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Fri 10 October 2025 19:00, UK
For anyone looking to become a star like Prince, there’s no limit to how high things can go.
Anyone would spend their entire lives trying to achieve a fraction of what ‘The Purple One’ did, but the number of albums he released and the scores of hits he’s accumulated over the years can only come from an artist who lived and breathed music every single minute of the day. Becoming a star was a happy by-product of everything, but there are times when things came to a head far too quickly.
Then again, Prince already had to face a lot of harsh challenges to even get mildly accepted in the industry. The Minneapolis sound wasn’t even close to being mainstream when he released records like For You, and even when he did get opportunities working as an opening act for The Rolling Stones, it wasn’t going to go over incredibly well, either.
At the same time, there’s a good chance that people didn’t know what they were seeing at the time. Yes, there were obvious undercurrents of homophobia and racism at seeing a black man managing to give Mick Jagger a run for his money, but Prince wasn’t about to let a few degenerates in a stadium get in the way of him making music. That was his calling, and he was going to become a star whether they liked it or not.
1999 was certainly a step in the right direction after bringing in The Revolution as his backing group, but Purple Rain is the moment where every single road lined up in Prince’s favour. The entire album is a spectacle from start to finish and contains a piece of what makes him the greatest to ever do it across every single track, but the fact that it’s so good is almost impossible considering it was made for a movie soundtrack.
And while Prince oversaw every piece of the movie of the same name, rarely has any musical film been as on-the-nose as this. We’ll probably never know the extent of what his life was like at home by any means, but the scrappy kid trying to claw his way up to becoming one of the biggest names in Minneapolis is the kind of role that Prince was born to play before he even had acting chops.
He had finally arrived, but when he finally decided to see how everyone was reacting, it was enough to make him dial things back, saying, “The first time I realized what was happening was the day of the Purple Rain premiere. There’s a picture of me from then, and my eyes are just glazed over. I had just got out of a purple limousine, and I looked up and saw this huge image of myself. At that moment I realized the whole world is an illusion.”
It’s not like Prince was about to suddenly go full Howard Hughes and begin locking himself away for any reason, but there were going to be a few more boundaries made in the future. Nothing was going to make him sacrifice his love of making music, but he also didn’t want to be put in a box, either, and everything from Parade to Around the World in a Day to Sign o’ the Times were each examples of him trying everything he could to make the music he had never heard before.
Even if Prince would ultimately change his name to a symbol once his name was being used for the wrong reasons, it was impossible to escape that name once Purple Rain began. The 1980s had officially arrived, and while people could call Michael Jackson ‘The King of Pop’ if they wanted to, not many people needed to give themselves a nickname to carry themselves like royalty.
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