Dear serious Prince students,

As a Radio and Television Masters Graduate student at San Francisco State University, I was recently privileged to pen a Cultural Theory paper discussing the many significant elements of "Purple Rain". I found this a fascinating study and unearthed for myself many insights that furthered my knowledge of, and interest in, Prince.

As it would seem a waste just to keep this study to myself, I thought I'd post it here, hoping it will be of value to some of Prince's many followers. You can judge for yourself how inciteful the paper is below. Beware, it is lengthier than most posts. Enjoy!

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One Song

For almost thirty years, Prince, the popular musician famous for his prolific output, eclecticism, and eccentric nature, has been regarded as one of modern music's most influential artists. Prince's albums have sold over 100 million copies, he has influenced the music of countless bands and artists, innovated throughout his career, is known as a unique live performer, and has been a leading voice in the struggle for artist's rights. However, the general public knows Prince for one thing above all else: Purple Rain (1984). This album is by far his highest selling work and has been covered by more artists than any other Prince album. At the time, Purple Rain was a phenomenon that gripped the public, cementing forever Prince's place in music history. However, aside from citing music sales and concert attendance figures, there has been little analysis of the significance of Purple Rain from all perspectives – not just popularity but in how it challenged social norms, engaged the public, and constructed a modern myth for audiences. This paper attempts to explain why, after over twenty years, Purple Rain is still being talked about.

The Purple Rain mosaic

Purple Rain was more than an album, film, or tour. It was a whole collection of elements, which could be termed the “Purple Rain mosaic” (Hahn, p.66, 2004), designed to comprise an entertainment event, the size of which had rarely, if at all, ever been seen before. Those elements' interconnectedness were crafted in such a way that consuming any one part would entice consumers to discover the others. Although its contents were likely conceived after the idea of a movie, Purple Rain was of course an album. After the avant-garde 1999 (1982), which had yielded the cross-over hit “Little Red Corvette”, the video for which was one of the few by a black musician played on MTV, Prince had stood on the edge of superstardom. However, he was an unlikely character to join the upper echelons of the music hall of fame. Both Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, the two other biggest black pop acts of the time, had more family-friendly images compared to Prince's risque approach. 1999 had featured well-crafted pop songs but also long experimental electronic workouts containing, lyrically, amongst other things, erotic metaphors (“Little Red Corvette”) and sexual violence (“Automatic”). Purple Rain, on the other hand, was a wholly commercial, and less challenging, venture. A focused nine-song album with no filler material, Purple Rain was aimed squarely at a mass audience, featuring a raucous opener (“Let's Go Crazy”), a celebration-of-love duet (“Take Me With U”), a sweaty ballad (“The Beautiful Ones”), an upbeat expression of stardom (“Baby I'm A Star”), and a stadium anthem (“Purple Rain”). A rare marriage of the accessible and experimental, the album was also praised for its undeniable 'Prince' sound, notably with Prince's signature synth (“Let's Go Crazy”, “Computer Blue”, and “I Would Die 4 U”) and the experimental bass-less “When Doves Cry”. Purple Rain thus struck all the right chords with the music-buying public, going on to sell eighteen million copies, easily Prince's best-selling work.

Intimately connected with the album was Purple Rain, the movie, a semi-biographical tale of The Kid (Prince) and his fight to compete with rival music outfit The Time and keep The Kid's band, The Revolution, on the roster list at the famous Minneapolis First Avenue nightclub whilst managing his relationship with girlfriend Apollonia and dealing with domestic violence at home between his father and mother. Little more than a series of music videos based on album tracks woven together with a simple plot, the movie is entirely Prince-centric. His name hovers above the movie's title on promotional materials, his stage performances dominate the film, and the film's plot revolves almost entirely around his struggles. Even the other main characters are, in one way or other, merely extensions of the Prince persona. Arch-nemesis Morris Day, of The Time, possesses an unmediated womanizing instinct and a desire to turn girlfriends into revenue-earning music acts – exactly what Prince became famous for in the 1980s. Since its release, the movie, with its lack of professional actors (only The Kid's parents are played by individuals with previous acting experience), poorly developed characters, and all the worst trappings of 1980s fashion sense, has aged badly. Even at the time, Purple Rain was not lauded for a strong plot or convincing actors. Nonetheless, on the back of the Purple Rain hype, the film became a hit, grossing $69 million and becoming one of the biggest box office successes of the year.

The third pillar of the Purple Rain entertainment event was the concert tour (1984-1985). Achieving comparable success to the album and movie, the tour comprised 90 concerts across 32 US cities and was designed to fulfill the hype of the Purple Rain phenomenon. With an elaborate set, extravagant showmanship on the part of Prince and the band, and a setlist focusing on eight of the nine Purple Rain tracks, the Purple Rain tour received an ecstatic response from stadiums packed with the frenzied mass audiences that accompany any phenomenon of the moment. Fully integrated into the Purple Rain mosaic, the shows exhibited the same characters (Prince and the Revolution) and the same Princely grandiosity and egotism displayed in the album and movie.

But the mosaic extended beyond the Prince name to side-projects that acted as conduits for other musical aspects of the Prince music-making machine. The Time, a front band secretly created by Prince that allowed him to release funk under a different name whilst exploring other creative avenues, released a third album in 1984, Ice Cream Castle, which featured the hit “Jungle Love”. Meanwhile, Apollonia, who played Prince's girlfriend in the Purple Rain movie, sang lead vocals for Apollonia 6 on the group's self-titled debut (and only) album. As with The Time, Apollonia 6 was merely a chance for Prince to cover an area of the music market not aimed for under his own name. The members of both bands also, in line with the tight control held over all elements of the Purple Rain experience, received strict instructions about how to act and present themselves, and what type of character to adopt in public. Apollonia, for example, was ordered to end any romantic relationships and give the impression of availability throughout her tenure with the band. The Prince name was also connected with Sheila E's Glamorous Life album, which contained several songs written by Prince, and with the Chaka Khan single “I Feel For You”, a cover of a song Prince had written and included on his second album. As it became known that Prince was behind these four projects, his mystique and reputation as a musical tour de force increased still further.

A perfect harmony

This expansive and carefully controlled package became a mid 1980s phenomenon akin to Beatles-mania. In fact, Prince was the first artist since the Beatles to have a single, album, and movie at the top of their respective charts simultaneously. Aside from commercial success, Prince himself became an object of intense public fascination as a quirky character of immense artistic talent. Somehow, the dual concerns of creative autonomy and commercial success had been perfectly straddled by the artist, making Purple Rain a unique success. Such a feat necessitated a harmonious relationship between the capitalist ideology of Prince's record label, Warner Brothers, and Prince's creative impulses. Garofalo (1987) offers a useful structure to understand how this was possible by identifying three 'arenas of struggle' which necessitate 'compromises that produce varying degrees of co-option'. These arenas occur in three relationships: that between artist and record company, artist and music, and artist and audience. The next part of this paper will explain the significance of Purple Rain through an examination between the artist and these three 'pressures of commercialization'. Acknowledged at this point are the limitations of an artist-centric approach to analyzing Purple Rain, especially where that artist is such a crafted figure, to an unknowable extent a fictitious construct, as 'Prince'. Where the man who is certainly behind much of 'Prince' ends and Prince himself begins is a difficult question that will follow in later in our examination of Purple Rain.

1. The artist and the record company

An artist's relationship with their record company exerts the greatest potential commercializing influence of all three areas of struggle. The profit-maximization drive of record companies to market commercially successful products is more often than not a conservative influence that pressurizes artists to produce formulaic music. An ideological conflict between conservative capitalism and progressive artistry frequently compromises the final product. A unique feature of Purple Rain is that both record company and artist's goals overlapped significantly, with Prince able to deliver a commercial and experimental product simultaneously. As early stated, Purple Rain was intended by Prince as a road to superstardom and this shaped the album's sound. Hahn retells a story recalled by keyboardist Matt Fink who was asked by Prince why the classic rock of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, an act touring close to Prince's 1999 tour, was so publicly appealing. Fink responded that Seger's simple anthemic songs appealed to Middle America. Soon after, Prince had written the stadium sing-along classic “Purple Rain”. Other parts of the Purple Rain album were unabashedly mainstream. “Let's Go Crazy” is a distortion-drenched rock number, a perfect album and concert opener. “Baby I'm A Star” is another high-energy party song. Elsewhere on Purple Rain, Prince drops the more challenging subject material covered on earlier albums and opts for traditional romance material on five of the nine tracks.

A significant confluence of ambition for Purple Rain by both record company and artist was the intertextual nature of the Purple Rain mosaic. Birringer (1985, p.225) notes the changed viewing experiences created by the numerous institutional practices of “constructing, processing, and circulating” images through television, cinema, advertising, the press, live experiences and more. Such a multimedia approach was at the heart of the Purple Rain mosaic and achieved great success. Audiences intrigued by a Purple Rain album, single, movie, or concert would likely feel compelled to complete their experience elsewhere in the mosaic. Each experience would carry similarities – musically, presentation, or otherwise – yet also differences, across the different media outlets. This was masterfully manipulated through careful release of the Purple Rain products in 1984: “When Doves Cry”, the first single from Purple Rain, was released in May, the album in June, the movie in July, and the tour soon after. With each stage, hype, and demand, grew.

In his seminal work “On Popular Music” (1941), Adorno identifies this “plugging” as central to the functioning of the culture industry. Whilst critical aversion to Adorno's disdain for popular music has been so extensive that it has almost become a critical theory subset of its own, his ideas on the machinations of the culture industry have more value. Adorno argues that standardization in popular music means that plugging is necessary to for such music to stand out to the listener who would otherwise not be able to tell such identical music apart: “Repetition gives a psychological importance which it could otherwise never have... Provided the material fulfills certain minimum requirements, any given song can be plugged and made a success, if there is adequate tie-up between publishing houses, name bands, radio and moving pictures”. One might disagree with Adorno's view on the extent to which popular music is standardized, but his description of plugging carries much currency. As Adorno says, repetition itself can be a sign of success. When the public saw the presence of Purple Rain everywhere, they likely presumed it was already successful and wanted to be a part of the phenomenon. There is not space here to discuss Adorno's division of music into the serious and the popular, and his dislike of the latter. Nor is there inclination. More important a distinction, says Paddison (1982), is that between music which accepts itself as a commodity and that which resists and denies it. From the outset, conceived as a marketing tool for the Prince name and commercial success, Purple Rain unashamedly belonged to the commercial world.

Purple Rain's commercial ambition is a reminder that, as Lovell (1983) says, “If surplus-value can be extracted from the production of cultural commodities which challenge, or even subvert, the dominant ideology, then all other things being equal, it is in the interests of particular capitals to invest in the production of such commodities”. This is, of course, no hard and fast rule. The more subversive a commodity is, and the closer it comes to offending the dominant ideology of the ruling class, the less likely that commodity will enter the market. Purple Rain, I argue, struck a fine balance between these concerns. Its commercial promise enabled the album's more controversial elements to pass.

2. The artist and the music

Garofalo's second arena of struggle that threatens to co-opt music to the dominant ideology is in the relationship between an artist and his music. A central question is whether the music represents what the artist stands for, to what extent the artist cares about his music. Although this relationship would be cast into doubt in later music bearing the Prince name, on Purple Rain the connection was clear. Ballad “The Beautiful Ones” is a rousing plea directed towards Prince's love interest at the time Susannah Melvoin, twin sister of his guitarist Wendy, demanding that she choose between Prince and another lover. “I Would Die 4 U” reflects a belief in God, common across the entire Prince catalog. “Computer Blue”, featuring an instrumental section written by Prince's father, speaks of the conflict between love and lust, a factor commonly cited by associates as important in Prince's life. These, and other, tracks on Purple Rain contain a clear sense of struggle that reflect genuine passion.

The album, though tamed down from the shock value of earlier Prince works (one notable example being the celebration of an incestuous sexual relationship on “Sister” from 1980's Dirty Mind album), also contains some uncompromisingly provocative material. The song “Darling Nikki”, a story about Prince's liaison with a prostitute, contains the famous line “I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine”. Whatever the reaction might be to such a line today, in 1984 this was less palatable, especially to Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Albert Gore, who found her eleven year old daughter listening to this song, proclaiming “These images frightened my children; they frightened me!” Gore, horrified that a lack of parental protection from the likes of Prince might corrupt children across the country, joined with the wives of other powerful Washington men to form the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) to hold the music industry accountable for lascivious content. The Parental Advisory warning labels still adorning album covers today exist directly because of “Darling Nikki”.

From the history of sex as part of the American national identity as articulated by Berlant (1995), it is apparent that the shock value of “Darling Nikki” derived from the flouting of cultural and historical norms. Berlant discusses the culturally constructed character of the “little girl”, one who embodies the disempowered female vulnerability and against whom the (male) adult of “adult culture” stands. Antipornographic notions embody the little girl, and then by extension the female in general, as the opposite of “someone who matters, someone with rights, a full human being, and a full citizen”. This sentimental logic embraces the idea that women are the bearers of privacy and that, as second-class citizens, an identity must be constructed around them to protect them. The threat of “Darling Nikki” was so real to Gore because it literally threatened a little girl: her own daughter. A second threat posed by the song and its explicit lyrics concerns the “zone of privacy”, the prescribed area for national heterosexuality, an idealized time and space where sex is deemed acceptable. Berlant calls this a “dead” area (as in “dead metaphor”), where sexual acts are conventionalized and stripped of any threat value. The threat of sex radicals, such as Prince who brings tales of prostitutes to public audiences, is to remove the state from sex and bring the act out of parentalized protection.

“Darling Nikki” was not the only track to have fought its way to inclusion on Purple Rain. For entirely different reasons, “When Doves Cry”, the album's first single, also challenged the music establishment. Hearing the song, one bewildered Warner Brothers employee proclaimed “What kind of fucking record is this, what a bunch of strange sounds”. “When Doves Cry” is indeed odd. Most remarkably, the song lacks a bass line, creating a fragile, spartan sound, relying instead on a constricted synth melody and thickly layered vocal harmony. Its sonic and lyrical qualities combined, “When Doves Cry” is a remarkable work that expresses numerous unconventional ideas. The minimalist sound combined with lyrics such as “Touch if U will my stomach / See how it trembles inside” betray a vulnerability rare in the rock world. The machismo normally associated with male rock stars is further jettisoned by gender role confusion. One notes the decidedly Oedipal ideas in the lines “Maybe I'm just like my father, 2 bold / Maybe u're just like my mother / She's never satisfied”. (Interestingly, Holland (1988) notes that to the casual listener the latter line almost sounds like “Maybe I'm just like my mother”). In these lyrics is shown “the classical oedipal displacement of love for the mother onto an age-peer who is “just like” her” (Holland, p.6). The film further underscores gender confusion in two ways: the actresses who play Prince's mother and girlfriend bear some similarity to one another, and both resemble Prince far more than his onscreen father, far darker-skinned and larger than Prince. Through these elements of de-machismo-ism, female pleasure is given unique prominence in the song, reflected even in the music video where a split screen effect causes mirror figures to merge in and out of existence, creating a visual recalling the female genitalia.

3. The artist and the audience

The third area of struggle highlighted by Garofalo is the relationship between artist and audience. As Purple Rain was a calculated status grab, this factor played a central role in the mosaic. The Purple Rain tour was designed to further the connection between Prince and the Revolution and audiences who had seen the movie, heard the album, and wanted to complete their experience. Thus, the tour was heavily stamped with the Purple Rain brand. The bathtub in the “When Doves Cry” music video was a prominent prop on an elaborate set costing $300,000, whilst the band wore the same New Romantics-esque clothes featured in the movie. Concerts opened with “Let's Go Crazy”, as on the album and movie, and showcased eight of the nine songs on the album. With Prince's five costume changes, the artist's mysterious “conversation with God” segment, guitar solos, and splits, pirouettes, and pouts, the Prince character was held beneath a spotlight to be idolized by enthralled audiences. From Prince's initial ethnically black following, the Purple Rain masses of 1984 were now predominantly white suburbanites.

The character of Prince, who cannot be said with much certainty to have objective reality, was carefully crafted, something that 'Prince' had heavily focused on from the beginning of his career to the extent that audiences were essentially connecting with a portrayal, not a real person. (Of course, this is more or less true of any performer held up on a stage above a crowd of fans). But the craftsmanship with which this was achieved in the Purple Rain era, and the success this had in engaging with audiences, was an essential part of the mosaic. Prince's eventual unmasking as the driving force behind Apollonia 6, The Time, and Sheila E's album; the well-publicized Prince as one-man-band phenomenon (every album sleeve adorned with “Produced, Arranged, Composed, and Performed by Prince”); the stories leaked to the press concerning his voracious sexual appetite; the uncertainty about how biographical the Purple Rain movie really was; and Prince's refusal to give interviews all helped construct a mystical figure that intrigued the media and public alike. No public appearance saw Prince let his guard down. The character depicted in the movie acted and dressed exactly like the one seen on red carpets, concerts, and award ceremonies. Prince's androgyny – as demonstrated by his appearance, characteristic use of falsetto, and stage demeanor – only added to the mystique, something he had encouraged since asking on “Controversy” (from Controversy, 1981), “Am I black or white, am I straight or gay?”

And as part of the package, the Revolution was under a similar regime. The band was ethnically diverse and members wore similar clothes to Prince. Band members played their own characters. Keyboardist Matt “Dr” Fink wore a surgery get-up and hid behind sunglasses, while Wendy Melvoin and guitarist Lisa Coleman exchanged suggestive glances and hinted at a lesbian relationship, notably on the Purple Rain track “Computer Blue” (“Wendy? / Yes Lisa / Is the water warm enough? / Yes Lisa / Shall we begin? / Yes Lisa”). Prince and the Revolution were were larger than life, playing with gender constructs, musical boundaries, and crossing ethnic divisions. Thus, so were audiences on the Purple Rain tour similarly eclectic. As expressed by music journalist Amy Linden, Prince “made it safe to be strange”.

But how were Purple Rain's characters so appealing to the public? Such a question can be considered using both Gramsci's (1971) ideas on hegemony and Althusser's (1971) conception of Ideological State Apparatuses. In considering how capitalism has maintained supremacy where it has taken root, Gramsci explains that control is maintained not only by violence and economic and political coercion but also by ideological hegemony where values of the dominant class became 'common sense' values. Eventually, the working class identifies its interests with those of the dominant class and maintains the status quo without requiring repression. This is achieved by making the coercion appear to be based on the consent of the majority, and, crucial for our example, this is expressed through the organs of public opinion, such as the media and organizations.

At this point, Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) becomes useful. Basing his focus on ideology on Gramsci's hegemony writings, Althusser says that whilst hegemony arises from political forces, ideology stems from structures that build and maintain a sense of the self. ISAs, “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions”, include religion, education, the family, legal, political, communications, and cultural institutions. Such organizations can only hand down ideology by creating concrete subjects to receive such ideology and this is achieved through hailing, or 'interpellating', an individual. Althusser recalls interpellation in the case where a person walks down the street and sees and recognizes a previous acquaintance. He says “Hello, friend” and the friend waves back. At this moment, because the friend knows that the call was meant for him, he is transformed from an individual into a subject: a friend. In reality, however, hailing is not sequential as per the above scenario. One who believes in an ideology by definition sees himself as outside the ideology. Such a person will thus also see others as belonging to that ideology, even if those others are not yet aware of it. Therefore, Althusser says that individuals are 'always-already subjects', subjects before even being hailed; hailing merely arouses their awareness of being a subject. As individuals are constantly interpellated, even by the most basic social practices such as possessing a name, it is impossible to exist outside of ideology.

In the case of Purple Rain, as part of the dominant class and as a cultural ISA, Warner Brothers's economic priorities encouraging a hailing practice. The more effectively Warner Brothers emulates the ideology handed down from the dominant class and which the people have come to accept as its own, the more the Purple Rain mosaic effectively hails the public, the more commercially successful the venture.

It is not difficult to observe Purple Rain's success in interpellating the public by appealing to a postmodern society which lacks meta-narratives, which collectively shuns a belief in one overriding explanation of 'the way things are'. In Purple Rain, many factions within this postmodern society are hailed: those who wish to express their individuality and reject what they conceive as the status quo. This may mean existing outside of conventional gender norms, men feminizing and woman masculinating themselves. Racial boundaries may be flouted; audiences may want to enjoy music without concern for whether that music belongs to this or that ethnic tradition. Audiences may wish to reinforce their own individuality by unconventional make-up and clothing. Those already troubled by their interpellation by religion may find solace in Purple Rain's co-mingling of a belief in the divine with a celebration and permission of sexuality that flouts societal norms. Women who feel suppressed by male dominance can feel liberated in the femininity in the Prince character or by the presence of female desire in, for example, the “When Doves Cry” video. Even those with an opposite disposition - women finding pleasure in the male gaze – might find themselves hailed in the sexualized Apollonia 6 group. In short, a society focusing ever more on the supremacy of the individual and of individual expression was hailed successfully by Purple Rain.

Aside from the hailing of various definable groups, Purple Rain's appeal also arises from the propagation of numerous myths reinforced by the dominant class of society, most noticeably the myth of Prince himself. The genesis of part of Purple Rain may have existed in the mind of one man, but what arose from that idea served to forge the man himself into what we know as 'Prince', an amalgamation of many ideological ideas. One chief characteristic of 'Prince' is the 'one man does it all' idea. Prince conceives of the overall Purple Rain project; Prince writes, plays, produces, and performs his music; Prince conceives album art; Prince works the basic storyline of the movie; Prince can play over a dozen instruments; Prince picks singles to be released, and so on. In reality of course, the execution of the Purple Rain mosaic required the involvement of countless musical technical engineers, musicians, marketing strategists, set designers, costume designers, and the overall consent of the Warner Brothers record company management. Moreover, even Prince's ideas and musical abilities arose from inspiration he had gained from elsewhere. After all, no person is an island. But the American dream of self-sufficiency, a cultural norm particular to the US, and the modern triumph of individualism over collectivism, leads to the construction of 'Prince' as a one man band that appeals to such a myth. From this perspective, 'Prince' is just another construct, another way of hailing the public.

However, acknowledging the idea of a fabricated person known as Prince identifies a limitation to the usefulness of Garofalo's three areas of struggle that threaten to commercialize music. If Prince is constructed then what relationship with the record company, 'his' music, and the audience exists? Who does it exist with? The least unsatisfying answer is that, as it is impossible to separate the man behind Prince from the constructed Prince, the exact nature of 'his' relationships is never entirely knowable.

The audience and the music

Such a realization of the limitations of a Prince-centric approach to understanding the significance of Purple Rain opens an opportunity to give importance to another relationship that plays a part in the co-option process: the connection between music (which in our case should include, where necessary, all audio-visual elements of the Purple Rain mosaic) and audience, something that does not depend on a relationship with the artist. The value of this line of inquiry is to penetrate further into the discussion of how audiences work with cultural texts to create their own meanings.

It is, of course, the case that audiences derive pleasure from popular music. Adorno was highly condescending about the qualities possessed by such music that enabled enjoyment. He contrasted 'serious' music, whose every detail could only be understood by simultaneously understanding the whole piece, with popular music, which was always standardized. All popular music is essentially the same and can only be differentiated by superficial embellishments that disguise the music's overall sameness. Such standard features as a repetitive drum beat serve to please the 'rhythmically obedient' and produces a conditioned response by being part of conventional music preselected ahead of reaching the listener. This “pre-digesting” demands nothing of the listener and thus popular music serves as little more than a novelty. As a result, Adorno says, there is a need to constantly release new popular music as audiences continue to tire of product already on the market.

Adorno has been heavily criticized for his blanket cynicism of music that he spent no time attempting to understand by subjecting his views to empirical scrutiny. Garofalo notes that a common basis of the dismissal, of Adorno's ilk, of popular music arises from the field of musicology being a study arising from the high art tradition. Middleton (1981, p.17), however, notes that “the formulaic processes operate within parameters relatively highly valued by traditional musicology: harmony, melodic shape, basic rhythmic pattern. Variant processes, on the other hand, often take place in parameters little valued by traditional musicology (and much harder to notate): slight pitch inflection or rhythmic variation, timbre and timbre changes, accent, and attack”.

The audience's relationship with popular music is, then, based on more than just a conditioned response to prepackaged product. Popular music does, potentially at least, have more than standardized wares to attract listeners. Instead, a more useful way to consider the public's response to Purple Rain is through Barthes's articulation of two types of pleasure: plaisir and jouissance. The former term describes pleasure deriving from a comfortable reading of a text, an approach that stays safe within cultural ideology and leaves unchallenged established notions of the self. Plaisir says Ott (2004, p.196) is “the pleasure of identifying with, and submitting to, a text’s socially accepted (dominant) meanings, and as such, it involves “conforming to the dominant ideology and the subjectivity it proposes.”” Secondly, jouissance is described as continuing where plaisir ends. This term, roughly (but inaccurately) translated as “bliss”, is a more intense form of pleasure than the passive condition of plaisir; it is instead an active moment of production. Articulated more alarmingly, jouissance involves not a reaffirmation but an obliteration of the self. The supremacy of the author is removed along with the belief that the text is a finished work and replaced by an “erotics of reading” (Ott, p.202), an anti-method attitude that allows one to engage in textual playfulness, making the text one's own.

When viewing Purple Rain as a text, both plaisir and jouissance offer explanations for the public's reaction to the mosaic. Those who engaged in plaisir were those who, for example, merely listened to and enjoyed the music, concerts, and movie without any consideration of why, for example, Purple Rain challenged gender, sexuality, or music conventions. Even those who attempted to dig deeper and interpret ambiguity in lyrics, fathom the meaning of the term “Purple Rain”, or understand who Prince is were also treating the Purple Rain text as finished and something with an intended, if mysterious, meaning by the author. The generic crowds, looking for nothing more than enjoyable music and a spectacle who flocked to the Purple Rain phenomenon did so under the influence of plaisir. Those masses identified with the contents of the Purple Rain text and found comfort in its self-affirming notions of individuality and freedom, notions that broke free of social conventions in a way liberating for many. However, Purple Rain also offered wide potential for jouissance, that playful reading of the text resulting in a loss of self. When, through its subversion of ideological norms, Purple Rain challenged people's identities, or when fans aspired to emulate Prince or other characters of the Purple Rain mosaic, thus losing themselves in such acts, jouissance arose.

Shifting terrain

Above all, Purple Rain's significance, why the album, film, tour, and side projects are still in the public consciousness over twenty years later, lies with how it maintained an equilibrium between key areas of conflicting forces. In its cultural innovations, Purple Rain exploited the shifting terrain of hegemony caused by the conflict between dominant ideology and capitalism to create resistance to the dominant ideology. It was both a commodity designed to serve capitalism and promote one man's career, and an artistic statement, without compromise to either. Furthermore, as a postmodern cultural product that fused sexuality, religion, gender, race, and music into a contradictory yet cohesive whole and interpellated so many demographics, Purple Rain's timing was perfect. As a balance between maintaining dominant ideologies and challenging others, Purple Rain was a contradictory work but still successful. But as Purple Rain challenged norms that later came to be accepted, so it also possessed qualities that made it one of the last of its kind, notably the creation of the character of Prince. Such a theatrical element became increasingly rare afterwards as most musicians found themselves more comfortably painted as one of the people, than an idol above them. And as a postmodern blow to the high/low art distinction, Purple Rain's experimental yet mainstream sound succinctly defied the notion that “the constraints of reaching the largest possible market places a premium on blandness, inoffensiveness, the lowest common denominator of public taste” (Lovell, 1983).

A rare confluence of many elements - art and commercialism, talent and drive, record company and artist, artist and music, ideology and capitalism, audience and music - Purple Rain remains significant but unrepeatable. It is testament to the complexity of why the Purple Rain mosaic succeeded that music critics, fans, and the man around whom “Prince” has been woven, all still yearn for a repeat performance without understanding that this is impossible. Prince himself has attempted on several occasions since 1984 to produce another Purple Rain, a commercial work, but has never successfully married that aim with observably 'authentic' music, instead producing something that appears to gain acceptance by emulating music trends of the day. Having produced one work so much more significant than any others in his catalog, Purple Rain's success has become a double-edged sword for the artist. While it has secured Prince's musical legacy, the public cannot abandon the association between Purple Rain and Prince. At every concert, the same songs are demanded; every album carries hopes of a return – quality-wise, stylistically, culturally, or commercially – to Purple Rain. And this is something about which Prince continues to change his mind. For a time, he will reject the Purple Rain burden and go 'underground', playing and producing according to other interests. But, tiring of a lack of recognition, he will return to the limelight as Mr Purple Rain, and relive the fame he sought, and won, back in 1984.

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Paddison, M. (1982). The critique criticised: Adorno and popular music. Popular Music, 2, 201-218.
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[Edited 6/10/07 15:47pm]

I don't even curse but, WTF?

wow... that really makes me think about a lot of things.

Not that I'd ever make the time for such an in-depth analysis of the movie (i didnt even know or really care to know about his 5-costume changes) i would have figured that out eventually... but its just details.

but yeah... the movie is awesome and so is the music. I don't need to know anything else.

Interesting paper. I'd never heard the Bob Seger story before. Will you let us know how the paper did?

One thing, though: I totally disagree that When Doves Cry is "decidedly Oedipal."

Great paper and analysis! thanks for sharing.

One nit: Wendy should be listed as his "guitarist" not "keyboardist!"

Efan said:

Interesting paper, and great job!

So, Prince took his cue from Bob Seger on how well anthemic rock songs could help a career? Cool. Bob Seger started writing those kinds of songs after being advised to by Don Henley of the Eagles. So, in a Kevin Bacon kind of way, you can trace "Purple Rain" to "Take It Easy".

BTW, here is a Bob Seger story that I (and probably no one else!) find interesting.

I had always noticed how the ending of "Night Moves" seemed to be similar to the ending of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland". Sure enough, I heard an interview by Seger about it and he confirmed that "Jungleland"'s ending was the inspiration for the end of "Night Moves".

gubbins4ever said:

and a Doctor in Typos?

.