For me, it was always the three minutes and change after the lyric “I wanna be the only one you come for, yeah” from Prince Rogers Nelson‘s “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” It was his first major hit, off his self-titled second album from 1979, which cost $35,000 to make. The song concerned a crush Prince had at the time on pianist and singer Patrice Rushen. It was only right that he serenaded Rushen, a jazz prodigy in her own right, with a distinctly different groove—every second in that instrumental exploration, foreshadowed so much to come in the ’80s Prince discography. That quirky George Duke-type figure he purposely wafted out to his small legion of funkateers on that track—whew. Always gave me the yips. It was a secret handshake that said, “I’m coming.”
Barely 21 years old, that’s Prince—playing everything. No really. Electric and acoustic guitars, clavinet, Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano, Oberheim 4-Voice, Polymoog, Minimoog, ARP String Ensemble, bass guitar, and drums. Just him.
As a recovering/semi-retired DJ, I was and still am always searching for those instrumental stretches in songs that say much more than a vocal. That plot? Eargasm. Steadfast command from a young accompanist who has no shortcomings in blending ideas about new wave and dance-pop with Moog funk moves, and blissed edges that still ride at 3 a.m. on dancefloors forever blowing that smoke machine. Nobody but Prince is doing that in 1979.
Prince doesn’t want some cheesy, hokey vocal diluting that stripped-down, cold, breezy consistency he’s lined up. And yes, I know, this is categorized as a funk track, but he’s got bits of AOR in the buttermilk along with prog brain fog. That riff doesn’t leave the mind for a while. He’s not copping the soon-to-be out-of-style disco thing here, nor P-Funk, Stevie, Chic, Kool & The Gang, or the Isley Brothers. Nope, this is fussy perfectionist R&B. Hrrm. Where do we see that pop up again in the next five years or so?
Better yet, who’s doing it? In a movie? Exactly.
Prince promoted this early hit by lip-syncing it with his band on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand, where he gave host Dick Clark the business during an interview, answering his questions with one-word answers. “That was one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever conducted, and I’ve done 10,000 musician interviews,” Clark later said.
[Purple Rain] was beyond a slam dunk; He crafted the most pop version of himself in such an accessible way that he would spend the remainder of his career desperately running away from that chart-busting monster.
But this instrumental stretch—-the first song, off the self-titled Prince second album? It’s the Purple one gently knocking, wavy perm and all. Being a jerk to Dick Clark, America’s musical Dad (we had Don Cornelius on Soul Train) is just the very start. “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” in so many ways, it’s Prince forming. Get ready.
Since the ‘70s, he’d been instructing top brass executives not to promote him as a Black artist—meaning, he’d studied how major record companies at the time unloaded budgets to promote rock (white) artists and then used whatever funds were left over to promote urban (Black) artists. His choices—from Dirty Mind to 1999, the whole lingerie thing—reflected a certain, some would say odd, ideology, that worked.
In the early 80’s MTV had a code. Music deemed as “rock” could get played, but everything else that may be deemed as Black, and that’s not even too Black, let’s just say pedestrian beige or non-offending mauve—-would not get on the airwaves. On October 27, 1982, with the release of the 1999 album by Prince, “Little Red Corvette,” a lustful milieu about automotive love by the car cigarette lighter, would make Prince, well, Prince. It gave the midwestern original his first U.S. top-ten hit. Released on February 9, 1983, it got pushed surprisingly by mainstream rock stations—a catch-up ploy by those gatekeepers who generally saw rock as a non-Black artist’s field of play. They were desperately trying to catch up to the youthful upstart network, MTV, which was changing music programming all over the world. So began the national branding of Prince. With Billboard calling the track “a typically racy rock number, thick with electronics” this new-wave, pop, and R&B artist would no longer have a problem landing on rock radio for the rest of the decade.
Much has been made and chatted about an incident in 1983 where Prince and MJ shared the stage with James Brown, and from that incident, according to the press, a rivalry began. But understand, they both come from that lineage, specifically JB stock, Black male soul-singer persona, who can move with or without the mic stand, accentuating rhythmic attributes in the music, giving clues to pedestrian dancers where and when to strut, camel walk, or whatever the dance move of the moment is.
Prince knew early on, before said incident, that MJ was in pursuit of a Pop Star title or position. Instead, he opted for the code “rock” in his artist and development deal which meant, for him at Warner Brothers, top-tier access to promotions and resources. In turn, this gave him even more latitude to write this new amalgam of Black music: The Minneapolis Sound, a funk subgenre that employed new wave, synthesizers, guitars, futzed with gender roles and norms. Prince did not come from an iconic musical family who started at Motown and then blossomed even after the lead singer decided to go solo. That act had notoriety, global pop cred, an iconic Motown 25 moment that moonwalked all over pop music culture, and more importantly access to top-flight producers, writers (did I mention Rod Temperton of Heatwave was one of MJ’s go-to writers, and of course Quincy Jones producing with those svelte horn arrangements). Prince knew the deck was stacked in that lane, so he played the outsider card.
Prince beefed with Rick James too; they both thought each other stole that punk-funk thang, but MJ was the top pop music dog and Prince was taking that feud so much more seriously than the type of glitterati mischievousness Rick James aimed in his direction, which proved to be oh-so wise in the end. There were brains behind that lingerie and raincoat early persona.
The double album 1999 captured the melodic side of punk now called new wave (“Delirious”), incorporated the emerging black dance music fervor from Detroit and Chicago (“All The Critics Love You In New York”), which would later form the foundation of today’s billion-dollar EDM industry. It also showcased major chord euphoria (“1999”) in a catchy, poppy song that delved into pre-millennium tension before Goldie explored similar themes. Additionally, the album influenced pop music ideas from Phill Collins (“Sussudio”) and led to requests for the artist to play keyboards for Stevie Nicks on “Stand Back.”
He broke through.
According to the biography Dig If You Will The Picture, Funk Sex, God & Genius in the music of Prince by Ben Greenman, the contract Prince signed with Warner Brothers in the late ’70s not only gave the precocious teenager full creative control over his own recordings but also included a clause that let him develop other talent. Prince was a trickster with the press, friends and with music. Highly critical of contemporary soul-music stereotypes: He had a rather large ego. As much as he pushed different ideas and genres into his own music, he needed an outlet for his straight-up funk arrangements. All of these sides would pay significant dividends in the future.
Initially, industry types laughed at Prince’s idea for the cinematic version of Purple Rain, not seeing the possible success of a musician-led film. But it alone grossed over $70 million at the box office, not to mention earning the artist an Academy Award for best song score. The record stayed at number one for 12 weeks, yielded five top-ten singles, and sold nine million copies in the United States by 1985. The public confirmed Purple Rain as a classic: It conquered its trifecta of (semi-)autobiographical film, album, and subsequent sold-out tour.
Released on June 25 1984, Purple Rain, the soundtrack to the film of the same name, dominated the summer, on the radio, in cinemas, on television, in rock and soul mags and just about everywhere yearning for an upstart rock star on a motorcycle with a weird symbol on it to hypnotize the nation. The days of the one-man band were gone. The Revolution which consisted of Wendy Melvoin, Brown Mark, Lisa Coleman, Matt “Doctor” Fink and Bobby Z, played their roles in the film and sometimes played foil, but overall allowed Prince to ring in a dense oeuvre that incorporated rock, pop, R&B, funk, new wave, psychedelic and whatever else he thought was up for grabs that the rest of pop radio thought he should not touch.
Prince single-handedly updated the playlist for American Bandstand and Soul Train in just one summer. Yet this band reflected what Minneapolis was pumping out. Back in the day The Twin cities were filled with jazz musicians, so it only makes sense the following generations would not only take funk, but also incorporate other elements that represented what that city was about. The Time, Vanity Six, Dez Dickerson and The Modernaires all give performances in Purple Rain. And it’s part of the reason Prince refused to shoot the film anywhere else but Minneapolis. As Questlove outlined in his own way referring to the origins of the Soulquarians, Prince knew, even in the ’80s, to bring about a sonic revolution (no play on words) you must frame it within a context so the public identifies it all, as a thing: Then they will buy in. So those bands he has in that contract clause got to eat off of Purple Rain, too.
The album had everything you would want in a soundtrack to a film or a generational push forward for that matter. Straight-up pop mayhem causing mass hysteria through rock bangers (“Let’s Go Crazy,” “When Doves Cry”), a new breed of soul that meets shuffling drums and computerized rhythms that was already invading R&B (“I Would Die 4 U,” “Baby I’m A Star”). Suggestive lyrical alchemy that always tracks well with the young folk (“Darling Nikki”), weird Prince elongated melodies crashing up and against Linn-Drum shores (“Computer Blue,” “The Beautiful Ones”), that acoustic-meets-psychedelic soul that he’d would pursue further in the next couple of albums (“Take Me With U”) and the anthemic rock meal ticket he heard Bob Seger fill stadiums with in the ’70s (“Purple Rain”).
It was beyond a slam dunk; He crafted the most pop version of himself in such an accessible way that he would spend the remainder of his career desperately running away from that chart-busting monster. As journalist Alan Light notes in his review of the album, Around the World in a Day was completed on Christmas Eve of 1984 and released in April 1985, just two weeks after the final date on the Purple Rain tour—which Prince cut short abruptly, after just six months.
The often prickly American film critic at large Pauline Kael, whose opinions ran far in the other direction of her contemporaries, didn’t exactly love the film Purple Rain in a review from August of 1984 for The New Yorker, but still found power in what hit the screen and America’s simultaneously: “Prince may consider himself a revolutionary force because he (like his band) represents a fusion of the races and the sexes and because his music is his own, self-taught eclectic mix. … Purple Rain is Prince’s bid for goddessy big-time stardom. In quality, it’s about on a level with Mahogany. But a new generation has come along that isn’t jaded about old movie-star self-absorbed emoting, and when Prince turns his life into a soap the audience loves it. The Kid’s sequinned psychobabble goes over big. He learns to reach out and touch somebody’s hand, and that frees him to be a star. And, yes, he does it his way.”
Artists like Bruce Springsteen or even Taylor Swift would have toured that film soundtrack into the ground for a couple of years. But not this Prince, his destiny always lay in what was ahead, despite the fact whether those projects had quality control or not.
You can’t cage a one-man band.
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