‘They’ll Hurt You Every Time:’ Prince Tried To Help Us Heal 40 Years Ago With His Film ‘Purple Rain’

“Ladies and Gentleman: The Revolution.” 

Those are the first words spoken in Prince’s 1984 film Purple Rain, released two days after his multi-generational defining studio album of the same name. Thirty years before Beyoncé gave us her masterful film-album, Lemonade, in 2016, the Artist Who Reclaimed His Name Prince set the bar not yet otherwise reached by anyone else by bringing his album to the screen, walking us into not only the realm where his spirit lived, but the visuals that resided alongside it.

Purple Rain navigates us through Prince’s social and political core through the creation of The Kid, the Artist’s on-screen avatar. The Kid’s persona is a result of the uncomfortable living conditions of his home. His father, Francis, is a physically abusive man. In the film we meet him following a triumphant performance by The Kid, who comes home only to see his father beating his mother. The Kid attempts to intervene with and stop one of his father’s many assaults on his mother. But he ends up being assaulted himself.

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The Kid’s reaction is to harm at home and in the world is to dress provocatively and flamboyantly. In the film, Morris Day is the frontman of the Time,  the Revolution’s rival band. Morris is brass and unapologetic about his opinions and treatment of women. To him, they are objects, applications for his desires, both physically and professionally. They are, most of all, disposable. 

The presence of Morris, who is constantly decked out in attire akin to a pimp or a slick street hustler, only further amplifies The Kid’s persona and appearance, which embodied by Prince, becomes a nuanced exploration of masculinity. With his dramatic fashion, emotional vulnerability, and intense performances, Prince subverts the typical macho image of male rock stars. His character embodies a blend of strength and sensitivity, challenging the audience’s perceptions of what it means to be a man in the music industry.

A Generational Curse, A Generational Call To Heal

On the other hand, Apollonia, The Kid’s love interest, represents a mix of independence and traditional femininity. While she aspires to forge her own path in the music world, her storyline also reflects the challenges women face in asserting their autonomy in a male-dominated industry. The film’s depiction of their relationship, marked by both passion and conflict, highlights the ongoing struggle for balance and equality between genders.

Painfully, as The Kid fosters a budding romance with Apollonia, he exacts the abusive nature of his father onto her. The Kid slaps Apollonia numerous times in the film, an instinctive reaction to his anger at her agreement to join Morris’ all-girl trio. While he’s opposed to the treatment he fears Morris will subject her to, he depicts the results of his father’s curse of hitting women. 

Later in the film, when The Kid looks to exact violent revenge on his father after another attack on his mother, he finds Francis playing piano in the basement. During a brief conversation between the two, in which Francis advises The Kid not to get married, the audience understands the bitterness and disappointment within Francis that led him to be violent towards his family, and later towards himself during a suicide attempt. 

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The generational curse that The Kid inherited from his father goes beyond just violent conflict resolution. The Kid later finds a collection of his father’s sheet music, and violently throws it around the basement in a rage. It’s in that moment we see that Francis passed down his musical gifts to his son as well, but his own unfulfilled potential embittered him, causing him to violently take out his frustrations on his family.

In Purple Rain, Francis passed fear and self-doubt onto The Kid. But through The Kid’s inherited musical talent, Apollonia’s love and the friendship he shared with his bandmates, was he finally able to begin the work to reverse the curse. We witness the beginnings of his redirection in the climatic live performance of the title track. We witness healing at time likely few in our community were thinking about the word, let alone the emotional work it calls us to.  Forty years on, Black men, though not universally by any measure, are beginning to consider taking the medicine Prince gave us so generously.

The Revolution That Was Prince

The  moniker of Prince’s / The Kid’s backing band, The Revolution, is the yarn and the loom upon which the real and fictionalized story is told. By showing us, not telling us, we experience Prince’s determination to challenge the sky-high barriers that stymied the movement and growth of Black / American music.  

By the mid-1980s, disco largely behind us now  and hip hop was still working its way through its tween years. lack music was R&B and House mostly. Of course there was funk too. But mixing all of them together wasn’t a thing record companies really understood other than it being akin to the rudeness of not staying in your delineated fast or slow lane.  

Prince saw lanes big enough to include all rates of motion. He wasn’t hip hop, but he was spoken word. He wasn’t rock-n-roll but he defined rock-n-roll’s electricity like no one since Jimi Hendrix.  He wasn’t Parliament but he mos def  brought the funk wherever he went. And the gospel, and the slow, sexy love songs. And he played at least 27 instruments, not including voice.

All that was on display aurally and visually in the film.

All of that was and is the power of the moniker, The Revolution. But the very concept of the word, revolution, telegraphed to the world that an uprising was on the horizon and it would challenge oppressive social norms and doctrines.

Keep Watching And Wait For It, Wait For It…

Whatever we could imagine the lyrics meant listening to the album Purple Rain, Prince’s use of film as both medium and message meant we could not  shield our eyes from what we knew but refused to address in the film: all that fullness of the human experience that whittled down gender roles and identities and then locked them in tiny, airless vacuum-sealed packaging when they lived and died alongside the generational traumas that kept leaving so many Black people desperate, destitute, depressed and, yes, even deranged.

Without flinching or squinting, Prince’s film forced us to confront truths that in the 1980s, had no name, no theory like we do today: toxic masculinity. In Black communities, the word androgyny was rarely, if ever, used. We knew flamboyance and knew men beat their women and children. But domestic violence was so often considered a private matter. Battered Wife Syndrome had been defined and included in the DSM but where was it applicable when the woman was Black?

This Was 1984

There was no Oprah on TV talking about domestic violence and physical and sexual abuse. There was no report from Mass General Brigham McLean, documenting that one in four women experienced intimate partner violence in America. The finding that “Children who grow up in the presence of domestic violence are more likely to experience it themselves once they reach adulthood wasn’t being pulled apart in public conversations.  Neither were we saying that “Boys from such environments are more likely to become perpetrators of violence.”

There were the words that at last now have been properly labeled as slurs. But there was no LGBTQIA+. There were ballrooms where people performed but no Billy Porters on all the red carpets, no Pose running for seasons on TV. There’d been David Bowie of course, and Mick Jagger but that was white world. In Black world, not even Little Richard occupied the space Prince opened up. Ours was a world of taboos, sometimes screams and then silence stretched out to the final point of strain.

Of equal importance–and power–is the film’s deep cultural and spiritual grounding. Yes, Purple Rain confronts  toxic masculinity, androgyny, flamboyance, and domestic violence. Yes, the conventional aspects of manhood are consistently questioned and contradicted. But in the tradition of almost all Black people almost everywhere,  Purple Rain demonstrates for us the capacity for redemption and forgiveness in the aftermath of violence and trauma.

Our Inheritance

This is why neither the film nor the album aren’t special just because of the music and the charismatic star. It’s special because it allows the viewer to feel genuine empathy for those who perpetrate toxic behavior. It’s easy to throw the baby out with the bath water, and there is no excuse for a man to put his hands on a woman. But this film not only reveals the true complexities behind what leads to abusive behavior but also the work that is required to reverse the generation’s curses, both from the perpetrators and the observers. 

The audience went from being angry at Francis to feeling pity for him. The Kid makes it difficult for the viewer to root for him throughout the film as he projects his fears and anger onto those who care for him. But once we see him take the steps to right his wrongs, we return to the fold, cheering on the young artist once more.

Chicago-Based Nonprofit The Healing Cultivates Safe Spaces For Black Men To Practice Wellness

Purple Rain, the film, was probably considered by those who invested in it, to be simply a vehicle to propel Prince in the real-world, to a new plateau of exposure and notoriety. It could have been a vanity project, as we see so many artists undertake today in big and small ways.

But the genius of Prince was so much more than his music. It was his courage. To center the taboo subject of what goes on behind Black doors, what goes on inside Black minds, hearts and spirits, what breaks them and what recreates them ever stronger, is barely the norm now, let alone then. We’re the people who refuse to  air dirty laundry like our lives depend on rather than appreciating the only our early deaths do.

This is what Prince understood, knew, confronted and was still working through as he drew in final breath in 2016. That is the full measure of the inheritance he shared with everyone of us if we cared to accept it and in accept it, ensure its growth and use in perpetuity.

SEE MORE:

The Scared And The Secular: 40 Years Ago Today Prince Blessed Us With His Album ‘Purple Rain’

WATCH: Rare Footage Unearthed Of Prince Recording ‘Purple Rain

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