Best Work: Purple Rain (the album)

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Watching Purple Rain as a questioning teen was a really unique experience. Nowadays, I'd definitely call what I experienced "attraction," but at the time, seeing as I grew up with nothing but a conservative Christian background, the feelings that Prince made me feel were very foreign and confusing. And I had decades of preparation to handle Prince's music; I wonder how it felt like to live in the moment itself, during the phenomenon that is Purple Rain?

I feel the same way about his music as I did about Prince himself. As an artist, Prince was weird. His love songs weren't romantic; I mean, they were seductive, but there's no thin veneer of romance about it, only this animalistic wail of desire. The closest he gets to romance was "I Would Die 4 U," a song where Prince uses the pop songwriting trick of writing in contradictions and opposites to create atmosphere, which supplies the romance that the vague lyrics wouldn't be able to support otherwise.

And all of his other songs are about sex. Like, not like babies or making love or whatever euphemisms pop music puts sex through. It's about fucking, plain and simple. They're energetic, funky, deliriously enjoying sex in the most Rolling Stones way that it can. It's dangerous fucking music, unfiltered and uncontrolled; Nancy Reagan was right to be frightened at this man because he will yield his desires to no one. Hell, I still remember "When Doves Cry" and how that music video made me feel uncomfortable at first, this tiny man seductively going out of a bathtub and crawling off a chessboard floor. That shouldn't have been shown on MTV, but it was, and probably a lot of our current crop of queer folks might've had their awakening with Prince

Even the songs with more religious implications, like "Let's Go Crazy" or the aforementioned "I Would Die 4 U," aren't pious. I mean, purple bananas? "Make you good when you are bad"? Yeah, we get it, Prince. You'd think someone as religious as Prince would hide his sexual nature better, but nah, he's in your face with it. You like his music, right? The implicit deal is that you get comfortable with his displays of blatant sexuality because it comes hand-in-hand as to why his music is so good. Very rock and roll move for someone so funky.

Prince's music sounds electric, and I don't mean like it's not acoustic (the lore is that the majority of Purple Rain was recorded live, which explains why the record sounds tightly-produced and raw at the same time). I mean it sounds alive, a record of pure raw energy akin to Prince's predecessors like Elvis Presley, or Chuck Berry, or Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Those people with the guitar riffs and the playful animal charisma that made all the ladies swoon, Prince wears their seeming influence at the sleeve.

But he also was influenced by other genres of music (you hear a lot of soul in the way Prince composes his guitar solos, and obviously no one was funkier than Prince), and it especially shows in his album's centerpiece, the magnificent "Purple Rain," a soulful ballad that was originally written as a country song before being made into this spacious, elaborate, orchestral beauty that just keeps on giving the longer it goes on. In the film, this moment is where Prince's character, the Kid, turns everyone around, and the performance is just awe-striking enough that it's easy to understand why all of the Kid's enemies started clapping and supporting him the minute he played the song. It just feels heartfelt, a song of sadness and quiet regret that gives Prince room to emote and show that he can sell a song with just his voice. Truly a magnificent song.

The album as a whole is just oddly cohesive, probably the first and last time Prince would ever sound so focused. He wanted to make his masterpiece, his mark, the legacy that people will remember him by, and goddamn it, he did it better than anyone ever could. Prince would get more ambitious, more creative, more scattershot, and more inaccessible as he struggled with labels, record executives, and an increasingly-hard-to-please public, but there's no moment that captured him at his most effortlessly-best than at this album, one of the greatest nine tracks of music ever printed on vinyl.