Prince – ‘Purple Rain’
Let me paint a picture for you. The year is 1984, and pop music will never seem as big as it is that year. With MTV steadily gaining traction over radio stations, the biggest names in music are shifting to TV and making lavish videos that make them look like musical gods, from Madonna strutting her stuff to the beginnings of a little genre called hair metal swooping in with bands like Def Leppard gaining steam. Michael Jackson may have been the crowned ‘King of Pop’, but when it comes to the biggest impact on music that year, there was only one Prince.
But it’s not like ‘The Purple One’ was a breakout star once MTV kicked in. He had spent years pioneering the Minneapolis sound before Purple Rain even got started, and 1999 was proof enough that he had the capacity to be a massive star. Still, no one was really reaching as far as he was willing to go since the days of The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
No other artist could claim to want a massive blockbuster movie deal along with a record contract, but Purple Rain never sacrificed the kind of drama that normally comes with big-budget movies. Years before the music biopic became a tired cliché, seeing Prince play a heightened version of himself throughout the film is one of the more harrowing portrayals of what a creative person’s life is like, down to his struggles to get a deal and his complicated relationship with his parents.
Usually when you have a movie this layered, the soundtrack would be thrown on as an afterthought. Just look at the way that A Hard Day’s Night was released. A classic album, yes, but also full of songs meant to paint The Beatles out to be heightened versions of themselves onscreen.
In Prince’s case, the music of Purple Rain may be some of the most adventurous music he had ever made. While it’s hard to really claim that about a man who has worn different musical hats throughout his career, this was probably the closest to art rock that Prince got throughout his early years, like including no bass on the song ‘When Doves Cry’ or the strange vibe of ‘Computer Blue’.
When the album’s not taking chances, though, it’s giving you some of the most elaborate pop rock of the modern age. Michael Jackson may have only messed around with a few rock songs here and there, but there were always going to be limits on where he could go. Not so for Prince, who managed to turn in the kind of solo that Eric Clapton would be proud to have written on ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ and flexing his radio-rock chops on ‘I Would Die 4 U’.
Even when he does go into full soul territory on tracks like ‘The Beautiful Ones’, it feels like he’s ripping his emotions out of his soul. No matter if you’re in a relationship or not, anyone who has ever felt lonely knows the desperation in his voice when he sings the line “Do you want him or do you want me cause I want you”.
Despite having a few hiccups in the track listing, like ‘Take Me With U’, there’s hardly really a complaint to be made with those songs. If anything, it’s just an excuse for Prince to take a break from the spellbinding tracks to make a decent song that could pass for anyone else’s greatest hit.
Every song on the album is about taking another chance, but anyone even slightly aware of music needs to be exposed to ‘Purple Rain’ at least once in their lives. That runtime of eight minutes seems intimidating, but hearing Prince pull out that guitar solo midway through the track feels like having your soul cleansed through music. The final few minutes of the song might just be feedback and ambient keyboard pads, but that’s not due to a lack of ideas. That’s a case of stretching the song because no one wants the moment to be over.
While Prince would eventually go on to far more ambitious projects since Purple Rain, nothing really defines him quite like this collection of songs. Like every other venture that he would go on, this is a project with creativity spilling out of each track with rarely a dud in sight. Michael Jackson held onto that title of ‘The King of Pop’ for years, but if you look at the raw artistry behind each of their classic albums, Purple Rain deserves to be up there with Thriller as one of the most celebrated pop albums of all time.
