Let's Go Crazy (23 page)

“Everybody was playing
Thriller
on tour, but he wouldn't talk about it and he wouldn't be playing it,” says Jill Jones. “If he did, he kept it on the down-low, and in those days, we weren't politically correct; Prince would laugh about somebody's rec­ord in a second. He was very competitive with ­Michael Jackson, but would he really admit it? No. He had to be the
different
black guy.”

According to journalist Ronin Ro's 2011 book
Prince: Inside the Music and the Masks
, Michael Jackson attended one of the Warner Bros. screenings of
Purple Rain
, leaving ten minutes before the end. “The music's okay, I guess,” he reportedly said to one of his entourage. “But I don't like Prince. He looks mean, and I don't like the way he treats women. He reminds me of some of my relatives. And not only that—the guy can't act at all. He's really not very good.”

When Prince and Jackson met in September of 1984 to discuss the possibility of collaborating, according to Jackson's lawyer John Branca, Prince freaked Jackson out by presenting him with a voodoo amulet. (“I never want to talk to that guy
again,” Jackson said to Branca.) Prince would resist Jackson's overtures to record the song “Bad” as a duet. “The first line of that song is ‘Your butt is mine,' ” he explained. “Who's gonna sing that to whom? Right there, we got a problem.” Years later, in the documentary
This Is It
, which chronicled Jackson's 2009 rehearsals for the series of concerts at London's O2 Arena that he did not live to perform, Jackson joked that if he didn't follow through on ideas that he dreamed up at night, God might give them to Prince.

In 1984, between record sales, the Victory tour, endorsements (including his record-breaking Pepsi deal), and numerous other business deals, Michael Jackson earned $91 million. In that same year—the most important, if not necessarily the most lucrative—of his career, Prince (who turned down an endorsement deal from Coca-Cola, which they offered after Jackson signed with the competition) took in $17 million. But Prince achieved something that Jackson dreamed of his entire life yet never accomplished: he became a movie star.

Prince and Michael Jackson weren't the only black figures who were changing lanes, breaking rules, and making history in 1984. The year marked a genuine revolution in terms of the ­visibility and impact of African Americans across popular culture. As Nelson George points out in 2010's
Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson
, “Michael was a harbinger.” Among the highlights of 1984, some of which seemed significant at the time, ­others only in retrospect: on January 4, Oprah ­Winfrey made her debut as a cohost of
A.M.
Chicago
; in February, Run-D.M.C.'s self-titled debut hit record stores, becoming the first rap
album to go gold; on June 19, the Chicago Bulls made Michael Jordan their number one choice in the NBA draft; on September 20,
The Cosby Show
debuted on NBC; in November, L. L. Cool J's “I Need a Beat,” catalogue number DJ001, was the first ­official release on Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin's new Def Jam label; and on December 5,
Beverly Hills Cop
opened, elevating Eddie Murphy from star to genuine superstar level.

Concurrently, Jesse Jackson was running for president, claiming the “Rainbow Coalition” as his constituency; widely dismissed when he announced his candidacy, Jackson won five primaries and caucuses before his own missteps (the infamous interview in which he referred to New York City as “Hymietown”) and lack of support from the Democratic party machine caught up with his campaign. Yet he left a significant impact on the national debate, as well as the voter rolls, and thus helped play a part in the election of multiple black candidates at the state and national levels over the coming years.

One remarkable aspect of these monumental figures is that while they all had their eyes on the mass market, they were also proudly and strongly black-identified. Writing in
The ­Village Voice
about the parallel phenomena of Prince, Murphy, and young jazz virtuoso Wynton Marsalis, Greg Tate stated that “right now black America's got more crossover acts happening than it's had since the '60s, and the funny thing is that they're all taking Babylon by storm in an era noticeably absent of agitation from the streets . . . unlike their forefathers, they've managed to make it to the mainstream without compromising their edge.”

Tate acknowledged the role that Michael Jackson played in this explosion of black culture for a general audience, but concluded that with
Purple Rain
, Prince had taken things even further. “Although Michael may have kicked the door in,” he wrote, “Prince done stormed the whole castle and come back handing the brothers and sisters the keys to the rock and roll kingdom.”

With MTV as a unified promotional front,
Thriller
illustrating the new and unprecedented heights that music could reach, and radio open to a more integrated version of pop, everything was in place for a remarkable moment. And 1984 did not fail to deliver. In 2012, Chris Molanphy wrote on NPR's website, “Widely agreed to be the greatest year for pop a generation ago, 1984 offered amazing variety on vinyl and represented a cultural peak for Top 40 radio.” And in 2014,
Rolling Stone
called it “pop's greatest year,” offering a list of the one hundred best songs of 1984 that was topped by “When Doves Cry” and featured no less than five Prince compositions (three
Purple Rain
singles, plus Chaka Khan's “I Feel for You” and Sheila E.'s “The Glamorous Life”) in their Top Ten.

Van Halen set the tone for the year. Perhaps the most popular hard rock group in America, they had proudly boasted of using no synthesizers on their previous albums. They titled their sixth record
1984
, added a synth part as the most prominent sound on the single “Jump,” and watched the song turn into the biggest hit of their career. What's overwhelming about the year's releases set end-to-end are the number of true blockbusters, how
many albums would have been the phenomenon of the year at any other time: Cyndi Lauper's
She's So Unusual
, Tina Turner's
Private Dancer
, ZZ Top's
Eliminator
. John Cougar Mellencamp's
Uh-Huh
marked the start of his transition from snotty young rocker to more mature singer-songwriter, especially when “Pink Houses” took off. It was the year that U2 cracked pop radio with their first Top 40 U.S. hit, “Pride (in the Name of Love),” and that Bon Jovi broke through with “Runaway.”

“Everything seemed to be getting bigger,” says Bob Merlis. “For the first time, the Warner Brothers record division eclipsed the film division for revenue—the company's biggest revenue source was now music. We knew it was bigger than it had ever been; it felt like something historic was happening. It was an era of great possibility, a lot of it realized by things like
Purple Rain
—well, as if there
were
other things like this; it really was the one.”

Several events demonstrated that there was a passing of generations under way. In April, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his father, an incomprehensible tragedy that seemed almost biblical. Coming so soon after John Lennon's death, it was a bracing reminder that the utopian dreams of the 1960s were long gone. In fact, the gestures and images of rock 'n' roll's greatest era (solidifying into the playlists of the classic-rock radio format at the time) had become so laughably clichéd that they fueled the definitive rock parody, the “mockumentary”
This Is Spinal Tap
, which was also released in 1984.

There was a new strain of underground rock emerging: sounds from the sloppy punk funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the literate moping of the Smiths debuted during the
year, as the nascent “college rock” of the time continued its journey toward the “alternative rock” explosion of the early '90s. And, of course, there was plenty of junk—some enjoyable, some not—that was also hugely popular in 1984, songs (often propelled by videos more compelling than the music) that were just as omnipresent but didn't have the same enduring appeal: it was also the year when Yes' “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Billy Idol's “Rebel Yell,” Huey Lewis and the News' “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” Deniece Williams's “Let's Hear It for the Boy,” and Duran Duran's “The Reflex” were in constant rotation. If that doesn't add up to a list of classics, it's certainly indicative of an impressive range of styles happening concurrently.

“Two things, I'd argue, produce good years for pop music: variety and shared pleasure,” wrote NPR's Molanphy, celebrating the “monoculture” of music in 1984. “For us in the pop world, it means the idea of a shared cultural experience—the Beatles-and-Motown AM radio of the mid-'60s or Michael Jackson's cross-cultural peak in 1983–84—and for years, many of us have been mourning its passing.”

That sense of music that everyone was aware of, that everyone had an opinion about and a relationship to, peaked during the summer with the battle for supremacy between
Born in the USA
and
Purple Rain
. In both cases, these albums represented an artist embracing his full potential as a pop stylist, striving to find a version of his music that would retain his essence yet connect with the greatest number of people possible. Bruce Springsteen utilized cleaner, more modern production on his new songs, put the musical hooks in the foreground (as in the '60s
pop records he loved), and worked out obsessively to resculpt his body. He dove full-on into the music videos he had scorned, frolicking with the young, unknown Courteney Cox at the end of the clip for “Dancing in the Dark” and allowing producer ­Arthur Baker to remix the song for a 12-inch dance single.

Yet Springsteen didn't abandon the fundamental themes of his writing—the struggles, economic and emotional, of the American working class; the attempt to maintain faith in justice and moral principles in the face of constant betrayal; the need for friendship and camaraderie during trying times. Despite the scathing protest of the often-misunderstood title song (famously quoted by President Reagan in a clumsy attempt to connect with young voters) and the despairing mood of songs like “Downbound Train” and “My Hometown,” the album spun off seven hit singles on its way to selling more than 15 million copies.

“I was very conscious of being an American musician and addressing the issues of the day,” Springsteen told me in 2006, looking back at his decision to pose in front of an American flag on the
Born in the USA
cover. “There was a sense that the flag was up for grabs, that you had the right to stake out your claim to its meaning and to the kind of country you wanted your kids to grow up in. I wanted to write music that was charting the ever-changing distance between American ideals and American truths, to explore what was happening in the middle, to be a creative voice in that discussion.”

Prince and Springsteen expressed admiration for each other's work. The Boss had come to check out a show on the
1999 tour in the spring of 1983, and the members of the Revolution recall that if Prince was quiet on the subject of Michael Jackson, he made clear that he respected Springsteen as a live performer.

The ascendance of
Purple Rain
and
Born in the USA
was a moment of pop music at its best. There was the usual tribal affiliation of fans claiming one artist or the other, but no one attains sales of more than 10 million without crossing a lot of boundaries. Whatever the eventual limitations of the grandiosity of the '80s, the universal connection that these two projects offered, testaments to blowing up without selling out, was an inspiration.

It was “[a] summer, then, of two albums by two titans with two different views of American experience,” wrote Rick Moody, “each of them very moving, each of them struggling for a response to all the trouble back in Washington.”

The summer of 1984 ended with an event that represented and encapsulated pop's new world order: on September 14, MTV's first Video Music Awards were held at New York's Radio City Music Hall. Herbie Hancock's “Rockit” and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police were the most-nominated clips, while the Cars' “You Might Think” won the prize for Video of the Year (the Prince and Springsteen albums came out too late for any of their videos to be eligible). David Bowie and Rod Stewart were among the performers, while a hodgepodge of artists from Diana Ross to Iggy Pop, the Go-Gos to Carly Simon, made appearances.

But really, there was only one thing most viewers remem
bered from that night, and it marked the true arrival of the final figure in the Mount Rushmore of '80s pop. For this was the night that Madonna sang her new single, “Like a Virgin,” while writhing on the ground in a wedding dress and flashing her undergarments. Her first album had been a success, starting on the dance/R&B side (her clear target, as her first single was released without a photograph on the sleeve in an attempt to ease the way onto black radio) and eventually reaching the Top Ten on the pop chart. But it was with the Nile ­Rodgers–produced
Like a Virgin
that Madonna would join Michael Jackson, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen as another defining act of the era.

“I remember in 1983, while we were making the
Purple Rain
movie, Prince said, ‘When a woman comes along and does what I do, she will rule the world,' ” says Susan Rogers. “And it wasn't long before Madonna did exactly what he did, and ruled the world.”

Springsteen and I spoke about the fact that
Rolling Stone
had put him on the cover of an issue celebrating the music of the 1980s, and he invoked this same Fab Foursome. “It easily could have been Michael Jackson or Prince or Madonna,” he says. “They were all massively influential. But using me, well, I suppose that's what I was aiming at. I was very aware that the people I was referencing were people who were not afraid to take on some history as part of their song and dance. I worked through [the eighties] to find my link in the chain of artists who were willing to do that—whether it was Woody ­Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Elvis or James Brown, Curtis Mayfield,
­Marvin Gaye. That was the kind of impact I was interested in having.”