SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Forty years ago, Prince's acting debut unleashed a storm.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PURPLE RAIN")
PRINCE: (Singing) I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain, purple rain, purple rain...
DETROW: The Oscar-winning film cemented Prince's status as a cultural icon. And one professor says the film and the moment in which it was made are worthy of a closer look, so much so that he designed a course on it at the University of Minnesota. It's called Prince, Porn and Public Space: The Cultural Politics of Minnesota in the '80s. And as you might have picked up at this point, the conversation we're about to have will get into several of those topics. It was designed by Elliott Powell, who teaches at the university and joins me now. Welcome.
ELLIOTT POWELL: Thank you so much, Scott.
DETROW: What's the gist of the course, though? What is it that you thought was worthy of a focus, and what are the big ideas you want your students to leave the semester with?
POWELL: One of the things that I really wanted to do when I arrived at the University of Minnesota is really ensure that I am thinking a lot about place here. And I knew that the City of Minneapolis had a very rich history. Of course, Prince becomes, as you already mentioned, a cultural icon in the 1980s, but there were other things happening in Minneapolis during the same period. In particular, really, Minneapolis, starting at the end of 1983 and going into 1984, became the first city to have a city council pass a ban on pornography. And what we saw after that piece of legislation passed was that other cities across the nation began to either adopt a similar model or start to have conversations about what they could do as it relates to pornography. And so I started to think about - what are these kinds of connections between really sort of music culture and sex that are happening on a local level in Minneapolis, but that are also happening on a national kind of ripple effect?
DETROW: And probably perhaps in the history of the world, nobody has brought...
POWELL: Yes.
DETROW: ...Music, culture and sex together more than Prince. But (laughter)...
POWELL: Of course, yes.
DETROW: And we took a look at your syllabus, and the first song you start with isn't "Purple Rain." It's "Darling Nikki."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DARLING NIKKI")
PRINCE: (Singing) She took me to her castle, and I just couldn't believe my eyes. She had so many devices, everything that money could buy. She said, sign your name on the dotted line. The lights went out, and Nikki started to grind.
DETROW: I was going to ask, why start there? But hearing your explanation for the chorus and hearing those lyrics again, I guess it's self-explanatory. But what is it about that song that jumps out to you as - this is the starting point?
POWELL: So obviously, with "Darling Nikki," we have Prince making allusions or explicit sets of commentary around sex and sexuality. And one of the more interesting things that actually happens as it relates to that song is that that song becomes the focus of Tipper Gore, of course, the wife of Al Gore. After she hears this song while listening to the "Purple Rain" album with her daughter, she becomes very concerned with how sets of musics might be available to children.
And so she and some of her friends start something called the Parents Music Resource Center, also known as the PMRC. They start to dub Prince and his contemporaries as porn rockers. That is their term. And so they start to think about and very much label these kind of connections between music and sex culture. Tipper Gore and the PMRC are coming off the heels of Minneapolis passing this anti-porn ban. And so this is how they're thinking about pornography not simply through a lens of really the visual, but they're making a connection to music.
DETROW: What are some of the key themes you keep hearing at the end of the semester when you're hearing what students took away from this, or what they think of Prince if they didn't know that much about Prince going in?
POWELL: So one of the key things that students take away at the end of the class is very much an understanding around the kind of breadth of Prince's music and artistry. So they get to understand Prince as a songwriter, as a producer, as a multi-instrumentalist. A funny, I think, story that I will also tell is when students watch "Purple Rain," often students will want to talk about their surprise at how bad of a kisser Prince was on screen. They're very confused by this because they're like, we've only heard that Prince was, you know, this sex icon.
DETROW: Yeah.
POWELL: And yet on screen, they were like, these kissing scenes are so uncomfortable. And so that's one of the kind of comments that they often make is that he's a sex - you know, he's a sex icon, and yet he seems like he cannot actually kiss on screen.
DETROW: What's your explanation for that?
POWELL: I just kind of tell students, you know, Prince is still kind of, I think, struggling with what it means to be intimate on screen. So that's how I try to talk about it. I don't think that students buy it. But that's kind of what they end up saying.
DETROW: We're having this conversation because, like I said, it's the 40th anniversary of "Purple Rain." Other than bad kissing scenes, what do you think the legacy of this movie is? Why do you think this movie still matters today?
POWELL: One of the reasons that "Purple Rain" still matters today is - and I'm thinking about the aftermath of Prince's passing here - for those who never got a chance to see Prince in concert, "Purple Rain" gives them that chance. A second thing that I think is really important on a very local level is that "Purple Rain" - and I don't think this gets discussed enough - is very much a movie that is centered in Minneapolis...
DETROW: Yeah.
POWELL: ...But it's told through Black characters and other characters of color. If you think about the film and you think about the stars of the film, the stars are either Black people or other people of color. The dialogue is either with Black people, people of color or women. I'm thinking here about Wendy & Lisa. And of course, in that film, Wendy & Lisa - there's a kind of lesbian subtext that's also happening in the film. "Purple Rain" ends up telling a story around Minneapolis through, really, people of color, through women, through LGBTQ+ folks. That's a different kind of narrative. It's a narrative that challenges things that that we assume about Minneapolis, that we assume about Minnesota, that we assume about the Midwest. And I think that's really, really crucial when we watch a film like "Purple Rain."
DETROW: That's a really good point. Elliott Powell is a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Thank you so much.
POWELL: Thank you so much, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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