‘Prince was able to capture the whole world’s imagination’
The late pop star Prince and his era-defining project Purple Rain are the twin subjects of author Alan Light’s new book Let’s Go Crazy. He speaks to Anirudh Vohra about being a Prince fan.
close to a genius.
Q. What made you write this book? A.
There may be a handful of records that I love more than Purple Rain, but I don’t think there’s any album that came out during my lifetime that I responded to as strongly in real time, as it was happen- ing. I remember every moment of its release — from staying up to hear the first time “When Doves Cry” was being played on the radio to buying the album the day it came out or going to the movie theater the weekend that the film opened. It also happens that it came out during the summer between my high school graduation and my start at college, so it’s particularly vivid in my memory — seeing the movie over and over with my old friends, and then going back again and again with my new friends and really creating relationships that started with the movie. And then sleeping on the sidewalk in the snow with my best friend at the time to buy tickets for the tour. It was such a massive phenomenon, the one time that Prince was able to make unprecedented, daring music that also captured the whole world’s imagination — the rest of his career, he swung back and forth between being a stadium-filling pop star and being the world’s biggest cult artist, with a dedicated fan base that would follow him through his experiments, but for that project, he was able to do it all.
Q. Do you think Prince’s music managed to inspire and change an entire generation? A.
What I hope will stand as his greatest legacy is his absolute commitment to creative freedom, to the sense that being a true artist means constantly taking risks, never feeling like your direction should be determined by what anyone expects from you. This is someone who turned down his first offers of a record contract as a teenager because he insisted on having complete creative control. Think about his audacity in getting Purple Rain made — he was a kid with a couple of hits and no real mainstream “celebrity” presence, with no business making a feature film. But he told his managers to get him a movie deal or else he would fire them and find someone who could. He had a totally clear vision of what could translate his music to a huge audience, even as everyone around him had no idea what he was talking about. So I think that fearlessness, along with his absolute musical mastery, really did take him to heights that no one else could reach.
“There may be a handful of records that I love more than ‘ Purple Rain’, but I don’t think there’s any album that came out during my lifetime that I responded to as strongly in real time, as it was happening.”
Q. Do you today’s musicians have the same influence on people as they did back in the day? A.
I think that the moment of 1984 when “Purple Rain” came out, along with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” really represents the moment when pop music got so big that its center couldn’t hold, and after that, it didn’t have the same kind of cultural impact. It was everyone’s first project after MTV took over and after “Thriller” showed that there was a different kind of scale you could aim for. Also, hip-hop was just starting to break through and polarise a big part of the audience. So different slices of pop were now bigger than the whole pie used to be. Certainly, musicians have opportunities now unlike anything they would have had before that — endorsements and clothing deals and digital platforms and business holdings that never were possible until those guys showed that a market could support multiple albums selling tens of millions of copies. But I think very few artists have the same kind of universal impact that acts like Prince and Michael Jackson were able to have at their peak.