In so much of his music, Prince seemed fixated on contradictions. He used the album format to position seemingly alienated concepts against each other—spirituality and sexuality, of course, but also isolation and collaboration, minimalism and maximalism, life and afterlife. He longed to connect these ideas, to isolate the points at which they melted into each other. The soundtrack for his 1984 movie Purple Rain represented the most precise implosion of his internal contradictions—sex, religious devotion, empathy, alienation. The album is a kind of geode of identity, a product of remarkable individual pressurization.
Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition is the first reissue produced by the deal Prince signed with Warner Brothers in 2014 in order to regain ownership of his masters. This edition’s approach to the original LP is to kind of unfold it from the edges by including unreleased songs and extended mixes that both expand and complicate the record’s essential character. Purple Rain was Prince’s commercial flashpoint, an album- and feature-length metaphor for his arrival on a national stage; in the last 33 years, it has been written about breathlessly (Carvell Wallace reconsidered it here just last year, one of a series of reviews published after Prince’s death), and it has been contemplated down to its skeletal details. The remastering job heard on this edition, apparently overseen by Prince, adds a clarity and fluorescence to an album whose elements already sounded carefully distributed. Prince’s screams in “Baby I’m a Star” take shape in three dimensions, and the interlaced guitar lines in “Darling Nikki” sound as if they're radiating their own humidity. The songs feel heavier and fuller and conversely, the void surrounding the guitar chord that introduces the title track feels as if it’s been expanded into an even vaster loneliness.
As good as the remaster sounds, the primary attraction of this edition is its second disc, 11 tracks from Prince’s vault of unreleased songs, all cut between 1983 to 1984. Prince wrote and recorded constantly for his entire career, and only a fraction of his music has found its way onto his official records. He only issued two archival compilations in his lifetime, 1998’s Crystal Ball and 1999’s The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale, where many of the songs recovered from the archives were altered, remixed, or re-recorded. Original versions of vault songs have tended to circulate among Prince fans through bootlegs or live recordings, where they would appear full of crackling and hissing artifacts, or would seem to be playing from a considerable distance, muted and cottony, as if they had barely escaped their source. (My bootleg mp3 copy of the 12-minute “Computer Blue” only occasionally verges on listenable.) On the Deluxe Edition of Purple Rain, the vault tracks sound like fully-formed Prince songs—animated, vibrant, reflexive, fluid, almost vehicular in their design and velocity, as if the motorcycle on the album cover were sculpted according to the songs’ sleek and slightly alien shapes. Whether Prince is constructing busy hydraulic cylinders of funk (“Love and Sex”) or drawing a few scribbles in empty space (“We Can Fuck”), one hears every detail with a previously inaccessible focus.