Prince shed his pop skin on Around the World in a Day

The success of Purple Rain—movie, album and phenomenon—jettisoned Prince from minimal success on Black radio in the 1980s to heavy rotation on a predominantly white MTV. This was a major feat for an obscure R&B artist who once opened for The Rolling Stones earlier in that decade and was booed off the stage. 

Except for Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop (talk about branding), a target that Prince used to stay artistically motivated but very distant from musically and image-wise, pop music had no idea how to promote Black artists. (It even took a second to get Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson to their highest elevation.) Hence, Prince chose to be marketed by the “rock” music division at Warner Bros. He did not want to be the next Stevie Wonder, albeit one of his musical heroes. Forming a multi-gender and racial band, a nod to his other musical hero Sly Stone, he chose a mysterious, sometimes androgynous on-stage and screen persona—and it worked.

Around the World in a Day, the seventh studio album by Prince and the third release on which his backing band, The Revolution, is featured in the title, dropped on April 22, 1985, and turned 40 this year; it was the first of many curveballs Prince Rogers Nelson would throw when distancing himself from Purple Rain, his watershed breakthrough album that sold 25 million copies worldwide (MJ’s Thriller sold 70 million worldwide). It was Prince, not the populace, who would move further and further away creatively from that phase, almost immediately shedding that Grammy and Academy Award-winning, pop chart-conquering skin to push boundaries further in other directions he found interesting. Similar to David Bowie, once he climbed the pop music sierra, he found the view mid. Unbeknownst to him, Prince would never reach such a level of record-selling delirium until his death on April 21, 2016.

At 5-foot-2, with a wicked hoop game, even in heels, according to Charlie Murphy, Prince didn’t just have a short man complex; he had that Jordan competition gene. If he asked you to jam—an action he did at every opportunity with various musicians from every corner of the music spectrum—he was fleecing people’s pockets, politely engaging them for new ideas. 

Dave Grohl said upon their meeting and jamming in the 2000s that Prince heard Grohl’s heavy foot on the drums, and subsequently, they arrived at “Whole Lotta Love,” and eventually, that track worked its way into Prince’s repertoire later in his career. Those ears were always working.

The time lapse between Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling record of all time, and the follow-up Bad is approximately five years. The time lapse between the release of Prince’s “Purple Rain” album and film in June 1984 and his subsequent follow-up album in April 1985 was minuscule in pop music metrics. Around the World in a Day, an album that looked, sounded, presented, and behaved in the absence of what had previously come before it, was released just two weeks after the last show on the Purple Rain tour. Its rollout sold over 1.7 million tickets, a high mark at the time in his career, that Prince consequently cut two weeks short on April 7, 1985 in what one can assume in anticipation of the next project—which according to Alan Light was recorded, wrapped and completed on New Year’s Eve 1984.

For years, he and his label, Warner Bros, would be in heated discussions about the rapid pace he wanted to release albums. They wanted to milk each project with tours, videos, merch, and such; meanwhile, Prince was just serving his creative appetite, yearning to deliver whatever came in fresh so he could share that emotion with fans and flex his burgeoning discography with competitors. He was so quick with it; Around The World In A Day, the follow-up to one of the signature albums of the decade, did not even have a tour to support the album. And Prince didn’t care.

In true Prince “I’m gonna do what I wanna do” attitude and form, the first three songs on Around The World In A Day move in opposition to the rapid-fire, concert-watching, induced bedlam, synth washes, and stage light intensity of the first three songs on Purple Rain. While Warner Bros was thinking sequel, Prince is delivering artistry after appealing to America, almost to a fault.

“Open your heart, open your mind/A train is leaving all day/A wonderful trip through our time/And laughter is all you pay,” are the first lines, a timid heat check if ever there was, on the opening of this new and different album. Instead of orgasmic screams, guitar solos, and mechanical drums, which make “Let’s Go Crazy” anybody’s go-to for getting a party, a football game, a political convention—you get the point—started. But here, on the album that feels as if it’s been tripping on acid, Prince has surrounded his audio fairy playland with ouds, Middle Eastern orchestration, and finger cymbals. Peep game between the lines: Instead of extreme consumerism, it’s let’s just chill, check in with ourselves, and see what’s popping. 

Not his words, but you can feel that type of sensibility.

But I’ll let him explain: “I think the smartest thing I did was record Around the World in a Day right after I finished Purple Rain,” he told Rolling Stone in 1985. “I didn’t wait to see what would happen with Purple Rain. That’s why the two albums sound completely different.”

But then, later on, he tells the most inspiring radio DJ in Detroit, the Electrifying Mojo, something a bit more from the heart: “I was making something for myself and my fans. And the people who supported me through the years—I wanted to give them something, and it was like my mental letter. And those people are the ones who wrote me back, telling me that they felt what I was feeling.”

Where MJ wanted a duplicate of the previous success, Prince was always on to the next, ready to jam, create, deviate, change image, get his next Bowie chess move on. Media-wise, it felt as though MJ was always slowing down for the cameras so the populace could get in and on board with what his next project was, whereas Prince, post Purple Rain up until the early ’90s, right around Diamonds and Pearls, was such a chameleon, moving at such a clip that you felt as though he had destinations, certain dream board to fulfill, no matter if people kept up or not. 

“Prince gets over with everyone because he fulfills everyone’s illusions,” wrote Miles Davis in his autobiography. “he’s got that raunchy thing, almost like a pimp and a bitch all wrapped up in one image, that transvestite thing. But when he’s signing that funky X-rated shit that he does about and sex and women, he’s doing it in a high pitched voice, in almost a girl’s voice. If I said ‘fuck you’ to somebody, they would be ready to call the police. But if Prince says it in his girl-like voice, then everyone says it’s cute.”

At one point, working on Purple Rain, Prince asked one of his band members why Bob Seger, a fellow midwestern act that would consequently be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the same night as Prince, sells out stadiums left and right. The response, which would lead to the creation of the actual ballad “Purple Rain,” noted how Bob Seger has many anthemic power ballads that people can sway their lighters and sing along to at the end of the show. “Purple Rain sounds like Jimi Hendrix doing a country western song,” stated George Clinton in the press many times over.

In Alan Light’s book, Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain, he waxes on about this character Prince created and then let’s former band member, half of the songwriting team for Prince that was Wendy and Lisa, his own in house Lennon & McCartney, Wendy Melovin, gives us a perspective from inside the camp. 

“Prince’s sexuality was unlike anything pop music had ever witnessed. As shocking as Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger and other rock gods had been when they first appeared, he had raised the stakes to a new level. “His songs were propelled by how incredibly palpable his sexuality was,” marvels Wendy Melovin. “He was wearing, for all intents and purposes, women’s clothing and makeup—not dissimilar to Bowie or Little Richard—not being a homosexual, still having a certain amount of badass factor in him, singing in falsetto and wearing black underwear and high heels. It’s remarkable to me that twenty-million people gravitated to that and were like, ‘Not only do I love that music, but he’s fuckable to me.'”

“Tambourine,” the sixth track on ATWIAD, is a return to that stripped-down funk, heavy drum and snare, with Prince talking about sex using a tambourine as the metaphor. Handclaps, bells, falsettos, and probably stilettos worn in the studio, it’s a slept-on funk jam that gets hidden among all the inward-looking ’60s hippie trip talk. Miles knew exactly what he was talking about.

“America,” the next song, fires along, returning to that “let’s talk about this country and all the hypocrisy” energy, using the language of funk and roll. Disseminating between the haves and have-nots with the branded-in-your-brain lyrics, “Jimmy Nothing never went to school / They made him pledge allegiance, he said it wasn’t cool / Nothing made Jimmy proud / Now Jimmy lives on a mushroom cloud,” for anybody who attended a high school that allowed cigarette smoking on the campus, way beyond the cliques and basketball courts, you knew exactly who Prince was talking about. In some respects, this is the prelude to Sign ‘O’ The Times, but it still fulfills Prince’s scathing critique of Ronald Reagan, who you will find as subject material throughout Prince’s discography in the ’80s.

Yes, “Pop Life” is the crafty pop song that is a bona fide Prince hit. But it feels like an answer to the Purple Rain fans asking where the hit is, and Prince shooting back, “Sometimes it beez like that.” Meanwhile, “Raspberry Beret” is the whimsical photo snapshot of a simpler time that hits kind of Dylan-esque in song construction but still fulfills this pop-with-strings stratagem that few could pull off. But it’s “America” that is the political caterwaul, talking but not talking about crack, racism, the underserved communities of color, and all the folks who are about to be forgotten about in the thousand points of light along the way, via President Bush real soon. It’s the snarly Prince that wasn’t on Purple Rain because that was about consumerism, and this is about the earlier, funkier Prince, writing about things he saw in his world.

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