- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Purple Rain is Prince’s sixth album and the one that made him a superstar; it is the follow-up to one of his most popular albums, 1999 (1982).
Prince and the Revolution – Purple Rain (1984): Prince is a musical prodigy who signed with Warner Bros. Records while he was still a teenager, with the Revolution being his backing band during most of his early career. Prince is unsurpassed at blending multiple music genres into his songs and albums – rock, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, neo-psychedelia, heavy metal, dance-pop, electronica, you name it – and the range exhibited in his music is nothing short of staggering. On the 19-year-old Prince’s audacious debut album, For You (1978), he sang every note and played every instrument and also wrote every song, with just one listing a second songwriter. Paul McCartney did the same on his debut solo album McCartney (1970), but he’d just spent many years in the Beatles.
Besides his own hit singles and albums – releasing a total of 40 studio albums counting the posthumous release Welcome 2 America (2021) – Prince had a profound influence on the entire popular music scene throughout his prodigious career. As examples, he masterminded albums for Morris Day and the Time – who also starred in his 1984 film Purple Rain – and Sheila E.; and he wrote hit songs for other rock musicians, particularly women like Stevie Nicks, Chaka Khan, the Bangles, and Sheena Easton. Purple Rain is Prince’s sixth album and the one that made him a superstar; it is the follow-up to one of his most popular albums, 1999 (1982). Purple Rain is not really a soundtrack album, so all of the music is by Prince; although there are appearances by Wendy and Lisa, and also Apollonia, who has an acting role in the film. Four major Top Ten hit songs were taken from this album: the lovely “When Doves Cry” (Prince’s first #1 hit single), “Let’s Go Crazy”, “I Would Die 4 U”, and the title song “Purple Rain”. The vulgar content in one song on this album, “Darling Nikki” led to the founding of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in 1985 by the future Second Lady Tipper Gore; as a result, Senate hearings were held on supposedly offensive music lyrics, and stickers marked “Parental Advisory / Explicit Lyrics” were placed on a large number of record albums – still occurring up to the present day – with some stores refusing to sell albums and CD’s having those stickers. Prince died unexpectedly in 2016 of what was ruled an accidental overdose of fentanyl. Besides Welcome 2 America, numerous posthumous Prince compilation albums taken from the legendary vaults at his Paisley Park home have been released, including 13 albums in 2016 alone. An expanded edition of Purple Rain came out in June 2017, including a second disc of previously unreleased material. Prince is one of the largest selling recording artists of all time, having sold an estimated 150 million records. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, the U.K. Music Hall of Fame in 2006, and the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2016.