VINYL LISTENING PARTY : PRINCE

Purple Rain (1984)

Soundtrack LPs were big business in the ‘80s. Flashdance, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, The Breakfast Club, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop — any box office hit with a big, silly synth pop song playing over a montage sent Americans to record stores in droves. But Purple Rain stands apart: a transcendent album that happens to have a pretty entertaining film attached to it. “Purple Rain” was Prince’s Journey-inspired attempt at a power ballad that would help him headline bigger venues like Bob Seger. But his naked ambition for world domination mingled freely with his immutable weirdness on Purple Rain, most famously on “When Doves Cry” but also on the outre “Computer Blue” and the bawdy “Darling Nikki,” the song that almost single-handedly caused albums with dirty words to be sold with “parental advisory” stickers.

Around The World in A Day (1985)

Nobody would’ve faulted Prince if he’d toured Purple Rain for two years and released seven singles from the album, as Bruce Springsteen had done for its closest competitor, Born in the U.S.A. Instead, Prince had a curveball follow-up ready to go 10 months later, turning the page to new, more challenging songs. Even with singles as irresistibly hooky as “Raspberry Beret” and “Pop Life,” Prince’s huge new fanbase couldn’t help but notice how baroque and long-winded “Condition of the Heart” and “Temptation” were. But Around The World in a Day’s psychedelic detour was an important moment in Prince’s creative development, the peak of Wendy and Lisa’s influence on his sound, and proof that superstardom was never going to tame him.

Sign O’ The Times (1987)

After Parade, Prince worked on several ultimately shelved projects as the Revolution fell apart, including the original Crystal Ball, Dream Factory, and Camille, before the wealth of material coalesced into its final form. Sign O’ The Times is a tour de force, with some of Prince’s hardest funk (“Housequake” and the live free-for-all “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night”), his most sensuous soul (“Adore” and “Slow Love”), and songs that defy categorization (“The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend”). Among other talents, Prince was a brilliant editor, turning these complicated origins into one of the most consistent, diverse, and exciting double LPs of all time.

Diamonds and Pearls (1991)

Three weeks before Prince released Diamonds and Pearls, he closed out the 1991 MTV’s Video Music Awards with one of his most memorable TV performances, singing “Gett Off” in an assless leopard-print jumpsuit. While that lead single reestablished Prince as one of pop’s most irrepressible provocateurs, the title track and the chart-topping “Cream” really made the album into a multi-platinum phenomenon, the last gasp of his imperial period.

• SPIN MAGAZINE