I wake up very late on Saturday, in the mid-afternoon, after working all night the night before. I wrote and published several stories for my website, genxchronicle.com. We cover news, culture and lifestyle through a Generation X lens.
I spent most of the afernoon and evening doing work emails. I also published the latest edition of Copper’s Corner: A Cat’s Life, about life with my shy yet warming up adopted cat Copper and the wacky adventures we have together.
Around midnight I ordered a pizza, because I realized I hadn’t eaten much during the day. I watched Thor:Ragnarok on HBO through Amazon Prime. It was pretty good, but it started to drag in the second half, and I actually ended up turning it off with about half an hour to go. I was just bored, and tired of the super hero shtick.
I’d much rather watch hip hop videos with scantily clad women, so that’s what I did for a while. I watched “Cyclone” by Baby Bash and “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado, and that chilled me out a little.
But around 4am I was bored, and it was still to early to go to bed considering how late I woke up. Then I remembered that my friend Kevin in Japan had posted a video of Prince’s original recording of Purple Rain on my Facebook page, in response to a post I made about how dope the official video is.
So I watched Kevin’s video, which was from vimeo.com, and it was absolutely incredible. The video is filmed in a Minneapolis club, and Prince debuts a new guitarist to start the set, Wendy Melvoin, and she has a long solo lead-in to the song which is absolutely great.
Then Prince strolls on stage after about four minutes, sweating profusely and wearing a purple sequined blazer that only Prince could get away with. He gets right to it.
I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I only wanted one time to see
You laughing
In the purple rain
Purple rain, purple rain
Those may just be the most iconic lines of Prince’s entire career, and he delivers them with the force and energy of a hydrogen bomb. He’s just raw naked sexual desire and love, he radiates energy. He seems spent already on stage, and yet he’s so locked in, it’s like he’s gonna take you on a wild ride tonight, so buckle up your seat belt. What a performer he was.
As for the meaning of the song, who knows what he’s really talking about. I mean he clearly feels like he lost a lover, and maybe it was his fault, or maybe it was her’s, but he just wants to see his love laughing again. Why would she laugh in the purple rain? I don’t know, Prince was an incredibly unique dude. I mean I’ve never even seen or heard of purple rain, but Prince was all about it. So why bother to try and decode it, just enjoy it. That’s what I say.
I decide to stick with the Prince theme, and I pop on another video on YouTube through my Roku. It’s When Doves Cry, from the Purple Rain album, and when it was released in 1984, it was my favorite Prince song for a long time. I bought the cassette at a local music store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I lived, and I must have listened to it at least 200 times on my Walkman. This was three decades before Smartphones and Spotify, so you had to play it on the Walkman, then manually rewind it if you wanted to hear the song again. And you could never get it exactly to the beginning, either. But you did it, because you loved music, and the Walkman was the only game in town.
So I watch the video for When Doves Cry, and Prince is, at various times, crawling on the floor of what looks like a church, with purple flowers on the ground, and later standing over a pond outdoors throwing rocks in the water, and still later he’s on top of the beautiful actress and model Apollonia. Later Prince breaks up a fight between his African-American father and his white mother. So there’s a lot going on in this video.
As for the music, it’s simply mesmerizing. The crazy things is, in addition to the vocals, Prince played all the instruments in the song too. There is no bass line at all. Simply electric guitars, a drum machine, synthesizers and keyboard. And Prince’s haunting voice. It’s melodic, it’s textural, it’s passionate, and it really makes you feel something. When the ten-year old version of me first heard this song back in 1984, I knew it meant something to me, and that it was a powerful song. Thirty-four years later, it remains that way. It’s just a great track, pure and simple.
Sticking with the Purple Rain theme, I watch “Darling Nikki” next. This has always been one of my favorite Prince songs, simply for the sheer audaciousness of the lyrics:
I knew a girl named Nikki
I guess you could say she was a sex fiend
I met her in a hotel lobby
Masturbating with a magazine
She said how’d you like to waste some time
And I could not resist when I saw little Nikki grind
She took me to her castle
And I just couldn’t believe my eyes
She had so many devices
Everything that money could buy
She said sign your name on the dotted line
The lights went out
And Nikki started to grind
Holy freaking Christ! I mean we all knew Prince was in to some freaky stuff, but in 1984 to declare that you met a chick when she masturbating in a hotel lobby, and then you went home with her and she had a lot of sex toys and she grinded on you, that’s just some raw, bold, provocative stuff.
Today, in 2018, with 50 Cent’s Candy Shop and Cardi B’s Bodak Yellow and Migos Selena Gomez and all the sex stuff out there, it wouldn’t seem as revolutionary. But in 1984, when America was a way more conservative country, with Ronald Reagan as its president, these lyrics truly were groundbreaking.
As for the video, Prince come out onstage and proceeds to grind and gyrate while on the floor as he stares out at the actress Teri Hatcher and a beautiful, unnamed blond women. Morris Day and The Time, a popular funk and R&B band at the time, are also in the audience for Prince’s performance. There’s tension between Prince and Morris as they both clearly have been loving on Darling Nikki.
All in all, it’s a great video and a great song.
I’m starting to get hungry, and the sun will be up soon, so I take a little break from my Prince marathon. One thing I learned is that the man was an absolute music savant, a genius, an incredible singer, songwriter, musician, and poet. He was a force of nature, full of passion and lust and love and heat.
Prince, you will be missed, that’s for sure. Your loss is felt every day, especially by those of us who grew up on your music in the 80’s. I know you’re up there somewhere in heaven, laughing in the purple rain.
