Tag: SZA: F2F

3 Prince: Purple Rain (Deluxe)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

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.

TOAST UP, SO WHAT? STREET SMALL BUT IT GO BOTH WAYS

4 SZA: SOS

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

This ain’t no warning shot, in case all of you hoes forgot, they know we’ve been more than lost. Us punk-asses tried to replace them but the stakes were too high, we weren’t able to live off some SZA mini-me. In December 8th 2022 they dumped this album like a press squeeze, they were horny like “Suck these”, daring like “Touch me”. They just want what’s theirs, after spending more than five years watching countless people try and fail to replicate the magic of their debut album.

And it’s hard to be a SZA mini-me. Their incredible 2017 debut album felt like a true moment in the history of recorded music. It’s one of the handful of 21st century records – as our tastes become more and more individualised and the latest stage of capitalism involves eliminating community and creating more dividing lines along identity – that is near unanimously considered an all-time classic. It spent more than 300 weeks on the Billboard top 200, selling millions of copies. You gotta rip that off, right??

OUT OF REACH, OUT OF TOUCH, TOO NUMB, I DON’T FEEL NO WAY