EL-P

Purple Rain

PRINCE

Purple Rain contains the DNA of everything I needed to understand about music. It doesn’t contain rap, but it’s still an amalgamation of everything that set me off. I was nine years old. I saw the trailer for the movie (I wasn’t allowed to see the movie, but I was allowed to buy the album). It was Hendrix guitar over LinnDrum machines — it was soul, rock, and funk, but also it was other shit that hadn’t been combined before. There are ideas in the music that are not re-creatable but lend themselves to some direction. The crescendo of “Beautiful Ones” — “Do you want

165 166 him or do you want me? Because I want you” — I remember as a kid, just chills going down my spine. Feeling what he was saying and understanding the power of what he was doing, without [my] understanding how he got there. Because I didn’t have any personal experiences that would ever lead me to that moment. But it’s so powerful. I was just like, “Goddamn, not only is this unbelievable music, but that’s kind of my prototype of what I think a man is supposed to be.”