The 1984 Prince classic that vanished from the charts overnight
Chances are, you’ve got a cheeky Billboard Hot 100 fact up your sleeve that could one day become useful at a pub quiz, like knowing The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ is somehow the highest performing song ever in quantitative measures.
It’s not usually formative to look back at the biggest losers, but breaking into the Hot 100 is still an impressive feat that is reserved for only the most commercially successful artists. And The Weeknd isn’t exactly going to lose sleep over my poking fun at his chart figures, is he? Unfortunately, the song that fell with mighty aplomb didn’t belong to Abel Tesfaye, but a legendary artist much more universally beloved than the Hurry Up Tomorrow creator.
Grief is a powerful emotion; pair it with nostalgia and one of the most admired, emotional epic ballads of the past 100 years, and crazy things will happen on the charts. After all, numbers can only measure specifically quantifiable ideas, and what’s less objective than mourning, than losing a musical icon way too soon?
Prince was only 57 when he passed away from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016. The news sent shockwaves throughout the music industry and beyond, as the world plummeted into a dark age of mourning for the bold, genre-defying and multi-talented star. In a semantic turn to pathetic fallacy, how else might the world expect to deal with this insurmountable loss than to stream the tear-jerker, ‘Purple Rain’, over and over again?
Released in 1984, it hit the second spot on the Hot 100 for two weeks, kept from occupying number one by Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’. The pair of songs couldn’t be further apart in vibes, but the latter was more radio-friendly than the eight-minute ballad, overtaken by a gnarly guitar solo. Still, this wasn’t the end of its Hot 100 history.
In 2016, as tragedy struck, the song soared straight up to the fourth spot on the Hot 100 charts. And then, curiously, it seemed that the world suddenly had its fill of the “oo’s” and “ah’s” of Prince and The Revolution.
After two weeks on the chart, in an echo of its release week, it fell once again. This time, the fall was mighty, straight from the fourth spot to nowhere in the top 100 songs of the week, making you wonder at the rapid speed at which society collectively moves on from seismic events.
Years later, the Prince song would enjoy another resurgence in popularity, for a reason less emotional than the hole he left when he shuffled off this mortal coil. For its epic fifth and final season conclusion, sci-fi Netflix series Stranger Things bagged the rights to ‘Purple Rain’ for the first time in any television series. This meant that the ballad saw a 243 per cent increase in global streams and moseyed on up to the upper area of the Spotify streaming charts earlier this year.
Also, in 2016, another Prince song experienced the same treatment from the general public in the same charts; four songs down, at number eight, ‘When Doves Cry’, the song re-entered the official Hot 100.
The last words in that beloved ballad are “Don’t cry”, which perhaps explains its newfound popularity, as Prince reaches beyond the boundary of death and reassures the listener that grief should be met with gratitude and acceptance that we existed in the same timeline as such a musical genius.
