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El-P on ‘Purple Rain’: ‘It Contains the DNA of Everything I Needed to Understand About Music’

This piece is part of our ongoing coverage of IndieLand’s newly updated 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Prince’s Purple Rain topped El-P’s personal ballot and landed at number eight on the overall list. Here, the Run the Jewels rapper reflects on how the album changed him as both an artist and as a person. (Go here to read the complete list of 500 Greatest Albums voters and learn more about how the current ranking was assembled.)

Purple Rain contains the DNA of everything I needed to understand about music. It doesn’t contain rap, but it’s still an amalgamation of everything that set me off.

I was nine years old. I saw the trailer for the movie — I wasn’t allowed to see the movie. But in the trailer, it had that scene where he’s slinking across the stage, licking his fingers, touching his nipple, and combing his hair, and I was just like, “What the fuck is this shit?” I had no fucking idea what it was. And I couldn’t see the movie because it was too risqué, but I could convince my mom to buy me the album. That was the loophole. Despite “Darling Nikki,” the song where I was like, “I should probably figure out masturbation.” [Laughs] “I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here, but I want a part of this.”

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Prince appealed to my idea, or the mystery of what it might be like to be an adult. Prince was the guy that made me want to grow up so I could understand what the fuck he was talking about.

It was Hendrix guitar over LinnDrum machines — it was soul, rock, and funk, but also it was other shit that hadn’t been combined before. There’s a reason why people across every genre fuck with Prince: There are ideas in the music that are not re-creatable, but lend themselves to some direction. You could take a fragment of what he was doing and build an entire sound on it. People could make their entire musical careers based on a couple of moments on that record.

When Prince is one of your big first musical impressions, the idea of rules seems silly. It’s not like, “What if I were risqué and I took different things that sounded different and put them together?” If Prince is your first hero, that’s not something you worry about

The crescendo of “Beautiful Ones” — “Do you want him or do you want me? Because I want you” — I remember as a kid, just chills going down my spine. Feeling what he was saying and understanding the power of what he was doing — without understanding how he got there. Because I didn’t have any personal experiences that would ever lead me to that moment. But it’s so powerful. I was just like, “Goddamn, not only is this unbelievable music, but that’s kind of my prototype of what I think a man is supposed to be.”

I could tell that there was somehow honor and passion in what he was saying. I could feel how powerful it was, but I didn’t comprehend why, I didn’t comprehend the scenario — and yet, here I am, a young boy, getting my heart sort of fucked. [Laughs] And being like, “Whoa, there’s a world of emotion opening up and I almost recognize it” — but how could I recognize it because I haven’t even had it yet?

That’s what he did for me. As a young kid, he threw me into zones of feeling that I hadn’t identified before that were being triggered by music. Before that point, everything felt pretty straightforward. I loved a lot of music, but none of it was mysterious to me. Prince was mysterious. And he still is.

As told to Jon Blistein

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