PRINCE In Exile

It Was a great interview. Prince Nelson was talking about his family, his troubled upbringing, his personal relationships, his curious teenaged existence in a Minneapolis basement. Then, in mid-sentence, he paused. "I don’t know why I’m telling you all this," he said, sounding more puzzled than  annoyed with himself. But he resumed talking. That interview, coriducted almost three years ago by Barbara Graustark (and run in last September’s Musician) is the cornerstone of Princeology. It’s nearly the whole edifice. Not long afterward the singer/composer/musical polymath abruptly walked out of another interview, and hasn’t spoken to the press since The hottest  one-man dynamo of pop music (and now. Moving is paradoxically also one of the most reclusive. Prince is full of paradoxes. He hides out in middle America while subtly proposing himself as a leader for disaffected 80s youth. He is in firm control of his music, his band, even a movie, but is so vulnerable at interviews that he’s imposed a virtual press blackout on himself. His albums celebrating the pleasures of the flesh are dedicated to God. In one sense, Prince is everywhere. You can’t get within listening distance of a radio for very long without hearing the ominous class drum thump of "When Doves Cry" or push-pull rhythms of "Let's Go Crazy." Chances are you're not far from a movie Theatre showing Purple Rain, Prince's feature film debut, either. But who is this guy? And why is he? In the mass media, you are what you seem to be: image is everything. Prince made himself known as a satyr, always a riveting challenge to public attention. Like sex itself, such a, persona has a limited time span. After the novelty wears off, a pop idol trading on sex appeal had better deliver the goods on a higher aesthetic plane or risk being discarded like a used – or risk being discarded. Prince is making the transition admirably. Without jettisoning his stud element – he's still only twenty-four – he’s broadening his musical approaches and thematic concerns to merit the leadership role the public has thrust on him. What first seemed like a decadent hang-up with sex has emerged as a concern for building an extended family. No wonder Prince and Bruce Springsteen are battling each other for the top of the record charts: Both are idealists, positing a better universe somewhere. Who wouldn’t want to believe that?

ONE FOR ALL AND ALL IN ONE

THE "WHY" OF PRINCE STARTS WITH HIS MUSIC, WHICH is casebook crossover. He reconciles black and white pop traditions, writing both open-ended funk riffs and structured verse/chorus tunes. He is fond of 4/4 rock rhythms. The refrain of "Purple Rain" has a plaintive country feel, buttress-ing his claim that that music was all he heard on radio while growing up in Minneapolis. "Other influences are more obvious. Purple Haze – sorry, Purple Rain – was heralded with photos of Prince wearing round tinted glasses straight out of a late-60s head shop. The image and title are only the latest manifestations of Prince's longstanding Jimi Hendrix obsession. His priapic posturing, moustache, gypsy-ruffle clothes and flowery packaging of the Purple Rain soundtrack have direct antecedents in Hendrix and the hippie/love era in which the late guitarist flowered. Prince couldn't have chosen a better role model in the last black musical artist to make the race issue redundant. Like Hendrix, Prince burst into notoriety as a threat or promise to the nation's daughters, coupled with virtuosic musicianship. (Prince can’t match Hendrix on guitar, but hg’s clearly studied the master's concert footage, as the live "Let’s Go Crazy" sequence in Purple Rain makes apparent.) Both are cultural mavericks: Hendrix, though an American grounded in R&B tradition, made his name in swinging England with an extreme form of progressive rock. Prince is adept in soul and funk genres but not bound by them. He and Hendrix played down their race; they operated outside such parameters. Both also found themselves cramped by their initial styles. Hendrix died wrestling with an image increasingly out of phase with his artistic progress. Prince, with seemingly greater control over his career, is escaping this noose. Here is where Prince, born a generation after his hero, learned from Hendrix’s mistakes. In contrast to the latter's shaggy career, as casual as his drug consumption, Prince is a model of forethought. Every move he’s made builds carefully on what preceded. His first album, For You in 1978, flopped. His self-titled second album a year later contained a black hit single ("I Wanna Be Your Lover") that helped it turn gold (half a million sales). Dirty Mind in 1980 broke through to critical acclaim, possibly influenced by X-rated subject matter ("Head," "Sister") that guaranteed lack of airplay. The following Controversy resumed Prince's cruising speed, also going gold within months. Two years and over two and a half million copies later, the double album 1999 is still doing nicely on the charts, thank you – even against the Purple Rain soundtrack LP, which matched its predecessor's sales figure in a few weeks. And Prince is down on drugs. Hendrix flourished amid a tense counterculture that preferred to make war, not love against a perceived establishment. He was almost a secret weapon whose excesses (hair, clothes, music, lifestyle) could have been designed by a hippie Dr. Strangelove to send the over-thirties screeching for cover, hands over bars. Prince’s younger followers weren’t even born when Hendrix was storming the guitar barricades. In a never-ending story, they take the hard-won victories of the past for granted – so much so that society’s pendulum is swinging back the other way, Sex, once a forbidden fruit, is now more like a dietary staple; and Rolling Stone, which did so much to promote better living through chemistry, publishes a book on how to get off drugs. Yesterday’s hippies are today’s yuppies. Hendrix signified rebellion, Prince reconciliation – between male and female, rock and funk, black and white. Indeed, Prince has protested (a bit too much?) that he is barely black at all. He has variously described his mather as half-italian, black or "a mixture of a bunch of things," his grandmother as Indian and his father as half-black, half-Italian and half-Filipino – which makes for a lot of father. "In Minnea-polis there are no pure black people anyway," he told Graustark. Prince’s multi-racial looks add to his allure and are distinctly au courant: processed hair has regained the crown from the separatist Afro. This is the 80s after all, not the psychedelic 60s when an electric-frizzed Hendrix waved his freak flag high. But Prince isn’t selling out, he’s buying in.

THE JOY OF SEX
NOT TO GENERALIZE TOO MUCH, BUT IN ANYTHING  involving living animals, the bottom line is usually sex. The lowest common denominator in the  human condition, sex manipulates our feelings and behavior: We’re in thrall to this primal urge regardless of whether we surrender to it (too predictable) or sublimate it (too predictable). Prince is the latest in a long, honored line of musical performers who are increasingly blatant about pex. His songs go where no mainstream pop lyrics have dared'go before; his stage props have included a bed; he’s performed in bikini underwear. He makes clear that music, with, its steady rhythms, emotional catharses and stroking of auditory ganglia, is a sex placebo. His exhibitionism guarantees Prince a loyal audience of  voyeurs and geeks. And there may well be fans of Prince’s music who find his stage shtick too unbuttoned for their taste. Prince attracts considerab'ly more than the voyeur/geek crowd, though, for radiating sex besides acting it out. Prince's idol Jimi Hendrix also outraged audiences with his sexual flamboyance, but here again their approaches diverge. In the days before women's lib, Hendrix relied on macho swagger. Prince is probe to boasting in his songs, yet overall his sex appeal is more gentle and teasing than overbearing. Hendrix played up the reputation of a large phallus; Prince would rather be known for having a shapely ass. His penchant for women’s stockings, leotards and Danskins imparts an androgynous quality, but there’s no whiff of homosexuality to Prince. He projects sensitivity without wimpiness – a dream-date fantasy. More importantly, Hendrix symbolized carefree hedonism. Prince, no slouch on the couch himself, has de.eper and darker thoughts on the subject. "Friendship, real friendship – that’s all that counts with me," he told Graustark. Later in the interview he added, about his audience, "You're telling them about wanting to be loved or whatever...accepted." The conclusion is that, for Prince, sex is a shortcut to intimacy. ("All my friends were girls.") Sex will lead to friend-ship and extended family. Who thinks this way? Maybe some-one who's had his own family cut out from under him – some-one for whom isolation has led to little beyond carnal knowledge.

LIFE WITHOUT FATHER
PRINCE’S UPBRINGING IS ALREADY TAKING ON AN AIR of picaresque legend. He was born on June 7, 1960 in Minneapolis, and christened Prince after his piano-playing father’s stage name. Prince thinks his forty-seven-year-old father named him to "get back" at his mother: "They weren’t getting along at the time and he knew he was leaving." His parents, said to be quarrelsome, did separate, but not until Prince was seven. He considers himself and a younger sister "mistakes...most of my brothers and sisters are (fifteen to twenty years) older." Significantly, Prince’s musical interests begin in earnest with the departure of his father; John Nelson was no longer around to tell Prince to stop banging his piano. The family’s fortunes took a turn for the worse until, a couple of years later, Prince’s mother remarried. Young Prince resented his new stepfather, who "would bring us a lot of presents all the time, rather than sit down and talk with us and give us companionship." When he was twelve, Prince ran away from home... and started a band with his friend Andre Anderson, known now as Andre Cymone. The band may have been the only constant during Prince’s puberty. he moved around from his father's apartment to an "aunt's  house to the Andersons' basement His father gave him an electric guitar. After graduating high school at age seventeen, Prince stuck with music as the only viable way of earning a living. He got studio experience working at a local eight-track operation, Moon Sound, where his band had cut a demo. Owner Chris Moon thought Prince was the most talented member of the group, and, Prince says, pressed him into service playing guitar and keyboards on local commercials. In exchange Moon let him fool around at the board recording his own material after hours. Prince says his band "hated" those solo tapes. "Disgusted" with Minneapolis, he came to New York to peddle his wares. Re stayed at an older sister’s New Jersey apartment, where – if you believe Prince writes strictly from experience – he conceived the incestuous song "Sister." His Big-Apple business dealings were less eventful, and soon Prince was back in Minneapolis. He hooked up with local promoter/manager Owen Husney, who put together a demo package and sold Warner Bros. Records on an impressive three-album deal, including Prince’s right to produce himself. The rest of the story is a matter of record.

THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO
UP. UNTIL PURPLE RAIN, PRINCE THE MUSICIAN HAD LED two lives: outrageous front man (live) and studio wizard (an record). His albums are virtual one-man tours de force. "He's a genius, one in a million," avers engineer David Leonard, who’s edited Prince’s tapes for the last three years. (He’s credited as "David the Blade" on 1999.) Leonard's wife Peggy McCreary agrees, and she's had even more experience with Prince in the studio. A staff engineer at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, McCreary met Prince when he came there to record Controversy. "He works such long hours – fifteen- to twenty-hour days – that everybody kinda bowed out and I started working with him," she says. "We clicke4" McCreary went on to record and mix 1999, and the Sunset sessions for Purple Rain. "Being in the studio is kind of a boring life," she says self-effacingly. "Anybody who's ever worked Jive thinks studios are really boring." McCreary doesn't find Prince sessions boring, though, and not just because she likes his music. "He doesn’t make records like other people. He doesn't have any set hours and he doesn't have any set way of doing things. Nothing is normal." Leonard elaborates. "Most people in L.A. will get a band, cut a(i their tracks one week, and for the next few months do overdubs and vocals. Then they'll sit down for a month and mix the whole record. Prince does not do things that way. He’ll go into the studio with a song in his mind, record it, overdub it, sing it and mix it all in one shot, start to finish. The song never gets off the board. That's the way ‘When Doves Cry' was done. A lot of times he doesn’t leave until it’s done – even if it takes a couple of days." How does Prince work up his own recordings? "He usually starts with drums or piano," McCreary says. "Then he puts on bass, and builds from there: keyboards, guitars, vocals. If we start a song in the morning it’s very rare that we don't finish it that night – at least a basic mix. Then he'll take it home and the next day we'll finish the mix. We do it all in one or two days, very rarely three days. That's different to me!" Prince can be as demanding of others as he is of himself. "You have to be really fast," McCreary says. "He doesn’t want to mess around. If you can't get it right away he wants to drop it; he says it’s an omen and it's not happening. You lose the groove.. Five minutes to get a drum sound is pretty unique," she laughs. McCreary keeps a microphone in the control room so Prince can add vocal parts without entering the studio. "The only bad thing is when he wants to do drums right in the middle of something! That gets a little hairy!" The couple depict Prince as a musical conduit ruled by spontaneity. "He’ll just write a song all of a sudden," M Creary says in amazement. "Once we'd gotten out (of the studio) at five or six in the morning and he wanted to be back at ten. I couldn’t believe it. He said a song was going through his head and if a chorus went through he was going to get up! He just loves to be in a studio. Sleep is unimportant to him. He likes coffee. [Hah! So much for Prince’s anti-drug stance. – Ed. } If you ask him to eat, he'll say, 'No, it'll make me sleepy.'" Prince’s musical illiteracy – he works only from written lyrics – probably explains his impulsive studio creativity. His home, in a Minneapolis suburb, has a full 24-track studio. Many Prince recordings come directly from "Uptown," a generic name for his home and on-the-road tapes, and are complete down to the final mix. "Most people say, ‘But it's done at fifteen ips!,’" gcgre¿ says, referring to tape speed that's half thepmfe5'knk4l standard. "Well, big deal. If you got it, you got it. I’ve had him say to me, 'Peggy, it’s over. That’s it.' "He's excellent on. piano and guitar," McCreary says. "He makes me smile when he plays bass; it's impressive. He’s good on drums, but I don’t think he's as comfortable. He likes to pick up different instruments. One time he said, ‘Get me a harp’ (for ‘Possessed,' an unreleased track). It wasn’t one of those huge harps but a non-pedal Gothic harp. He picked it right up. He's just a natural."

PLATINUM ON THE SILVER SCREEN
WHEN BILL HALEY UTTERED INCONSEQUENTIAL DIAlogue in Rock Around The Clock, he couldn't have thought about movies as a creative outlet comparable with music. No did the Beatles, despite their celluloid romps, feel a need to diversify into acting careers. But since the turn of the 1970s, pop stars have gravitated to feature films – usually like moths to a flame – in attempts to broaden their appeal beyond a comparatively small and fickle public." Movie studios have had a hard time trying to incorporate rock figures," says Albert Magnoli, the thirty-year-old director and co-writer of Prince’s cinematic debut. "I'm sure Mick Jagger has tried as much as he could to get into film in any way that’s going to be vital." Prince’s management company of Cavallo, Ruffalo & Fargnoli nursed the Purple Rain project carefully. "It seemed. like a logical progression in Prince’s career," Bob Cavallo says. "He certainly wanted to make a film." According to Cavallo, Prince wanted his managers to produce. Joe Ruffalo says they were looking to get into film anyhow. By April, 1983 they had hired writer/producer William Blinn, of Fame fame, and dispatched a researcher to Minneapolis for source material. The story would clearly be based on Prince’s hermetic hometown scene. Ruffalo says they chose Blinn for his reputation – he also write Brian’s Song, episodes of Starsky and Hutch, and adapted Roots – and "sense of music."
"I said to them, 'I seem to be strange casting for this kind of project,’" Blinn recalls. "I didn't feel illequipped to do it, but I did say, 'You’re clearly heading for an R-rated picture.' Their response was, in essence, that they wanted a picture that had a strong dramatic progression, that from a story standpoint would stand on its own and that music would only make better. They felt they wanted to broaden Prince’s audience." Cavallo scouted director. He was interested in Reck-less’ J¿esAihp. Foley was unavailable but suggested his editor, Magnoli. Although Magnoli had only one student film to his credit, that short, Jazz, reaped over a dozen awards. Magnoli read Blinn's script, found it "very introverted, very claus-trophobic," and turned town the project. Magnoli, who knew Prince solely through a Rolling Stone profile, then outlined to Cavallo what he thought a Prince movie should be. Cavallo was so impressed he agreed to let the recent U.S.C. grad school film student have his way, directing his own version. Purple Rain’s credits list two writers, Magnoli and Slinn. The former says ninety percent of the first draft was rewritten, although "the story changed hardly at all." Perhaps Magnoli’s biggest switch was resoscitating the parents of "the Kid" (Prince); Blinn had them dead, of murder and suicide, before the film started. Blinn says the script was rewritten to include the parents, and his involvement -with Fame kept him from doing it himself: "The overall story – the sense of the Kid’s music represent-ing a kind of life force and his home life representing the apposite of that-that was part of the plan from day one, not something l brought to it. That was what the movie was going to be. To me, from the start, this picture was either going to be really big or fatl right on its ass Thats to its credrt They were taking real risks." Among those oaks were e first-time director,– a totally non-professional cast, save foi the Kid’s parent.s; $nd location shogting; W and around:! Minneapolis:during a brutal November and   December. "Most of that film was shot at about twentyeight degrees outside," Magnoli says, "and in some cases eighty below We had crew members coming down with frostbite Many af those scenes were shot in the rain." Despite such adversity, Purple Rain come off wifh considerable panache, Its seven-million-dollar budget is "veiy smaH in terms of results," Magnoli says, citing the film s many production numbers. The boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl plot is hardly avantgarde. Yet between Prince’s charisma, Morris Day’s comic relief, some sizzling concert sequences, equally steamy erotic dalliance and female lead Apollonia Kotero's cleavage, Purple Rain shows every sign of being a box office winner. If you're unfamiliar with Prince, Purple Rain ii an entertaining depiction of a weird youth scene in Minneapolis. But the film's pre-sold audience will come expeoting a quasi-documentary, and Purple Rain does everything it can to heighten the illusion. Everyone except Prince goes by their real name. His backing band, the Revolution, portrays hih backing band. The uncommunicative Kid lives in a basement surrounded by recording equipment. His father piays piano and fights with his mother. In short, the story encourages Prince fans to think that here is the low down on their hero. Purple Rain’s Kid is quite a sexist heel: he refuses to listen to a cassette demo from his female guitarist. He takes Apollonia out to a lake, convinces her to disrobe – of course she does, such is the Kid's animal magnetism – and then tries to leave her stranded. (In return, Apollonia buys him a guitar. Can’t help lovin" 'that crazy Kid.) He hits women, although the film excuses this as an hereditary trait. Is this the real Prince? "I’d have to say no," answers Wendy Melvoin, the Revolution’s guitarist mentioned above. "I just hope the public knows that it’s a movie. There was a script written." "It's a. biography created by the press, by a lot, of rumor and other things," Magnoli says. "Ninety-five percent of the concept is fictional." "Faction" is how Lisa Coleman, one of the Revolution’s two keyboard players, describes it. "In the film we are us, when  we’re onstage and performing. But it’s a story." She giggles over the band’s strained onscreen interrelation-ships. "Yeah, that's a little bit weird. There is some tension, naturally, sometimes, But I think the film showed that we cared about Prince, and in the end it showed Prince cared about us." Ruffalo believes Purple Rain captures "the essence" of Prince. McCreary is even more positive: "That’s him. He didn't write it, but that’s him in Minneapolis. it’s a dramatization – he’s not neurotic, and he’ll listen to things – but that is kind of his life:", So the secret of Prince’s success with women is that he likes to play tricks on them? "I'm not gonna answer that!" McCreary laughs.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE HEARD
IN CONTRAST: TO PRINCE’S CLOISTERED RECORDING habits, he cut two-thirds of the nirie songs for Purple Rain with the Revolution. That is revolutionary. The band shares credit with Prince, not just fear performing, but for composing, arranging and producing as well. "A lot of those songs came up during rehearsal," Coleman says. "We all had a hand in writing." "isn't it wonderful?" Melvoin enthuses. "It's pretty much a unit now. Prince has allowed all of us to express ourselves with out. instruments. He hasn’t tried to tame us down at all, and he's more willing to accept ideas from each of us." That mey have the air of grateful peasants praising the czar for Sparing theii lives. This Prince is certainly an artistic despot – ahd he works hard for the money – but all signs point to a b8nevblerit dictatorship. "Prince knows what he wants – any leader of a band does," McCieary says. However, "it is interplay to a point. They react from each Other."  "He’s the boss,": Oavid Leonard agre'es. "But when he calls Upon them for ideal they definitely come up with something. He'll give somebody parts of a song or cassettes to figure out parts." .Three songs ori Purple Rain include a string section arianged by Li8a.and Pririce; and conducted by Lisa and Wendy. "It was neat to ice Prince relaxing for once," McCreary says, "and riat having to do it all himself." M8ivoih explains the Rivotution’S internal mechanics: "We play a lot tdgether. When we jam we’ll get caught in a groove and, knowing each other’s style so well, we can create a song. That's how a lot of stuff gets created and arranged."  Purple Rain’s songs carne about in a few ways. Cavallo says Ill the filre's material was written expressly for it, but Magnoli recdllect'e differeritly. "There was a whole body of work that existed beforehand," the director says. "I listened fo everything and said, ‘How about these?' Other songs why written while we were shoot-ing"; he cites "The Beautiful Ones," "Co.mputer Blue" and "Darling Nikki" as "tailored while we were making the film" (whose heroine originally was named Nicolette). Magnoli says "Take Me With U" and "When Doves Cry" were written in post-production; Melvoiri says Prince insisted "Doves" be in the film: "He wanted every song on the album in the movie." Regardless of whether the music qr the movie came first, Prince's ieamwOrk with th8 Revolution on Purple Rain sets a happy precedent. Lisa Coleman.feels Prince will alternate t)and with so)a recordings in the future, Wendy Melvoin states Prince "definitely" found group sessions more rewarding than his bouts of solitary confinement, But Purple Rain is a watershed album for more than just its personnel.

A WAREHOUSE IS NOT A HOME
THE OFFICIAL PARTY LINE ON PRINCE AND THE Revolution is that it's one big  family. "We all get along," Coleman saga.‘ egos don’t get in the way." "I'love Prince very much," Melvoin declares, "and I know he loves all of us too. We all get together as much as we can." Perhaps Prince has changed his tune, then, since he discussed his band three years ago: "I think they’re my friends," he said tentatively, "but I think they’re just passing through." The remark quivers with insecurity. A little Freud is a dangerous thing, but you don’t need a Viennese doctorate in  psychiatry to piece together some facts about Prince: Product  of a broken home. Interest in music dates from his father’s departure. Started first band upon running away from mother. "It Ain’t Love But It Ain't Bad," runs a country music song Prince probably never heard, His thematic hang-up with sex has all the earmarks of settling for a one-night stand over genuine commitment. "When I was living alone in Andre's basement," he told Graustark, "I realized music was the way I could communicate what I was feeling." He started writing songs about sexual fantasies and "insane people": "I liked the idea of  being insane, of someone who grew up totally alone  and ended up in a hospital." A business associate says Prince is more comfortable with w,omen than men, and started to loosen up when Coleman joined his band (for the Dirty Mind tour). A year later Prince toured with his proteges the Time and Vanity 6! now Apollonia 6), Lest year he added Melvoin, a childhood friend of Coleman, to his immediate band/family, fine-tuning the multi-racial, multi-sexual mix. Utopia begins at home, or in this case the Warehouse, his Minneapolis rehearsal space. Why Minneapolis? "I see him fighting to keep a sense of normalcy in his life," Cavallo says. Prince could hardly pick a better spot to keep the media hounds of both coasts at bay. Coleman complains about having o schlepp from Los Angeles, but Melvoin doesn’t seem to mind. "He’s taken us all in and takes good care of us," she says, making Prince resemble less  band leader than the head of a foundlings home. He has called himself shy. Others agree, if not on his shy ness, on his reserve. "When I started working with him he was a little difficult," Leonard observes. McCreary says "it took a long time" to achieve communication. "He doesn’t talk a lot." Prince to Graustark: "I tried two or three (interviews) and they were fiascos, They didn’t believe anything I was saying, from my name on down to my background, so I said I'm not going to let anything get cut in the public eye that's going to be misquoted, They didn't believe I ran away as much as I did, and not at such an early age, They didn’t believe I got out of . school early – no black kid in Minneapolis does, What they didn't understand was I didn't come from any ghetto, I wasn’t really black-not in the sense they thought I  as." There's something affectless about him, sexual braggadocio notwithstanding, It takes ingenuousness, if not naivete, to appear on two consecutive album covers  (Dirty Mind end Confiouersy) wearing the same coat. When he wore it at an interview, he explained, "It's the only coat I've got." The con tradictions and mysteries he perpetuated about himself early in his career (i.e, when he gave interviews) smack more of confusion than deviouness, Indeed, more than.. likely Prince stopped talking publicly because of an inability to dissemble. He is said never to discuss personal matters with any of the men in his band, His . closet associate in his most creative, personal activity-studio recording-is a woman. Keyboard player Matt Fink was  reportedly startled when Prince once opened up to him about his family life. After a few minutes Prince realized what he was doing and promptly broke off. The Revolution is the-family Prince never had, and this time he's firmly in control. "His vision more than dominates," an associate says, "it’s almost absolute in its authority." "Heruns his show, no doubt about it," Cavallo agrees. Prince became independent the hard way; as he grew up, he "started to care less and less about what. people expected of me. Because every time I did what they expected of me, they either hurt me or it hurt them." To love is to forfeit independence. If Purple Rain’s lyrics are a barometer, Prince is expanding both emotionally and as a songwriter. The sex-machine persona is almost totally absent, replaced by sensitive romantic yearnings. Both on record and in the film, "Darling Nikki" represents a nadir of meaningless lust. Prince uses "purple rain" and "dawn" as metaphors for personal overhaul. Sex is still an answer, but4he question has changed. He implies his own development. So does the film, in more melodramatic terms: A one-shot deus ex machina suggests the near-death of Prince's father somehow has reconciled a battling family. (To be fair to Mag-noli, additional family scenes were cut from the release print.) At the same time, Prince's rendition of the song "Purple Rain" – ducted, as was "Darling Nikki," at Apollonia – indicates his corning to terms with the issue’s of acceptance and intimacy. The film neatly wraps up the Kid's problems, maybe too neatly. Well, it's only a movie, right? Three years ago Prince spoke ominously of cutting himself off from the world. His enormous success since then shows the world forbids it; Prince can’t live behind a one-way mirror, even in Minneapolis. Starting out as a technical prodigy, he has grown in scape musically and lyrically. The stud turns out to have a soul. Fueled by loneliness, he preaches unity – giving yet withholding. He doesn’t expect his mother to appreciate his accomplishments. Artists create for a myriad of reasons, Prince tapped into a potent stereotype, hid behind it, and now is sloughing it off. The mixed-up (racially, stylistically) kid waves a banner for pop in the 80s, and it’s no freak flag; it’s an open invitation to party, with no RSVP required. He's not a kid anymore. Prince has sized himself up with typical succinctness: "It could be I have a need to be different."