PRINCE & ThE REvOLUTION Purple Rain
9/10 The first posthumous release: “We are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…” By Stephen Deusner
It’s an electric word, life, and it makes for an electric opening to Prince’s sixth album: His Royal Badness as preacher and pop star, gathering his flock around him for a sermon about the hardships of life and the lure of the afterworld beyond. “Let’s look for the purple banana ’til they put us in the truck!” the excitement of that invitation – or is it an invocation? – has not diminished in the 33 years since Prince Rogers Nelson released his magnum opus, and Purple
Rain overflows with rousing hooks and musical ideas that remain thrilling even in their familiarity, from the unabashed arena rock of “Let’s Go Crazy” to the breezy chamber pop of “take Me With U” to the gothic sexpunk of “Darling Nikki”.
Purple Rain was Prince’s most pivotal album, establishing him as the most visionary pop auteur of the 1980s. It remains the most personally revealing record Prince ever made, sharing a semi-autobiographical approach with the film of the same title and sounding gloriously cocksure even as it lays bare its creator’s insecurities about – in no particular order – love, God, sex, family, sanity and celebrity. these songs depict Prince dealing with the immense celebrity that 1999 afforded him, embracing the pleasure of the spotlight while steeling himself against the daunting expectations.
“Baby I’m a star!” he declares. “Take a picture, sweetie!/I ain’t got time
to waste.” While these tunes didn’t really need to be remastered for this deluxe reissue, the new versions highlight the intricate details of Prince’s production as well as the cleverness of his backing band the Revolution’s arrangements. Purple Rain sounds incrementally more alive.
the matter of the bonus tracks is the real question with this reissue. For decades Prince’s vaults have been rock’n’roll’s very own El Dorado, a mythical place filled with untold treasures. During his life he added to it every day, but guarded the contents closely, which might have frustrated fans but turned out to be a sound strategy: even as he revived and reinvented old songs onstage, Prince never became a nostalgia act squeezing cash out of old hits and raiding the archives for quickie reissues. Instead, he was writing new chapters to his story right up until the day he died.
It’s a bitter irony that it took his death in April 2016 for that vault to be opened. the first stray treasures are included on this deluxe reissue of Purple Rain, which is, for myriad reasons, the first Prince album to get any kind of reissue treatment. In addition to a live DVD and a disc of previously released single edits and B-sides (most of which are fairly redundant and contain awkward fades), the set includes 11 new old songs from the vault, most of which have never been heard. that alone makes it as momentous as the album’s original release, exposing new aspects of an impossibly complex artist.
Rare for any kind of reissue, these new old songs actually coalesce into something like an album, teasing out new sonic motifs and some of Prince’s favourite lyrical themes. “the Dance Electric” and “Love And sex” are monster jams showcasing the dynamism of the Revolution, Prince’s legendary backing band. “Electric Intercourse” and a 12-minute version of “Computer Blue” prove extremely prescient, envisioning in 1984 a future where digital bodies replace physical ones, although the brilliantly titled “Velvet Kitty Cat” and the bluntly titled “We Can Fuck” imply that sex can always be experienced musically.
that second disc also works as an artefact of a period of intense creativity and seemingly boundless energy, blurring the lines between the synth seductions of 1999, the world-conquering sound of Purple Rain and the paisley pop of his derided follow-up, Around the World
In A Day. We may think of these albums as individual works, each with its own identity and sensibility, but this long-awaited reissue portrays Prince as an artist who made no such distinctions in the studio, who got through this thing called life by indulging every sound that came into his head.