This is a couple of months old, but I don't recall seeing it here before.
Welcome to Amazon Essentials, a weekly feature highlighting a classic album available for Amazon Prime members free in Prime Music. First up: Purple Rain, Prince’s blockbuster soundtrack to his semi-autobiographical movie. On June 25, 1984, the album released and changed the sound (and look) of pop music forever.
Former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spin magazines Alan Light—whose book Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain publishes this fall (pre-order)—revisits Purple Rain on its 30th birthday…
"I did it," Prince said to me backstage, in a grungy dressing room following a sweaty club show in Nashville 10 years ago. "Purple Rain was my baby. I knew about it before it happened, I knew what it was going to be.”
If Prince truly envisioned the phenomenon that Purple Rain would become, he was the only one. At the time, he was starting to emerge as a pop star. After several critically acclaimed albums had won the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist a cult following, the 1999 record was the breakthrough release that introduced him to a mass audience. But when he presented the idea of making a film that would showcase his mysterious persona and dazzling, genre-blurring songs, everyone—the studios, his record company, even his own managers—thought he was crazy: a couple of hit singles didn’t make the 24-year-old Prince anywhere near being big enough to be a movie star.
He held his ground, telling his managers that either they get the film lined up or he would find someone else who could. So the money got raised and the film got made, with a first-time director and a cast of musicians who had never acted before, shooting in a brutal Minneapolis winter. And when it was released in the summer of 1984, Purple Rain was an immediate, earth-shattering smash.
A fictionalized version of Prince’s own life story, it would make almost $70 million at the box office (10 times the cost of the production). The soundtrack album blasted to No. 1 on the charts, where it would remain for a full six months and eventually sell over 20 million copies worldwide. It spun off three huge hit singles (“When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and the title track), won Grammys and an Oscar, and permanently altered the rules and definitions for rock, funk, and pop music.
Since then, the project’s impact and influence have never waned. Entertainment Weekly listed Purple Rain as the second greatest album of all time (behind the Beatles’ Revolver), and a few years ago, Vanity Fair named it the best soundtrack ever released. Rolling Stone ranked it at No. 2 on lists of the best albums of the 1980s and best soundtracks of all time. “Purple Rain” has been covered by artists from Darius Rucker to Foo Fighters, from Phish to Tori Amos, while other tracks from the album have been recorded by everyone from Mariah Carey to Patti Smith. It’s impossible to imagine how the sounds and careers of such acts as Outkast, D’Angelo, Daft Punk, Beck, and Pharrell would have developed without Purple Rain.
Prince had a clear vision for how a visual and narrative presentation could refine and focus his peculiar image, and turn his poly-sexual and pan-racial identity into the appeal of a true rock star. Positioning himself not as a solitary, enigmatic studio genius but as the guitar-slinging front man of a Sly Stone-style, mixed-race and -gender band—and manipulating the details of his own story, including giving his on-screen character, known as The Kid, a white mother—his appeal became universal, undeniable. Though his sexuality remained aggressive enough that the song "Darling Nikki" famously led to Tipper Gore’s Capitol Hill attack on explicit song lyrics, he had actually toned things down from his earlier songs about oral sex and incest and an onstage costume of an overcoat and bikini briefs.
Whether Prince was forecasting trends or just tapping into the culture, the timing of Purple Rain was impeccable. MTV, which launched in 1981, was added to the New York and LA cable systems a year later. Immediately after that, Michael Jackson's Thriller album was released, forever expanding the possibilities for worldwide crossover success. As the impact of these supernovas continued to spread, the summer of 1984—at the center of the super-sized, big-hair-and-big-shoulder-pads Reagan ‘80s—was perhaps pop music’s grandest season ever. A span of just a few months saw the release of Purple Rain and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA; the Jacksons’ Victory tour; and Madonna’s "Like a Virgin," which she performed at the first MTV Video Music Awards, writhing on the ground in a wedding dress and instantly skyrocketing to superstardom.
It was also a revolutionary moment for black culture. In 1984, The Cosby Show premiered, Michael Jordan was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, and Oprah Winfrey made her debut as a morning show co-host, all while Jesse Jackson was mounting the first significant Presidential campaign by a black candidate. With Thriller leading the way, African-Americans were assuming unprecedented roles as American heroes and icons.
There was no sound more perfect for this historic moment than the expertly crafted rock/funk of Purple Rain, and there may never have been another album that was as embraced by all types of listeners—from hard rockers to teenyboppers, white and black, young and old, everyone was enthralled by Prince. And it may have been the last album ever that received such all-inclusive response. Propelled by the juggernauts of 1984, the music audience simply got too big for a true center to hold, especially as hip-hop ascended in the years that followed, splintering pop’s audience and making this kind of across-the-board hit all but impossible.
In some ways, though, the overwhelming success of Purple Rain became a burden for Prince; he has called it “my albatross—it’ll be hanging around my neck as long as I’m making music.” He is simply too individual and eccentric as a musician to do what it takes to please tens of millions of listeners; really, he’s something closer to the world’s biggest cult artist, with a dedicated base of followers ready to stay on any musical road he pursues (well, almost any…).
He cut off the Purple Rain tour after six months, never bringing the show overseas, and instantly veered off in another direction with the psychedelic-tinged Around the World in a Day album, which—despite "Raspberry Beret"—confused and stripped away the bulk of his new audience. Prince has shown that he’s still capable of writing a hit single when he wants to flex those muscles, but he traded multi-platinum sales for the freedom to create when and how he chooses. Yet the Purple Rain songs have remained the backbone of his live shows, from opening the 2004 Grammys with Beyonce to his unforgettable 2007 Super Bowl halftime performance. And 30 years later, as one of his later compositions put it, nothing compares 2 him.
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