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Spin - April 1990
"The 10 Most Interesting Musicians of the Last 5 Years"
Written by - Steve Perry

PRINCE

In the years following Purple Rain, a number of black bands moved to Minneapolis to launch careers. Why not? The movie made it look like a Black Rock Coalition rendering of Mecca. Almost without exception, these bands moved out.

The thriving, racially-mixed scene Prince portrayed in Purple Rain was something he made up. It had nothing to do with Minneapolis, which has a relatively small black population, but it had everything to do with the emotional reality of growing up black, talented and ambitious in Minneapolis.

Starting as a stranger in his own hometown, Prince invented a polyglot, multiracial community in his mind; "Uptown" (from Dirty Mind) was its anthem. He then reinvented himself as the high priest of Uptown, freak flag flown high. It involved calculated fiction, as his detractors always claimed.

The self-mythologizing reached its apotheosis with "Purple Rain" the movie, which Prince called his "emotional autobiography." It was a staggering feat, both as music and as rock careerism. The radio never sounded better in the 80’s than in the summer bracketed by "When Doves Cry" and "Let’s Go Crazy." But Purple Rain also proved how perilously alone Prince was. On his subsequent tour, Prince seemed petrified on-stage and off.

At any rate, Purple Rain certainly had the effect of isolating him even further. In the next 2 years he made some fine music, but he also acted out a basic confusion about which took precedence, the music of the cult of personality. The self-obsession reached an embarrassing crescendo in 1986 with "Under the Cherry Moon," a bad movie made worse by being so heartfelt on some level.

If the self-mythologizing became more circumspect after that, the pace at which Prince reinvented himself musically redoubled. Each record was radically different from the last.

Of them all, Parade was the only post-Purple Rain album to elaborate on musical ideas from its predecessor. Otherwise, the cardinal rule was change. It made Prince the most intriguing figure in rock, not to mention the most maddening. Prince’s approach favored revolution over evolution, and solitary composition over collaboration. All through the latter half of the 80’s, he hit big or he missed big.

Prince¹s most exciting strides in the second half of the 80’s came as a live performer and band leader, not in the studio. The Sign O’ The Times and Lovesexy tours were amazing spectacles, both musically and visually. Lacking contemporaries who could challenge him creatively, he put together a band that kept him honest and he shared some of his finest moments with them.

Sex may be Prince¹s best known obsession, but it always gone hand in hand with a longing for larger connections. Images like Uptown, Paisley Park and the New Power Generation are all attempts to imagine communities where he¹s at once a member, a prophet and a benevolent dictator. What he crafted on-stage with the Lovesexy band is as close as he¹d ever come to realizing it and confronting its contradictions. That tour gave a breadth and depth to his music that it never suggested so clearly before.

For someone who used to seem determined to usher in the Apocalypse or wear out his dancing shows trying, that’s a mark of growth. So what now? Well, if part of his problem in the 80’s was a lack of creative stimulation from his peers, that should change in the 90’s as pop struggles to integrate the profound innovations of hip hop. All that may not matter if he holes up in Paisley Park, but if he’s willing to walk through the door he opened on the Lovesexy tour, his best work is still ahead of him.