Returning to Lake Minnetonka

The July issue of Spin (curiously, available at newsstands but not up online yet) has a 25th anniversary retrospective on Prince's Purple Rain. The article is a kind of oral history of the album and the film, with contributions from a lot of the people around Prince at the time. ?uestlove is also interviewed to shed some light on the topic and says . . . well, I'll just quote him.

"Purple Rain really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it that way or not. You have Prince himself, a very unusual-looking figure, five feet tall--pretty much anybody considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of odd physical feature, i.e., Biggie's lazy eye."

What?

Anyway, to go along with the magazine story, Spin commissioned a tribute album, in which 9 bands covered the 9 songs from Purple Rain. You can download it for free starting tomorrow. I guess they're trying to make it like a physical record and not releasing it until Tuesday (or Monday at midnight).

The man himself, not surprisingly, did not participate in the Spin article. As Spin editor Doug Brod said: "We did a full court press to get Prince himself involved. He's a pretty tough guy to get a hold of, and he doesn't dwell much on nostalgia." Only the rest of us do that.