(Warner Bros.)
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Movie stardom is nothing, and boiling radio fever was familiar by now, but it's unmistakable that something's changed in Prince during the opening moments of
Purple Rain. In stark, funeral echo, he makes what at first seems a mildly subversive announcement about being gathered here today to get through this thing called life, an "electric word" -- but after a few moments of playing along with the schtik we realize he's on some sort of a cuckoo rant involving "the afterworld," the "shrink" in "Beverly Hills" ("you know the one"), and a "world of neverending happiness." Prince being Prince is a concept familiar to us now, but in 1984 the seductiveness of his purposeful but abstract lunacy was fresh as cold water; it's pure chutzpah as performer, entertainer, and outsized personality that brings the entire world into his corner during the course of the next-to-shapeless party anthem "Let's Go Crazy." Not that his band, the Revolution, aren't a big part of the success of his records from this period, but it was sheer audacity on his part that transformed a terrific R&B singer into a cult of personality, a force of nature. The only conceivable comparison is imagining the Beatles attempting to make "She Loves You" and "Revolution 9" the same song.
Let's be clear: Prince made better albums before and after
Purple Rain -- at the very least,
1999 and
Sign o' the Times have a sprawl and heft to which it never aspires. But the alarming self-assurance of "Let's Go Crazy" indicates that which is proven over the eight cuts that follow: this is the peak of Prince as a pop performer, specifically the man who can justify a claim to having owned popular music throughout the '80s. The biggest share of the universe's attention belonged quite deservedly to Michael Jackson and Madonna, sure, but you had to search far and wide to find people who were passionate about music and weren't excited about Prince. He was like the Beatles in the '60s, Neil Young and Stevie Wonder in the '70s, Kanye West in the '00s -- critically, commercially, artistically, there was no touching him. And if we can get behind any one of his records as a manifesto, it's this one, hampered initially by its relation to a turgid and silly rock & roll movie but now easily standing out as a shining beacon of the best and most forward-thinking pockets of its era.
One measure of
Purple Rain's success is that it's not tied into its era at all -- if anything, it still feels ahead of our time. We discover a Prince who's mostly shed the Minneapolis sound he helped to invent, instead building from the more left-field, experimental music he delivered on
Dirty Mind and parts of
1999. Whereas songs like "Automatic" and "Let's Pretend We're Married" married their funk to a brooding, deliberate pace as they gathered mood and energy, the songs of
Purple Rain are bursts of (mostly) brief enthusiasm that deliver ideas and retract them with invisible rapidity. It's possible, of course, to draw a line from his earliest radio hits, "Soft and Wet" or "I Wanna Be Your Lover" or "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad," to something like "I Would Die 4 U," which has some shred of tradition in its grooves. And yet it perversely sounds like nothing that came before, shedding all but its ghostly electronic rhythm section and a lonely, frantic vocal, in addition to a clipped, awkward, repetitive verse/chorus that eventually explodes into an even more bizarrely frenzied instrumental bridge. It's all over before you know it, before you even have time to process it, but it's immensely pleasurable. It feels
perfect, carved in stone, and immediately familiar. But who else but Prince could do it? Who could duplicate it now?
In sum total, this feels like the most innovative straight pop record since the '60s. Prince goes for broke on it, shooting for the broadest possible contingent and courting a mainstream rock audience by both simplifying and building atop the soul music principles that were once his foundation. It's a careful practice of shedding and growth, and we don't hear much of it now because the concept of "mainstream" has changed so much, but there was a time when it was possible to become stranger, more unique, while building a larger fanbase and in fact infiltrating the top tier of the Billboard 200. For the rest of the decade, Prince's singles would remain uncompromising, off-putting, surreal -- and intensely popular. We have no one capable of such madness now. It's a wonder we ever did.
Like those early Beatles singles, it all has the subliminally affecting energy of an alien missive of some sort, inspiring shrieking disbelief and pleasure that some could (and did, almost immediately) call sinister and vile. The urgency of "Take Me with U" is pure pop only slightly mussed up by its sly string gags and supernatural catchiness, but where Prince proves his prowess over the formation of abstract ideas into pop and over the pop audience itself is on the elaborate tangents that mark material like "Computer Blue," a truly otherworldly creation that captures all the spoken-word innuendo, oddball jamming, and sensual infectiousness into less than half the length of "Automatic," and caps it all off with backmasking a la "Rain." It then segues into "Darling Nikki," a witty and terrifying concoction that responds to no heretofore known standard of either R&B or pop but hasn't the shade of experimentation or noodling. Rather, it creates its own landscape and runs brazenly on top of it, Prince appropriately giddy and impassioned over the story of the girl "masturbating with a magazine" who had "so many devices" in her apartment and left a note in the morning about calling "whenever you wanna grind." It sent people into a tizzy, including Congress, who couldn't admit how it related to them so they started putting stickers on all our CDs instead.
The irony, of course, is that
Purple Rain is now in the National Recording Registry; Tipper Gore and Prince in their present incarnations are absent of influence or importance, but these songs ring out and last. Their elevation of batshit songforms continues to provoke in wildly different ways, a few decades removed. "When Doves Cry" still soars on the radio and still sounds brand new, its bass-free, suspiciously invigorating anxiety and anguish continuing the capture the imagination of untold numbers daily, whether listeners get to hear the version that descends into sinister, chant-like bellowing and electronic mystery or not. The massive excellence of something that pushes forward as much as "The Beautiful Ones," a show-stopping showcase for this masterful writer and instrumentalist, displays the aptitude of Prince to mask his ingenuity with torch-song expertise. Like the whole record, it's the best of everything.
In the film
Purple Rain, the title song serves as an emotional climax, meant to signify the Prince character's stripping away of disdain for the world beyond himself. On the record, it comes across as a deliberate outlier; it's every bit the standard ballad "The Beautiful Ones" is not, yet it became a signature and a classic because Prince's mannered appropriation of the conventions therein is marked by such disarming sincerity, in context at least, that it's akin to learning about the depths in the heart of an intellectual giant. This is the point when Prince strips away all of the business and surrealism and goofing around and he'll use that angelic, versatile voice of his and guitar-hero his heart out in an eight-minute potboiler made for radio, for making out, for every kind of international utility you can picture. And he recites his lyrics about regret and causing pain and, oh, all the same stuff singer-songwriter dudes always sing about regretting -- like it's just you and him. And, you know, a few million other people, all transfixed and adoring, all in the palm of his hand for several years to come. Not an infinite number of years, mind you, but enough.
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SEE ALSO:]
Dirty Mind (1980)
Controversy (1981)
1999 (1982)
