In 1985, Prince was faced with following up the previous year’s Purple Rain, a massive success that made him one of the biggest stars in the world and an album that is still hailed as one of the greatest ever.
His response was to record a weird little psychedelic pop album that seemed to deliberately avoid comparisons with its storied predecessor. Around the World in a Day is Purple Rain‘s quirky cousin, popping in from out of town to make everybody a little uncomfortable.
Continuing my look at 1984, first by counting down my own top five albums of that year.
#3. Purple Rain – Prince
Only five albums reached #1 in 1984, and one of those was Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was released the previous year but still spent the first 15 weeks of ’84 at the top of the Billboard 200. Thriller was the top-selling album of both 1983 and 1984.
I hadn’t exactly written off Spike Lee as a relevant filmmaker, but it has been 12 years since Inside Man, the last “joint” of his I truly enjoyed. And that film was atypical for Lee, a pretty straight-forward heist film. You have to go back to 2002’s 25th Hour for something really meaty and thought-provoking.
In fairness, I missed 2015’s Chi-Raq, which divided critics but was generally regarded as a return to form for the filmmaker.
Prince’s ‘7’ is one of the most popular tracks in my ’31 Numbered Songs’ series. Released in 1992 as the third single from Prince’s Love Symbol album, the track reached #7 on Billboard’s Hot 100.
Filled with Prince’s trademark religious imagery, ‘7’ is presumably about the seven deadly sins. The song’s video features then 18-year-old Mayte, a dancer who married Prince four years later and divorced him four years after that. They had a child, who died less than a week after his birth.
The Random iTunes Fairy must still be in a tribute mood after this week’s Tom Petty retrospective. Here’s Prince with his classic ‘Purple Rain.’
I was surprised this song hasn’t shown up on the blog before now. In fact, only two songs from the Purple Rain soundtrack (‘Computer Blue’ and ‘The Beautiful Ones’) have been given the Song of the Day treatment, and both of those were on Random Weekends as well.
