Day After Day: Pop Life

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Pop Life

People who say they have no regrets are full of crap. Everybody's got regrets, but the difference is how much you let them affect you. I don't particularly get hung up on regrets, but I definitely wish I had gone to see Prince in concert before he passed in 2016.

My gateway to Prince was "Little Red Corvette" off the 1999 album, which came out in '82. I was a teenage metalhead at the time; loved me some Maiden, Priest, Sabbath, etc. But it was hard to escape Prince on the radio and on TV. We were living in the small city of Richland in Washington state at the time, so the radio options were limited. We didn't get MTV on our cable system, but I would see "Little Red Corvette" and "1999" on the USA Network's "Night Flight" show. This was Prince's fifth album, but I had been blissfully ignorant of him to that point. But it was hard to escape his singular brilliance. Singing, songwriting, playing all the instruments, the guy had it all.

A few years later, the "Purple Rain" album and movie blew up and Prince became a megastar. I enjoyed it but I still held back--I didn't buy the album and definitely missed that Purple Rain tour. Prince could have made Purple Rain 2 and kept the train rolling, but he decided to go in a different direction. Instead of the commercial combination of R&B, funk and rock, he went with psychedelia and varied instrumentation. He seemed to pull back from the spotlight, releasing only one video, for "Raspberry Beret." He asked Warner Bros. to release the album with little publicity. Nevertheless, Around the World in a Day hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart. 

"Raspberry Beret" got a lot of attention, but "Pop Life" seemed to have a lower profile, at least to me, anyway. It ended up hitting #7 on the singles chart, but with no video, it definitely had less impact. But what a great song. It's about the trappings of celebrity. "What you putting in your nose?/Is that where your money goes?"

Propelled by a funky slap bass line, "Pop Life" is super tight and catchy as hell. Prince is accompanied by Lisa Coleman on vocals and the song also features a sample that was reportedly of Prince getting booed while opening a stadium show for the Rolling Stones a year earlier. It's the best song on Around the World in a Day, no contest.

Prince had his ups and downs in the years that followed, peaking with the Sign o' the Times double album in '87. There was the Batman soundtrack, the New Power Generation, changing his name to a symbol and 16 post-2000 studio albums that kinda came and went. One of these days I'm going to dig into them but it's a bit intimidating. After his death, I picked up the early albums that I didn't own like Controversy and Dirty Mind. He was so prolific that there are hundreds of hours of unreleased recording in the Prince vaults that are slowly being released. Ultimately, the Pop Life won out in the end, but what a legacy.