The massive success of Purple Rain made Prince a
superstar. He was in as rare an air as there is, with only Michael
Jackson on the same plane commercially and no one in his class
creatively. Yet Prince was a restless musical genius, bursting with new
ideas he just had to get out. He was not about to coast on the success of
Purple Rain, releasing single after single to keep the hit machine
rolling. A new album was about to be unleashed on the public while Purple
Rain was still topping the charts. However, this new album was to be
a completely different animal. Many artists have attempted to follow a
smash commercial hit with something more experimental and challenging but no
one who ever done it was as big as Prince was in 1985 and no album was as
different from its predecessor as Around the World in a Day.The album isn't talked about much these days, but at the time the public's appetite for new Prince music was such that even this left field excursion would get several tracks played on the radio and sell a whole bunch too. The press dubbed it Prince's psychedelic album and compared it to Sgt. Pepper. It certainly does have plenty of psych flourishes and Prince was almost certainly aware of the Paisley Underground scene going on in Los Angeles (more on that later). But what the album shares most with the Beatles' classic is the attempt to sneak underground and experimental elements into the pop mainstream. The mass public of the sixties was ready to accept the Beatles' experiments because they loved the Beatles. They felt the same way about Prince in the eighties and while Around the World in a Day hasn't become a lasting classic like Sgt.
The album kicks off with the title song and immediately challenges its pop audience with eastern textures and percussion. Slightly more familiar ground comes with the infectious melody of "Paisley Park." Here, Prince taps into the mid-60s pop-psych vibe that L.A.’s Paisley Underground bands like The Three O'Clock and The Dream Syndicate were also hitting. The song is important enough that he named his studio and record label after it. Another psych-pop masterpiece is "Raspberry Beret," the album's biggest hit, with a trippy video to go with it. It's also the most joyous song on an album that can get a little dark at times. "Tambourine" ends side one with a bit of stone cold funk, a reminder that gettin' the dance floor movin' is still a top priority. Side two (yes I'm still thinking in vinyl terms, though the CD is what we're selling here) opens with a blistering critique of "America," a particularly bold statement right in the middle of the Reagan 80s. No less relevant, yet cloaked in another infectious melody, is "Pop Life," a critical look at modern stardom and the state of the world. If any tune on the album deserves to be considered an all-time Prince classic, this is it.
Around the World in a Day stands as his greatest creative achievement. At the height of his success he followed his muse and we all reaped the rewards.
- Adam Reshotko
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