Purple Rain sounds like futuristic jazz music; a unique, somewhat chaotic, almost sci-fi blend of pop, rock, funk, R’n’B, and disco, shot through with sex, incessant partying, and rockstar messianism. It’s a cocaine record; bombastic, ridiculous, affluent, funny, arty, an album for the wasted bourgeoisie of some shimmering, declining space-age society. Prince’s lovers take him back to their mansions; he’s surrounded by beautiful women; bathed in the icy blue of computer monitors; and the rain that falls from the sky is apocalyptically purple. Maybe my palette is not yet broad enough, but it sounds unlike anything else I’ve listened to so far, and I can’t imagine how he went about composing or recording it. In its stylistic eclecticism, density, and sheer lack of conventional structure, it almost sounds like it came from a dream – the dream of a stimulant-addled cyborg rockstar from the year 2083.
Or perhaps from 1983, because the West was in celebratory mood at this time. The tide appeared to be turning in the Cold War, though the threat of nuclear annihilation still hung over the globe even as the “evil empire” teetered. Thatcher and Reagan had crushed the unions and deregulated the markets, unleashing a torrent of new wealth to upwardly mobile thrusting yuppies powered by vast quantities of Columbian marching powder. Prince undoubtedly tapped into this zeitgeist of slightly desperate, grandiose abandon and societal flux. Purple Rain begins with a mock funeral eulogy about visiting a quack doctor in Beverley Hills, a possible reference to cocaine, which was presumably imbibed in liberal quantities prior to the recording of “Let’s Go Crazy”, the album’s opener and a manic, synth-infused glam rock party song for the apocalypse. It reminds me of Eva Braun arranging alcohol-soaked all-night dancing sessions as the Red Army laid siege to Berlin, its lyrics explicitly linking wanton hedonism with an awareness of the inevitability of death.
Purple Rain’s stimulant-fuelled, aspirational, money-drenched 80s mania reaches its zenith on two of the album’s later songs, “Baby I’m a Star” and “I Would Die for U.” The former is an aggressive ode to the desire for success and fame, articulated by an indestructible and invincible ego that knows it’s destined for the top. The album’s grandiosity reaches messianic proportions on the racy synth-funk of “I Would Die for U”, which offers an explicit comparison between its author and Jesus Christ himself, and links Prince’s refusal to be pigeonholed, musically or in terms of his racial or gender identity, with an incipient god complex.
The speedy self-aggrandisement of these songs could be taken as evidence for what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein referred to as the “paranoid-schizoid position”, a childlike tendency toward idealisation and denigration, and an inability to integrate good and bad, black and white, into a single object. Further indications of the pre-eminence of this structure can be heard on Purple Rain’s love songs, two of which are almost childlike in their treatment of women as all-powerful objects of worship and devotion. The throbbing, driving pop beat and lush strings of “Take Me With U” find Prince out on the town, looking for an unnamed lover to step in and take complete control of his evening. On “The Beautiful Ones,” he positively begs the object of his affections to spend the night with him, and he also pops the question in a manner reminiscent of an uncertain six-year-old boy who possesses no real understanding of the significance of marriage. The vocals here are achingly sensual, the music a kind of slow, sultry channelling of the Beach Boys – until, that is, the song’s conclusion, which explodes with a dramatic glammy guitar riff and a sudden barrage of pained shrieking that sounds like KISS and unexpectedly lays bare the ravages of Prince’s unresolved Oedipal dilemma.
But whereas these songs conjure a fairytale-like conception of romantic love, others reveal a groundswell of sexual perversity and promiscuity. “Take Me With U” and “The Beautiful Ones” stare starry eyed at a shining Madonna; the shrill, suggestive, creepy synths of “Darling Nikki” glare lustfully at the whore, a dominatrix groupie masturbating in a hotel lobby who takes Prince back to her sex dungeon and, after a night of “grinding”, simply abandons him at the break of dawn. Both darling Nikki and the goddess of “The Beautiful Ones” are, of course, objects of a schizoid male fantasy, unrealisable and unintegrable ideals of sexless love and profane desire. But the psycho-sexual problems that the pre-eminence of this structure can give rise to are alluded to on “Computer Blue”, a demented industrial-funk song reminiscent of David Bowie at his most obscenely exuberant. It’s surely about the experience of being impotent, and perhaps of resigning oneself to self-pleasuring in front of a computer monitor.
This points to the fact that, at isolated but key moments on Purple Rain, the album’s schizoid grandiosity starts to break down and the reality principal begins to assert itself. This occurs most notably on “When Doves Cry,” a song of pounding drums and spidery synths evocative of sinister 80s alternative music such as Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails. Its lyrics are a devastating meditation on a toxic relationship and how we inevitably repeat the patterns imparted to us by our parents. Notably, however, the song is not accusatory or denunciatory, but almost resigned, despairing at the inescapability of mum and dad filling us with the faults they had and adding some extra, just for us. Arguably, this sorrowful self-analysis and recognition of psychological reality represent a level of maturity more advanced than the mania of “I Would Die for U” or the puerile idealisations of “The Beautiful Ones.”
Indeed, the album’s closing song, “Purple Rain,” perhaps marks a point of acceptance and grief, a move toward the sense of guilt and responsibility typical of the depressive position, the psychological state which, according to Klein, follows schizoid-paranoia. It’s no coincidence that, in interviews, Prince subsequently likened purple rain with “the end of the world”, with the apocalyptic rainfall of a nuclear winter, because indeed, for the infant male, the separation from the mother and integration into the symbolic order do represent the end of the world – the world of infancy. The melancholy triumph of this psychological achievement is conveyed by “Purple Rain’s” graceful air of simultaneous sadness and optimism. None of which changes the fact that the song is also ridiculously overblown, an 80s power ballad of big-haired preposterousness which culminates in a five-minute guitar solo.
Purple Rain is often likened to and compared with Thriller as the quintessence of the garish, futuristic, bombastic pop vibe of the 1980s. In my opinion, no single song on this album approaches the catchy brilliance of “Beat It” or “Billie Jean”, but equally, nothing comes close to the fire-licked chasm of naffness opened up by “The Girl is Mine” or “Lady in my Life.” Thriller is a hit-and-miss collection of (admittedly singular) singles, whereas Purple Rain is a complete and cohesive-sounding album, which is an achievement in itself, considering that it’s a bizarre and unintuitive mashing of pop, glam rock, R’n’B, jazz and disco. I would venture to say that nothing else in the history of popular music before or since sounds like it.
9/10
Highlights: “The Beautiful Ones”, “When Doves Cry”, “Purple Rain”