Purple Rain

Nine tracks in about forty-four minutes, and the subtractive test finds little to cut. Let’s Go Crazy must open: its spoken sermon sets the record’s terms, the afterlife and the party in one breath, and its guitar runs the record up to speed. The Beautiful Ones is the first turn inward, a ballad that ends in a scream. When Doves Cry opens the second side as the plainest statement of the record’s wound, and Purple Rain must close it; Darling Nikki is the profane pole the sacred one answers, and Computer Blue keeps its place as the bridge from love to obsession. The test bites twice, lightly: Take Me with U, a bright duet, carries the film’s romance more than the record’s argument, and Baby I’m a Star’s length is the stage’s. Two soft tracks, neither idle.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: desire and salvation are one hunger, and a man who would be loved may find in himself the father who could not love. When Doves Cry carries the second plainly, the singer asking whether he is “just like my father”, and the bareness of its sound, with the bass taken out, carries it as fully as the words: a dance record with its floor removed. Darling Nikki and Purple Rain set the first, lust stated without shame and then a hymn asking forgiveness in the same voice, and I Would Die 4 U offers the singer as a sacrifice. Sound and words are credited alike. Held below the bar because the statement is theatrical as often as true, much of the disclosure is the persona’s display rather than a condition uncovered, and the meanings are named more than discovered.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and both warm and dreadful. Purple Rain is the summit: a slow ballad that rises through its choruses to a guitar solo of long held notes and then a coda of wordless voice, strings and piano, a height sustained for minutes. The Beautiful Ones climbs from a hush to a scream of unwanted desire, the record’s most naked moment. When Doves Cry holds a cold, airless height, its keyboard figure and stacked voices hung over a drum machine, and Let’s Go Crazy rises at its end into a frantic solo. I Would Die 4 U has lift; Darling Nikki has menace, not height; Take Me with U and Computer Blue have force. Height on five of nine tracks, the highest as high as the medium reaches; the four that do not rise hold it a step from the top.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth is built in the frame and evoked inside it. The frame is a liturgy: the record opens with a minister’s address over an organ, promising an afterlife, and closes with a hymn and a benediction in which rain, colour and grief become an end of the world and a washing. Between them the old pattern of the sinner and the saint runs through one figure: Darling Nikki’s profane confession, the offering of the self as saviour in I Would Die 4 U, and the hymn that asks pardon. The figure is a person, the singer, and particular: a club, a girl, a father, a city. Held below the bar because the myth is the persona’s own, worn as costume as much as built, and the father, the deepest archetype on the record, lives in one song, his full story belonging to the film rather than the album.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is Prince’s own Minneapolis funk of Dirty Mind and 1999, with its drum machines and synthesiser horns, beside Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and the arena rock of the day. The turn is toward rock: a funk and R&B artist sets guitar-led rock, the power ballad and the hymn at the centre, recorded partly live with a band, and releases as a lead single a dance record with no bass. That subtraction is the boldest departure, and its stake was real. Held below the bar because the larger turn was made on a proven path, where Hendrix and Sly Stone had placed the bet, because 1999 had taken most of the step already, and because the move to rock was also a move toward the largest audience, a wager the film was built to win.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The record’s form is a service, sermon, profanity, confession, sacrifice and hymn, built so that the profane and the sacred stand in one sequence, and the live recording beneath the last three tracks carries meaning: a congregation is heard behind the hymn. When Doves Cry’s missing bass is form as knowledge in one song, where what is absent is the content. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side passes from the sermon through love to obsession and Darling Nikki’s degradation, the second from the father’s wound to sacrifice, display and the hymn. Held below the top because most of the songs would stand alone, Take Me with U and Baby I’m a Star are containers for the film’s needs, and the frame is set by the first and last tracks more than enacted between them.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over forty-two years. The production of When Doves Cry has been studied and imitated by producers for decades, and its missing bass remains a lesson in what subtraction can do. Purple Rain has been taken up by singers of every kind and has become a standard. The expanded edition of 2017, with unreleased recordings from the same period, reopened the making to study, and writing on Prince’s joining of the sacred and the sexual, and on his play with gender, keeps returning to this record. Held where it is because the words yield what they state on first hearing more than they deepen, and part of the return is ritual, a known object replayed. The depth is formal and performative more than semantic.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the popular music of the 1980s, rock, R&B and dance pop, then sharply divided on radio and in the market by race. The intrinsic force is real and smaller than the reach: the record joined funk, rock guitar, synthesiser pop and gospel in one voice, and When Doves Cry showed that a dance record could subtract its foundation and keep its floor. The Minneapolis sound it carries was set on earlier records, and what belongs to the film or to the artist’s career is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record carried a Black artist’s guitar rock and funk to the top of the white rock audience as well as the R&B one, set a model of the soundtrack album as a star’s statement, made the drum-machine and keyboard sound of Minneapolis a sound of the decade, and gave the field a standard in its title song.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-two years. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, remastered and expanded. Presence is continuous and wide: the album is in print, its singles are in broadcast, the title song is a standard, and Prince’s death in 2016 renewed its presence rather than closing it; popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is the charge: the Linn drum machine, the synthesiser timbres and the gated sound of 1984 are on most tracks, and Take Me with U and Computer Blue sound of their year. When Doves Cry carries its machines as content, and Purple Rain, a band in a room with strings, has aged least. Part of the record’s presence is still carried by the film, and it stands a tenth below the widest presence of its age.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing throughout. Prince’s command runs across guitar, keyboards, drum programming, arrangement and voice: the falsetto of The Beautiful Ones turning to a scream, the low murmur of Darling Nikki, the guitar of Let’s Go Crazy and of the title song, one frantic and one patient. When Doves Cry holds a stacked keyboard figure, a drum machine and layered voices with nothing wasted. The band plays tight on Computer Blue and broad on the live tracks. The faults fall on a share: the arrangement of Take Me with U is generic, Baby I’m a Star is loose, the live tracks are smoothed by overdubs, and some keyboard timbres are of the year rather than of the record.

Score: 8.7 / 10

One law governs the record: desire and salvation in one voice, the body and the soul asking the same thing. The two most distant elements obey it. Darling Nikki, the most profane track, and Purple Rain, the most devotional, are the same hunger, met once in a hotel lobby and once in a hymn. Let’s Go Crazy’s sermon and its party obey it inside one track, and I Would Die 4 U joins the lover and the saviour in one offer. The range is wide: funk, synthesiser pop, power ballad, rock and gospel hymn. The law strains at Take Me with U, which obeys by sound more than by meaning, and at Baby I’m a Star, which serves the persona’s display rather than its hunger. Two strains, and no break.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as desire and as guilt. The body is held fully, and the couple, in its heat and its failure. The sacred is held, as sermon, sacrifice and hymn, and joined to the body by the record’s law, which is its integration. A crowd, a congregation at a club, is present behind the last three tracks. What holds the figure lowest on the page is how few orders are held fully: two, the body and the sacred. The family enters through one song, the father and mother of When Doves Cry, held there and then gone, and labour, the state, history and the natural order are absent, unless the rain counts as more than an image.

Score: 7.3 / 10