Let’s Go Crazy: Why Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is a Masterpiece
In 2014, in advance of 30th anniversary of Purple Rain, Warner Brothers announced a “new partnership” with Prince — one that promised remastered and unreleased music from his vaults in exchange for returning ownership of the master recordings to all of his albums to him. Broadly, the announcement felt like a harmonious and happy end to the very public battle he fought with the label in the 1990s. At the time, you either thought that he was rightfully standing up for the rights of musicians, or merely indulging in the increasingly odd behavior that culminated in him painting “SLAVE” on his face and changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol. But for fans, it meant something different. Soon, we might be able to toss out our bootlegs in exchange for official, high-quality version versions of “Father’s Song” and dozens – if not hundreds – of other Eighties songs that were never officially released.
The Purple Rain sessions alone are legendary: Although director Albert Magnoli later clarified that many of them were basically demos, Prince reportedly delivered some 100 songs for potential use in his breakthrough film. But “Father’s Song” actually made it into the movie, during a quiet, melancholy conversation between “The Kid” and his father, and for a very long time it felt like a skeleton key that might unlock the truth between Prince Rogers Nelson, the man, and the iconic performer. Now, his death has papered over the lock, leaving generations of listeners with only the film itself as a biography, an explanation, an encapsulation of his singular identity.
Some 32 years later, Purple Rain feels easy to compartmentalize, and — if you choose not to look closely — to dismiss: separate out the soundtrack, ignore the uneven performances, laugh at or be outraged by its misogyny. But it’s all of those elements together that make it the enduring testament to Prince’s artistry (and imagery) that people still watch today; when Magnoli wasn’t effectively codifying the MTV aesthetic with his Bob Fosse-meets-Bergman approach to capturing the crowds at Minneapolis’ First Avenue nightclub, he was shepherding one of the most important artists of the 1980s through a tortured, occasionally unflattering portrait of art intersecting with life. For every shot of Morris Day tossing a female conquest into a dumpster, there’s a half dozen understated, revelatory lines of dialogue explaining why The Kid struggles to reconcile his rock-star aspirations with the troubling limitations of reality.