Tag: purple rain film
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Baby I’m a Star
“Baby I’m a Star” has the familiar air of Prince self-actualizing through music: projecting himself toward a celebrity status he was still years away from achieving.
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1999
What set Prince apart from his early-’80s peers was his insistence on greeting Judgment Day, not with solemn gravity or mordant gallows humor, but with a seemingly irony-free display of millenarian ecstasy.
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Moonbeam Levels (The New Master)
If the 1999 album sounds like dance music from a cyberpunk future, then “Moonbeam Levels” sounds as if it’s been beamed in from an entirely different solar system: had David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character been a product of the early ‘80s instead of the early ‘70s, this is exactly the kind of song I’d imagine…
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Don’t Let Him Fool Ya
While it’s clearly a throwaway, I defy anyone to get through “Don’t Let Him Fool Ya” without at least a head bob and a smile.
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Automatic
On “Automatic,” Prince distills the intricacies of romantic and sexual connection into a clean, simple cause-and-effect relationship: love and lust as a computer programmer’s conditional expressions.
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3 x 2 = 6
Just as he’d done for his own Controversy, Prince put the finishing touches on the Vanity 6 album at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. The last song he recorded for the album, on April 5, 1982, was also the last song on the track list: a gauzy synthpop ballad arithmetically titled “3 x 2 =…