compete with Lionel Richie, who walked away with six awards including Favorite Soul/R&B Male Artist and Favorite Soul/R&B Male Artist. Prince’s performance of Purple Rain that night – which Billboard would later name as the greatest performance in the awards’ history – would ensure those decisions would look immediately ridiculous.
But the 1985 AMAs were most notable for the fact that, right after the ceremony that night, this absolute royalty of popular recording artists would – rather than spend the night covered in so much gak that their face resembled Elizabeth I and being serviced by heavily narcoticised groupies whom IDs was encouraged not to be checked by the entourage, as would usually be the case for successful music artists in the 80’s – they would all be whisked off to the Hollywood AGM studios to record We Are the World, a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones to benefit ‘USA for Africa‘ (America’s version of Band Aid). It would become the fastest selling single in US history and serve as the climactic singalong at that July’s Live Aid Philadelphia concert.
Prince, though, wasn’t really feeling it.
Interestingly, we never did find out the true reason that Prince had declined to be included on the song, as Prince Himself never properly clarified. Ken Kragen, a music manager behind much of the recruitment for ‘USA for Africa’ argued that Prince no showed because “He always recorded alone and not with an engineer. He would go into the studio, do his own engineering and record every instrument and sing and no one else would be there. All of a sudden, he couldn’t be in a room with his peers“. The vocal arranger Tom Bahler has even argued that Prince didn’t show because He was afraid of Michael Jackson: ““I had a feeling Prince had a problem with men. With Him, everything was with women. It made Him feel good… I think if anything, He was afraid of Michael, This is pure conjecture on my part. Michael was not afraid of Him. Michael wasn’t afraid of anybody. He loved everybody*”. Whereas Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin offered the far simpler explanation that “Because He thinks He’s a badass and He wanted to look cool, and He felt like the song for “We Are the World” was horrible and He didn’t want to be around ‘all those muthafuckas’”. At the 1985 AMA ceremony, there was already a rumour going around that Prince wouldn’t be joining the recording. He offered to play guitar on the track – in a separate room – and not sing, which wasn’t appreciated, and in the end His manager Bob Cavallo spent the AMA ceremony going from table to table to try and put out fires, and making sure that Prince at least kept His head down:
“At the American Music Awards, He keeps telling me the only thing He’ll do is play guitar, So I call Quincy, and he says, ‘I don’t need him to fucking play guitar!’ and he got angry. I said, ‘All right, I don’t know, He’s not feeling well’ — I start this whole campaign that He’s getting the flu. I say to Prince backstage, ‘I’m gonna say you’re sick—if you go out tonight and you’re seen, I can see the headlines: ‘Prince Parties While Rock Royalty Saves Millions’ or whatever the fuck they want to write. They suspect you anyway. You’ve got to stay home, ride it out, and be sick’, ‘Okay,’ He says.
(*I can believe that. In fact, I might even argue that Michael loved too many people, in a way)
Prince abides, and to keep a low profile He took His entourage to the Westwood Marquis hotel to celebrate His wins. Members of His management team were able to stay with Him in the hotel until 2am in the morning, after which they considered the job done and went to bed.
We left Him around two, two-thirty in the morning, and at maybe four o’clock, four-thirty, the phone rings and it’s Chick [Big Chick, one of Prince’s bodyguards]. ‘Hey, buddy, better get back up!’ ‘What?’ ‘Well, we were at ‘Carlos and Charlie’s’, and Big Larry, the bodyguard, he’s in jail, the sheriff’s got him.’ I’ve had scandals on tour where musicians got busted and shit happens, but I’ve never read anything that was on page A1. It was just plain weird.
Prince’s two bodyguards being arrested while attempting to stop photographers snapping their boss out partying on the night of the AMAs while decidedly not being present for the ‘USA for Africa’ recording was the spark that lit the first real backlash of Prince’s career. Where He wasn’t just hated by the racist hicks and the pearl clutching mothers, but seemingly the entirety of the culture. The fact that Prince would contribute an entirely new song to the ‘USA for Africa’ album (and an acoustic video version) meant little when stacked up next to the Original Sin of not wanting to stand between Kenny Loggins and one of the Pointer Sisters to lipsync to a song co-written by a paedophile. The Los Angeles Times suggested that Prince’s actions “led many to think of him as an arrogant jerk”; He was called a child in a Doonesbury cartoon; and was even the subject of a predictably fetid sketch on ‘Saturday Night Live‘. Billy Crystal played Prince. It was the episode hosted by Mr T and Hulk Hogan in the run up to the first Wrestlemania, and I wish there was a single person in the world who appreciates this episode’s dual significance as much as I do! Also, Rich Hall on SNL in 1985?? Weird when you realise these celebrities were already huge in their home country long before you’d ever heard of them.
The tide of public opinion was really souring on Prince, and He kind of had to agree. The people around Him had already noticed Prince losing interest in the rigmarole that promoting a sexquillion selling album (and zakbillion grossing movie) like ‘Purple Rain‘ necessitated. “Creatively, he was over it”, said manager Alan Leeds. “I’m sure it was fun playing the music for a while, but this is a guy who never stopped rehearsing, so they were all tired of playing the songs long before the tour started”. Wendy Melvoin noticed “He was bored. He gave it everything onstage, and He was always in that. But He was gone, He was uninterested, and He had moved on”. Two months after the AMAs, Prince played the final, abrupt date of the Purple Rain tour, He ended the show by saying to the 55’000 in attendance that “I have to go now. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I want you to know that God loves you. He loves us all”.
Luckily, they’d finished recording Prince’s next album on Christmas Eve 1984, and it was released two weeks after that final ‘Purple Rain’ show.
The narrative behind ‘Around the World in a Day’ is quite alluring: Prince as a Cobainesque artist getting a glimpse of the sickness and depravity of mainstream success and turns their head away in disgust. Prince had reached the mountaintop, looked around and decided to bring the whole edifice down on their unworthy heads. And I love that narrative too, don’t get me wrong! Unfortunately however, it’s kind of debunked by two major plot holes: 1) The album was started and had its whole musical direction decided pretty much as soon as ‘Purple Rain’ was released, being completely finished in late 1984 before the Oscars, the Grammys, and halfway through that album’s tour. And 2) Please show me any Prince album that sounded similar to the last one. Prince had always intended that ‘Purple Rain’ be His multimillion dollar smash hit, and He always intended for the next album to be decidedly not that.
By early 1984, before ‘Purple Rain’ was topping both the album and movie charts, Prince already had written Paisley Park, Pop Life and Temptation, which at their core could kind of be imagined fitting into the vein of the ‘Purple Rain’ album, with that record’s glam rock segueing more into more 60’s summer of love influences. At this early point, the working title of the next record was ‘Paisley Park’. The record would eventually be credited at having be recorded in Paisley Park, but this was just Prince manifesting, as that famous studio complex wouldn’t actually be built until 1988. Whatever the original plans for the record were, they were all changed in June 1984 (days before ‘Purple Rain’s June 25th release) when Prince – in a classic rich guy move – decided to gift Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman’s brother David 48 hours in His studio for his birthday. David Coleman recorded a song he called Around the World in a Day, and Lisa was so impressed she got Prince to listen to it. Prince’s mind was blown. He now knew what the next album would sound like and what it would be called, so He immediately brought David Coleman back in, and just made the whole album. The rest of the Revolution would have no idea of the next album’s existence – much less it’s near finished state – until they were called in later to add backing to some tracks.
That music Prince had heard was more flighty, more psychedelic and way looser and jazzier than anything He’d done previously. The Beatles are often mentioned as an obvious influence, though as Wendy tells it “Prince hates The Beatles. My take on it is that He hated The Beatles not for the music, but for something else. Maybe because of the iconic look of them or there was something about them that didn’t ring true for Him and His rock stardom”. In interviews Prince would deny any Beatles influence, evoking instead other artists experimenting outside their safety net such as Stevie Wonder’s ‘Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants‘ or Joni Mitchell’s ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns‘, two albums I can definitely hear the influence of. Though as Lisa concedes “It wasn’t The Beatles we were referencing, it was probably the same things they were referencing. We were seeking what they sought, we weren’t seeking them”
Whatever the influences, ‘Around the World in a Day’ stands as possibly the greatest conservative, anticommunist, hippy album ever.
And it really is an astonishing left-turn from ‘Purple Rain’. Or at least, it would be astonishing if it were any other artist and that artist had just released one of the cultural touchstones of the entire decade that this record would completely disregard musically and thematically. The David Coleman co-credit opening title track is an absolutely perfect introduction to this new sound: sitars, Turkish Darbuka drums, and the song hung upon an incessant flute riff. It’s shocking, it’s brave, it’s entirely bizarre, and it’s absolutely magical. Paisley Park is next, in my opinion the strangest exclusion from Prince’s epic and essential ‘Hits 1/2/B-sides’ collection, an absolutely wonderful if, again, entirely batty pop anthem, with the greatest wah wah pedal ‘kick in’ in musical history. It’s woozy, trippy (and crap) ‘anti-video’ was actually planned to be the first single at one point, until everyone collectively smacked their foreheads in realisation and released the all-time classic (song and video) Raspberry Beret a month after the album came out. Yeah, sorry I didn’t mention it, but fucking Raspberry Berry is on this album. No, I’m not going to talk about how perfect that song is again. The third track is the extraordinary Condition of the Heart, a slow burn jazz exercise that starts with a three minute free range sounding instrumental introduction before the vocals even start, with perhaps Prince’s most androgynous singing style up to that point, before finally exploding into chorus towards the end of its nearly seven minute runtime. Tambourine is described by esteemed Prince biographer Matt Thorne as “The worse thing on any Prince album up to that point” (“A silly squib about genitalia, masturbation, (pornographic, it seems) models and distaste for promiscuous women”) which is an insane take! Sure, the “I don’t care for one night stands/With trolley cars that juggle seventeen” line is a bit eye-rollingly gross, but otherwise, surely you’ve come too far now to be put off by Prince singing about having a wank?? It’s silly in the best way, a delirious two minute palette cleanser and mood lifter that I’d actually name as one of my favourite deep cuts from the record. And worse thing on any Prince album up to that point?? Bro, I might give you ‘worse thing on this album up to that point‘, but trust me, that bar’s getting lowered pretty soon!
So that’s the pretty much unimpeachable side one. Side two, to be honest, takes a bit of a fucking nose dive.
America, man, I just can’t. There’s a 21 minute version, so automatically I kind of love the album cut for ending mercifully at 3:42, but this is utter Reagan era Red Scare bullshit. “Communism is just a word/But if the government turn over/It’ll be the only word that’s heard”. In other artist’s words, verses like “Little sister making minimum wage/Living in a one room jungle-monkey cage/Can’t get over, she’s almost dead/She may not be in the black/But she happy she ain’t in the red” might be read as some Born in the USA type satire, as many more charitable people have chose to view it. But this is an artist who sang “You go to the zoo, but you can’t feed guerrillas/Can’t feed guerrillas/Left-wing guerrillas/You can go to the zoo, but don’t feed guerrillas/Who want to blow up the world” on a previous record – Prince was a guy convinced that nuclear war was coming, and that bomb would be dropped by the Communists. And if you don’t salute the flag?? You’re only making destruction inevitable!
Jimmy Nothing never went to school
They made him pledge allegiance
He said it wasn’t cool
Nothing made Jimmy proud
Now, Jimmy lives on a mushroom cloud
Gross. But at least Pop Life is next and that’s scientifically impossible to dislike. Then Prince chooses to end the album with The Ladder, a pretty decent Purple Rain attempt, and then finally the eight minute Temptation, which is just what the actual WTF?? By far the most insane song on an already pretty doolally album, Temptation is a guitar and saxophone chug that sees Prince working Himself up into more and more and more of a sexual fury – and, yes, slapping one off again – like He was back in His ‘Purple Rain’/’Dirty Mind’ days – “Working my body with a hot flash of animal lust/Temptation/All my fingers in a pool of splashing musk”. Until, around five minutes in, Prince decides to slow things right down to eulogise more clearly on the exact type of bonking that He’s referring to (“Oh, darling, I can almost taste the wetness between your…”), before – get this – having a conversation with God.
Oh, silly man, that’s not how it works
You have to want her for the right reasons
I do!
You don’t, now die
No! No!
Let me go, let me go
I’m sorry
I’ll be good
This time, I promise
Love is more important than sex
Now, I understand
I have to go now
I don’t know when I’ll return
Goodbye
And that utter nonsense is the end of the album.
‘Around the World in Day’s bravery, its 大胆子, its commitment to its stylistic left turn, and it’s many, many, many fantastic songs make it an incredible album. For Prince, however, it’s probably most notable for it allowing Him to sidestep the potential artistic sterility of being more financially successful than most European countries and to empathise His commitment to experimentation when it was most likely to be beaten out of Him by the machine of the ultra mainstream. And if He wanted to remove Himself from the top table, congratulations: ‘Around the World in a Day’ sold roughly 20 million copies less than ‘Purple Rain’. And no subsequent Prince album would even sell that many.
Musically though, I think it’s the one album of this mid 80s Imperial Phase that you could possibly argue was Prince being experimental for its own sake. It doesn’t truly magnetise like His best work does, because at the end of the day there’s an unsatisfactory feeling that maybe Prince was trying to fit His genius into a predetermined style, rather than truly letting His freak flag fly. There’s actually little of the styles and genres experimented with on this album that would play much into Prince’s later work. And, thankfully, this is definitely what I’d consider to be pretty much the end of ‘Reaganite Prince’, lyrically. And, despite the end of the album worryingly aping His ‘Purple Rain’ life show religious conversions, you’ll be relieved to know that the Bible nonsense gets better after here… before it gets a lot worse.
After this little sojourn out of his comfort zone, Prince sat down at His drum kit, and started to write the songs for what I consider to be His greatest record. And also started to concoct another movie. Which many people consider to be amongst the worse ever
The Story so Far
Necessary Evil 
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