INDIE RETAIL EXCLUSIVE!!
30th Anniversary Purple Rain Deluxe (Expanded Edition)(3CD/1DVD) Listening Event! Giveaway + Drink Specials & More!!
ABOUT THE 30th ANNIVERSARY DELUXE RE-ISSUE:
Few creative projects in pop-culture history succeeded on more levels than Prince’s 1984 masterwork, “Purple Rain.” In one elaborate, calculated stroke, it spawned a hit album, a hit movie and a 100-date concert tour, not to mention global superstardom, a sound, a look, a scene and a new meaning for the color purple.
The album is remarkably diverse, compact and loaded with hits: 44 minutes of rockers, ballads, grinding funk and joyous pop songs about love and sex and hope and family and ambition and dreams; five of its nine songs were released as singles, of which four went Top 10 and two hit No. 1, including “When Doves Cry,” one of the most imaginative, unorthodox (no bass!) and undeniable chart-toppers in history. Commercially it remains one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, certified 13 times platinum in the U.S. alone and winning two Grammys; the film grossed more than $70 million domestically and scored an Oscar. Perhaps above all, it may be the most successful self-fulfilling blueprint for superstardom in history. Prince was just 25 when he made it, but he’d spent virtually his entire life preparing for it — and the rest of his life refusing to make another album like it.
Prince’s untimely death inadvertently allows for the release of music from his storied vault, which contains thousands of unreleased recordings. This peerlessly prolific artist was such a control freak — and so fiercely determined to obtain the optimal value for his music — that even as his contemporaries cashed in on their work by issuing boxed sets containing virtually every stray note they’d ever recorded, he locked most of his creations away, earning nothing and leaving them unheard by few except him, until he could release them on his own terms. In 2014, he signed a much-ballyhooed new deal with Warner Bros. (the label that nurtured his career and that he later accused of making him a “slave”) granting him the rights to much of his 19-year catalog with the company. Yet this 30th anniversary deluxe edition — due on June 23, available in single, double and four-disc incarnations, and which he oversaw before his death — is only now seeing the light of day.
