PURPLE RAIN.
Prince: Purple Rain
Say what you will about The Purple One. The man is a jacked-up freaky crazypants sho nuff. However, as maddening as his antics and latter-day output may have become, there was a time when he was one of the great songwriters in the industry.
Now, I love Purple Rain. Not just this album, but the movie as well, that thing is a work of genius, and Prince comes off in it as a complete and utter jackass, which I respect, while Morris Day as the villain ends up being the most entertaining character. The scene where he’s confronted by an ex-girlfriend on the street and is frozen in deer-in-the-headlights shock as she starts yelling at him, then instructs Jerome to toss her in the nearest dumpster – one of the great surreal moments in eighties cinema. Made me fall out of my chair laughing. A lot has been said about Prince’s ego and it’s all true, but this is a movie about Prince and the Revolution, and he admits that he dominates his band but that they do have contributions to make that he can be too self-involved to accept at times.
However, what truly elevates the movie is the music. There’s quite a range of performances in Purple Rain, showcasing the man’s many talents (he wrote the Morris Day & The Time songs too, which are fabulous in a whole different way). The high-energy open is the admittedly insane “Let’s Go Crazy” with first a goofy sermon – ‘I’m here to tell you… there’s something else – the afterworld’ and then the drums and guitar kick in and Prince starts going off about sex and ‘let’s look for the purple banana til they put us in the truck.’ Sure, fuck yeah! From there, it just climbs up and up. “Take Me With U” and “I Would Die 4 U” are a couple of the finest love songs he ever wrote, and there are true oddities like “Computer Blue” which really shows off the man’s serious guitar chops and “Darling Nikki” which is the nastiest song on here (‘you could say she was a sex fiend, I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine’) and there is a point where Prince just goes way loco screaming ‘YOU DIRTY LITTLE BITCH!’
As great as all those are, the real star here is “When Doves Cry” which is just unreachably massive. What a song. It provides the film’s dramatic finale, tells the story (largely based on Prince’s own life), and God, it just has such heft to it. Paired beautifully with “I Would Die 4 U” it’s the emotional center of the album and perhaps Prince’s career. The album really never lets up (or lets down), as every single track here could by rights have been a hit single. This is a statement, by God, a grand statement.
Perfect => *****
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