Purple Rain (1984)

Like similar product from the times, which in retrospect do seem more predisposed to such phenomena— Prince BFF Michael Jackson's Thriller, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., maybe even albums by Tears for Fears and Tina Turner—Prince's really, really big commercial breakthrough stepped forth with a seemingly endless lineup of inescapable hits, hits, hits. Arguably, certainly in the mind of Prince I think, this was predicated on the movie Purple Rain (accounting for the official title of the album, which came out several weeks ahead of the movie, Music from the Motion Picture "Purple Rain"). Rumors of the time claimed Prince as so giddy as to be hysterical by the initial reception of the first single, "When Doves Cry," which immediately shot to #1 and stayed there for better than a month. Something about hanging out of the windows of his Eden Prairie mansion screaming imprecations to Michael Jackson. I trust that he fully savored the moment as the trend line of what followed tells some tale of the public's taste for this determinedly weird-ass shit, at least across such a compressed timeframe: "When Doves Cry" (#1, 5 wks., June 1984), "Let's Go Crazy" (#1, 2 wks., Aug. 1984), "Purple Rain" (#2, Oct. 1984), "I Would Die 4 U" (#8, Dec. 1984), "Take Me With U" (#25, March 1985). No flash in the pan, of course, Prince has gone on to be a genuine star, with big hits all the way through the '90s, and even today he's hardly relegated to anything like an oldies circuit, not nearly. Yet the glare of this supernova was so overwhelming in its times that I was dubious, not to say positively fearful, about paying it a revisit, thinking I had probably used it all up long since. And, indeed, I found that I had less use than ever for "Darling Nikki" or "Computer Blue" (though I understand there's a longer version worth tracking down); that "Let's Go Crazy" seemed merely pro forma; that "When Doves Cry" and "I Would Die 4 U" have just grown tired. But, mirabile dictu, when is the last time I listened to "The Beautiful Ones"? He takes it from zero to supersonic in 5:14, a wandering fitful exercise that coalesces into shrieking beauty like a rocket leaving the planet. Or "Take Me With U," better than I remembered. Or "Baby I'm a Star," a straightforward rave-up so happy it pushes over into joyful. Even the title song, all eight-minutes-plus of it—the hippie nod on this album, I take it, in the form of extended guitar-noodling jam—has a kind of undeniable stateliness I was never patient enough before to get from it. That's me here in my bedroom, standing on my bed with my arms in the air, waving them back and forth slowly.

A nice perspective on Prince can be found in this great overview at the Not Just Movies blog.