Prince & The Revolution

Essential Albums

  • Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)
    Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)
    Parade (Music from the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)

    In 1985, less than six months after the end of the Purple Rain Tour and the release of his Around the World in a Day album, Prince began shooting his second movie, Under the Cherry Moon. Released in 1986—and featuring Prince serving as both star and director—the black-and-white film lacked the performance-showcase feel of 1984’s Purple Rain (and didn’t come near ’s box office or critical heights). But Under the Cherry Moon still had strong musical elements, with Prince playing Christopher Tracy, a piano player and gigolo in 1930s France. And the album it inspired, Parade, is less of a traditional soundtrack and more of a companion album, in both style and structure. The album’s first four tracks—“Christopher’s Tracy Parade”, “New Position”, “I Wonder U” and “Under the Cherry Moon”—play more like evocative scene-setters than traditionally constructed pop songs, with each clocking in at less than three minutes. The same goes for the piano instrumental “Venus de Milo” and “Do U Lie?”—the latter a bit of jazzy, French-kissed whimsy that perfectly captures the period and Riviera locale. But listeners don’t need to gaze upon the Cherry Moon in order to take part in the Parade: There’s the party jam “Girls & Boys”, which references “the steps of Versailles” and drops some French; the funk-rocker “Anotherloverholenyohead”, which serves as the album’s answer to “When Doves Cry”; and the gorgeous “Sometimes It Snows in April”, a Joni Mitchell-esque elegy for Christopher Tracy that would prove to be even more poignant when Prince himself died in April 2016. But the two biggest hits from Parade—which was released three months before Under the Cherry Moon hit theatres—have no connection to the film. First up is “Mountains”, one of two tracks that Prince wrote with guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman of The Revolution (Parade would prove to be the third and final album in which Prince shared billing with his best-known backing band). Then, of course, there’s the stuttering “Kiss”, the smash single that became one of Prince’s several career chart-toppers, and reconfirmed his mid-1980s commercial clout. With a sexy staccato beat that’s as impossible to resist as Prince’s flirty falsetto, “Kiss” proved once again why the singer simply ruled our world.

  • Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) [2015 Paisley Park Remaster]
    Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) [2015 Paisley Park Remaster]
    Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) [2015 Paisley Park Remaster]

    Sometime during the half-year stretch when 1984’s Purple Rain was the most popular album in America, Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, walked in on their 11-year-old daughter listening to the song “Darling Nikki”. She was shocked. The lyrics—with their references to pornography, masturbation, sex toys and sex itself—seemed inappropriate for a child. Within a year or so, she’d formed a committee called Parents Music Resource Center, designed to raise awareness about the moral evils of pop music—a campaign that went so far as to put stickers on the albums themselves: “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content.”  Of course, to hear “Darling Nikki” as a song only about sex is to miss the point, and to reduce “sex” in the world of Prince to the physical act is to miss it further. The brilliance of Purple Rain is how it stirs seemingly contradictory moods—lust, devotion, intimacy, alienation—into a brew where nothing can be separated from anything else. He makes trauma sound erotic (“When Doves Cry”) and salvation sound reckless (“Let’s Go Crazy”). His sexual escapades are spiritual, disorienting and almost psychedelic (“Darling Nikki”, “Computer Blue”), while his spiritual journeys are grounded in the mechanics of a guitar solo (“Purple Rain”). In putting together Prince’s wardrobe for the movie that the album soundtracked, costume designer Marie France noticed the way he was drawn to contrasts: a silk trench coat with punky silver studs; clean, masculine lines with feminine fabrics like lace and chiffon; the edgy and the romantic. He often drew comparisons to Jimi Hendrix for the way he mixed music that felt Black and white, sacred and profane (even though, as he pointed out, his playing was more like Santana’s). The reality is that he had no precedent then and no comparison now. Tipper Gore may have been right in her panic over “Darling Nikki”, but not for the reasons she thought: The song’s power isn’t just that it’s explicit, but that it manages to be mysterious at the same time.

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About Prince & The Revolution

In the early 2000s, the filmmaker Kevin Smith contacted Prince to see if he could use one of Prince’s songs in one of his movies. Prince responded by asking Smith to make a documentary about him. Smith said sure, but the project never got off the ground. When Smith tried to pull out, one of Prince’s assistants explained to him that it wasn’t that simple. 'Why not?' Smith asked. After all, he wasn’t even a documentarian; he made features. 'I get it’, the assistant said—but Prince doesn’t understand reality like the rest of do. Prince… Prince calls you at three in the morning to ask if he can get a camel. He isn’t doing it to be a jerk. But he does want the camel. It’s a funny story, of course. But it also illustrates the strength and commitment of Prince’s vision. The camel is an extreme example. But imagine you told him there was no way to mix new wave and psychedelia with funk and R&B. Or that a man couldn’t explore androgyny without risking his sex appeal. Imagine, really, telling Prince there were any conventional boundaries he had to respect—and then imagine how much groundbreaking art would’ve been lost if he’d listened. Born Prince Rogers Nelson in 1958, he trained in ballet as a teenager, starting his music career just out of high school. By 24, he’d already released a body of work (including Dirty Mind, Controversy and 1999) that helped shape nearly every style of ‘80s pop music, Black and white; by 30, he was both a midnight-movie cult hero (Purple Rain) and a Beatles-level visionary (Sign o’ the Times). To read about his Paisley Park compound is to get a glimpse of a world of almost perpetual creativity—between his debut in 1978 and his death in 2016, there was barely a year he didn’t put out an album, and there were several years during which he put out two. He was one of pop music’s true universals, and yet always distinctly Black. And to listen to him mix sexual ecstasy with spiritual transcendence (“When Doves Cry”, “If I Was Your Girlfriend”) not only finished the mission Little Richard started, it delivered on rock ’n' roll’s promise that you could find heaven here on earth if you were willing to shake for it.

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R&B/Soul

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