What actually is ‘Purple Rain’?
Prince’s second album with the Revolution, and his sixth overall, was the one that launched him into the stratosphere. From there, he would go on to define the decade with his innovative output.
Purple Rain, with its number one hits ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ alongside its anthemic title track, and a film starring the artist himself to boot, was the biggest thing in music during 1984. It was perhaps only eclipsed by Michael Jackson’s Thriller as the pop phenomenon of the entire decade.
Incredibly, the song from which the album takes its name was never recorded fully in a studio, with the LP’s eight-and-a-half-minute version taped live during its debut performance at the Minnesota Dance Theatre in Prince’s hometown on August 3rd, 1983. It was later cut down to size for the single version, but the soaring full-length track is the one most fans hold dearest.
Those eight and a half minutes feature only eight lines of lyrics, the majority of which are the enigmatic title refrain. As it happens, the roving song almost had a lot more structure but the little Purple One just didn’t manage to secure the helping hand he wanted on this front.
Prince had originally asked Fleetwood Mac singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks to write the words to the song with the intention of dueting on it with her, crafting a more traditional pop composition, but Nicks later told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that she was too “scared” to go ahead with the project.
Given the task of working with the rising star of world music on such an epic number, Nicks felt completely overawed. “I can’t do it,” she told Prince. “I wish I could. It’s too much for me.” And so, he and his band turned it into a monumental slow-burning guitar jam, which his weepy, bittersweet vocals made all the more powerful for it.
But what does ‘Purple Rain’ actually mean?
As much as the song and its accompanying album and movie would achieve massive success and secure Prince’s legacy as a rock legend, like so many aspects of his artistry, its meaning has remained obscure. It took him years to come clean about what exactly “purple rain” is supposed to be.
Many people had already figured that it was a reference to the artist’s favourite colour, which adorned many of his most iconic outfits and became an integral part of his brand. Purple helped set Prince apart from his various primary-coloured contemporaries on the music scene. But what about the rain?
Well, according to the man himself, “When there’s blood in the sky… red and blue = purple.”
Prince was intensely religious and believed there would be an apocalyptic day of reckoning for humanity, as he alluded to on his previous album, 1999. Other Prince lyrics also associate the colour purple with this rapturous event. And so, “Purple rain pertains to the end of the world,” the devout Jehovah’s Witness commented.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. He added that it’s about “being with the one you love.” As long as you’re together and staunch in your belief, he asserted, you could just kick back and let “your faith/God guide you through the purple rain”. He reflected this biblical overture in the melody of the hymnal anthem.
Likely the song has meant many different things to millions of people down the years. Not all of Prince’s fans are believers. But each of them find resonance the roving song, just like Bob Dylan’s own Revelations-like offering, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, before it.
At least in this case, the music of ‘Purple Rain’ is more important than the words. Without the music, we wouldn’t be laughing in the purple rain. Alas, the joy it brought to the world also somewhat daunted its creator. “In some ways Purple Rain scared me,” he noted in The Observer. “It’s my albatross and it’ll be hanging around my neck as long as I’m making music.”
Thankfully, he would amass 16 top ten hits, so his “albatross” had plenty of company.
