Tag: Purple Rain

Purple Rain (1984)
Try and count how many songs are called “I Would Die for You” and you’ll get lost deep in the double digits. Pop music can’t get enough of the phrase. The Weeknd and Ariana Grande topped the charts with it, Taylor Swift sings it in no less than three of her songs and when Bryan Adams used it to end a power ballad it became one of the best-selling singles of all time. That may be because the sentiment is catnip to teenagers. Think of the Pixar film Inside Out where Riley’s imaginary boyfriend does nothing but endlessly repeat, with a dramatic hand grab, that he would die for Riley. A schoolgirl’s idea of love painted with nothing more than that phrase and a Harry Styles haircut. From pre-teen crushes to the annihilating onslaught of first love, anything less than a declaration of the ultimate sacrifice seems deeply unserious. At that age you wonder how a force so powerful could not come with a bodycount?

In Purple Rain, this phrase is spoken with worldly gravitas by the actor Clarence Williams III, foreshadowing his character’s attempted suicide in the final act. A Pixar character he’s not. Yet despite the earnest delivery of these words, the song they inspire The Kid to write is curiously free of any of the melodrama you would expect from the young protagonist. It’s uplifting and persistently joyous with none of the histrionics or dramatic crescendos that characterise the Purple Rain album. There’s no build up at all. It starts, shimmers with electric brilliance for three minutes and then makes an Irish exit as Baby I’m a Star enters the scene. 

Having been penned a couple of years earlier it makes sense that the song follows the locked groove playbook of the previous album. However, overshadowed by its more extravagant album mates, I Would Die 4 U can be a slow burn. It flew under my radar for a long time and it took hearing the chorus in an unfamiliar setting to finally make me notice this strange wallflower. Im sure those who remember the single shining in the chart sun had a different onboarding, but my Prince journey started shortly before the turn of the millennium, and the first time I heard I Would Die 4 U on the radio was when somebody calling themselves The Space Cowboy released a dance remix. Hearing the song divorced from the album, divorced from Prince, made me realise the pure pop power of that vocal hook. No shiny Baby I’m a Star to distract me afterwards – something easy to tune out took its place and for the first time I was able to reflect on its majesty. I then listened to the original and felt I heard it for the first time. 

The song, previously nothing more than a launchpad into the film and album’s climactic dance number, was now a state of mind I desired to stay in forever. A tantric recharging of body and spirit. I live by the sea and sometimes I get the same feeling when I sit on the shoreline and stare out into the blue immensity while my physical body is pummelled by cold foreign winds. My chakras plug into the mains and the love that powers the universe courses through my arteries. I’m just a secular Godless sinner but when this track plays I’m intertwined with the Divine.

Which brings me to the lyrics. They are the most religious Prince had written to date and lean heavily into imagery of the Holy Trinity, with verses moving from the perspective of God (“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man”), through Jesus (“I’m your messiah”) and ending on the Holy Spirit (“I am a dove, I’m your conscious, I am love”). The title, no longer a solemn statement of pain-filled commitment, becomes a joyous celebration of his faith. Even if you read it as a straight-up love song, the religious imagery help imbue energising radiance into a message that often lands as either trite cliche (most of pop), leaden-hearted anguish (Clarence Williams III’s delivery) or both (hello Bryan Adams).

Watched in the context of the film, played over the final act montage, you can pick up several other inferences. Like all good lyrics, they work on multiple levels. But, after hearing the director reveal he added the line to the script after Prince told him his father once said the same words to him, the lasting image it leaves on me is an artist taking a cherished memory of rarely-expressed parental devotion, and returning it gift-wrapped in a love language to touch the heart of his devout bible-quoting father. 

Purple Rain (1984)
Purple Rain was the first Prince album I bought. Chosen partly because I knew and loved the singles, but the real clincher was seeing the title of track five. I’d recently started dating a girl named Nikki and I naively earmarked this song as mixtape material. Remember mixtapes? Those personally cultivated repositories of subtle messages and meaning. Well, that plan was abandoned two lines in, but it no longer mattered because by that point in the album I had already been converted. My future was purple.

Darling Nikki is a sexual fantasy that goes heavy on the fantasy. Prince has a wild night of passion with a castle-dwelling fiend who extracts his signature in a Faustian pact for his soul then disappears, leaving him forever transformed. It’s the dark heart of the album and his character’s lowest ebb in the film, where his performance appalls all onlookers, including his girlfriend who flees humiliated, and the nightclub owner who tells him “no one digs your music but yourself”. Everyone seems oblivious that they’ve just heard rock’s equivalent of a Caravaggio. 

Prince created this song to inject danger into the Purple Rain album which at that point he felt was veering too mainstream. And the danger goes deeper than the opening lines which torpedoed my mixtape plans and Tipper Gore-ed a moral panic within the pearl-clutching heart of America. The danger is present in every beat, in every scream, in every grind. The melody – a gothic reimagining of Vanity 6’s 3×2=6  – sounds like a tentative descending of a spiral staircase into the dark dungeon depths of Prince’s unbitted lusts. And the final throat-shredding screams of “your dirty little Prince wants to grind, grind, grind…” makes every Heavy Metal frontman that has ever lived sound like a tired toddler in comparison.

Of course, after this swan dive into the profane, Prince felt the need to purify the air with a taste of the divine. I’m reminded of Plato’s allegory of the soul being a chariot powered by two winged horses pulling in opposite directions. After letting his primal horse of base desire plunge towards the earth, the driver had to let the noble horse of spiritual aspiration take over and soar towards the heavens lest they crash. Darling Nikki plunged deep and fast. A Christian message hidden in the purifying sounds of Lake Minnetonka wasn’t enough to right this chariot, not least as the message was placed, in part, as a prank to fool those expecting to uncover evidence of satanic corruption. Another hidden element was needed to restore harmony. On the record’s inner sleeve there are printed lyrics at the end of Darling Nikki, not of the backwards prayer, but of an extra verse that is never sung. This verse contains the key to the entire symbology of the album, born out of a spiritual experience he had prior to its recording, and if you’ve not yet spotted it I won’t spoil the surprise by revealing it here.

Prince wasn’t Darling Nikki’s only victim. With the help of the PRMC labelling her public enemy number one, she reached folklore status and lured generations of curious teens into her castle. She beguiled a multitude of rock bands to cover her and showed Michael Jackson how to grind by inspiring him to write Dirty Diana. As for me, she nudged me down this purple rabbit hole and for that I’m forever grateful. Consider this a note from me saying thank you for a funky time… 

This is no one night stand though. My relationship with the real life Nikki didn’t last the summer. Darling Nikki, however, is for keeps. 

Purple Rain (1984)
I needed a run up for this one. A couple of days basking in the various performances: the First Avenue debut; Rave Un2 the Year 2000; the Super Bowl half-time show. The song looms so large over Prince’s legacy that attempting to wrap my head around it is like trying to picture the vastness of space. Human minds aren’t equipped for the task. I’m as overwhelmed as Stevie Nicks when she received the instrumental from Prince to add lyrics. In her words: “I can’t do it… It’s too much for me.” Yet, I’ll try.

It’s strange to think Purple Rain – the Revolution’s signature anthem – could have been a country duet with the singer from Fleetwood Mac. Praise be that its destiny, like in the movie, was to become a band collaboration instead. The writing process didn’t quite go like it did on screen, with Wendy giving Prince a tape titled Slow Groove, but she was instrumental in shaping the sound. Late in rehearsal one night, Prince suggested working on something new. He introduced the band to the basic idea of Purple Rain and, as Fink recalls, told them to “play what you feel”. Wendy, a new addition to the line-up and eager to impress, toyed with Prince’s chord progression and turned it into the anthemic opening section that speaks in goosebumps. The rest of the band also worked their voodoo and later that summer they performed it live for the first time which, with a little trimming and polish, is the recording found on the album. The one the rest of the world hears when they think of Prince. His lighters-in-the-air epitaph.

You can divide Prince’s career into before and after the Purple Rain moment. In the movie, this occurs when he performs the climactic title song. The Prince that coughs nervously before launching into it, is different to the Prince that ends it. Never again will he face a sea of blank-eyed faces. Megastardom has arrived. I believe that’s close to what happened in real life too. Once people heard Purple Rain, either as the album closer or the cinematic denouement, their relationship to Prince changed, which changed him too. Its crescendo, along with the iconic intro to Let’s Go Crazy are the defining moments of both the album and movie. Better songs are found therein but none are as irreplaceable. When Doves Cry was the big lead single, but who’s to say one of the B-sides (17 Days, She’s Always in my Hair, Erotic City) wouldn’t have had the same success. The Beautiful Ones is a personal favourite but if the inferior Electric Intercourse had remained instead, the album would still have hit multi-platinum. Swap one of the other songs for any of the hidden classics from that period – The Glamorous Life, Wonderful Ass, We Can Fuck, G-Spot – and the album would still have catapulted him into the stratosphere. But take away the album’s intro where he describes the afterlife, or the closing crescendo where he guides us there, and it’s no longer Purple Rain. There are spiritual references throughout the album, but those two definitive moments – the spinechilling bookends – wrap it up in an embrace that must come from a profound and deeply personal place. It’s no accident they are the two songs he left blank when writing his own (unpublished) liner notes for the Hits compilation – reducing them to a pithy one liner must have seemed trite. Prince is on record saying he had a spiritual experience during the Purple Rain period. One he hasn’t talked candidly about, but it feels like he’s communicating a revelation to us here. That is the true message of Purple Rain.

Too much has been written about how Prince created it in a bid for maximum crossover success – a Stairway to Heaven for the white rock audience that had started to pay attention after Little Red Corvette. It pays tribute to rock’s power ballads, sure – he was worried it sounded too similar to one of Journey’s hits and sought their approval before release – but focusing on its whiteness is to lose sight of its blackness. Purple Rain is heavily influenced by gospel music. The electric grand piano and wordless hosannas provide the song with a spiritual intensity, drawing from Afro-American gospel roots, like Stairway to Heaven drew from Celtic folk. He’s back at the start of the album but now he’s no longer addressing the congregation. He’s addressing the one he loves. An ex-lover? His father (to whom the song gets dedicated in the film)? Is he even singing as a messiah? The lyrics are open to interpretation but on the record sleeve, an extra printed verse to Darling Nikki casts some light on the title. It reads “Sometimes the world’s a storm. One day soon the storm will pass and all will be bright and peaceful. Fearlessly bathe in the purple rain”. In 1999 he linked a purple sky with Judgement Day. The purple rain is God’s cleansing fire during the apocalypse, before the “bright and peaceful” dawn arrives. Prince opens up the heavens and recreates the moment of ascent for us poor souls trapped in our decaying meat bodies.

It was only fitting that it was the last song he performed live in concert, before ascending himself a week later. The preceding song at that show was his mournful elegy Sometimes it Snows in April. He could have left us in sorrow, but instead chose to leave us laughing in the purple rain.

Purple Rain (1984)
We finally get to Purple Rain – the only album residing wholly in this list’s top 100. Take Me With U was the album’s final single and the film’s romantic duet between the lead and love interest during the most memorable scene in the film, but its upbringing could have been very different. Initially, it was the opening track on Apollonia 6 before Prince stripped the album of potential hits (Manic Monday and G-Spot were also removed). With unabashed pop swagger and a suggestive wink, it would have fitted in well, easily becoming the stand out track. But who would have heard it? Getting the call up to return us to earth after Let’s Go Crazy’s stratospheric “take me away” scream and to lighten the mood before the ultimatums start in The Beautiful Ones is one hell of a promotion. Luckily Take Me With U has an ace up her sleeve: two drum fills that hit you like the pounding of your heart. These bookend the track, cocooning the soft and fluffy pop in a hard, protective layer that no cynicism can penetrate. We’re safe inside. This is our happy place. And when the concert lights get turned on full beam for this song’s duration we can all gaze into one anothers’ eyes and know that for two minutes and 57 seconds, the world is perfect.