PRINCE ON PARADE!
Following his Purple Rain tour in 1984, Prince announced to the music world and beyond that he was, in effect, “retiring” and would not tour again for an undetermined number of years. “I’m going to look for the ladder,” Prince said at the time, to the astonishment of millions of fans.
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PRINCE ON PARADE!
Following his Purple Rain tour in 1984, Prince announced to the music world and beyond that he was, in effect, “retiring” and would not tour again for an undetermined number of years. “I’m going to look for the ladder,” Prince said at the time, to the astonishment of millions of fans. When pressed as to what he meant by this, he simply explained, “Sometimes it snows in April.”
Some eight months later—a short time for an artist of his stature—Prince released Around The World In A Day, a psychedelic-influenced pop LP. The album, unlike Purple Rain, had very little hype surrounding it, and produced two videos— “Raspberry Beret” and “America.” No tour followed, but Prince did sport a new, shorter, dazzling haircut similar to that of Liza Minnelli’s.
And whatever Prince’s definition of “retirement” might have been, he’s certainly employed now with a new LP, Parade, and a new soon-to-be-released movie, Under The Cherry Moon...and rumors are rampant that Prince will, indeed, tour again this yeah.
Prince Rogers Nelson’s status as a rock superstar has been culminating since his worldwide success with 1999. His two previous albums—Controversy and Dirty Mindhad done significantly well, but it was with 1999 that Prince finally crossed over from the urban to the pop charts. Following the successful 1999 tour, Prince began putting together the Purple Rain project almost immediately. The tour and movie were commercially and critically acclaimed—Purple Rain, the movie, grossed $80 million and Purple Rain, the album, became one of the Top 10 biggest-selling LPs in the history of the record industry. It seems as though Prince is successfully doing it all over again with Under The Cherry Moon, filmed in Paris and probably showing at your nearby theater any day now.
From his busy schedule, it would seem that Prince would have little, if any, time to do much of anything but create his own work. Not true...Prince has produced many offshoots in the form of groups such as Sheila E., the Time and the Family. Numerous artists have covered Prince’s songs, such as Cyndi Lauper (“When You Were Mine’’), Chaka Khan (“I Feel For You’’) and Tina Turner (“Let’s Pretend We’re Married”). Prince has also found time to work with groups like the Bangles and even wrote a song for them—“Manic Monday”—under the name Christoper, his role in the new movie. The song is surely on its way to becoming at least a Top 10 hit. It is also rumored that Prince penned recent hits by Sheena Easton and Stevie Nicks under other pseudonyms as well.
Prince is a man of many extraordinary talents, there’s no denying that. One can never tell what direction he’ll take next. Will it be psychedelic? Pop? Funk? Whatever, it’s sure to bear the indelible stamp of the Minneapolis Genius.
