Dearly Beloved: The Battles Behind Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’

It begins like a funeral. A church organ drones, swollen and slow, and a preacher’s voice rises over it: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” For nearly a minute, “Let’s Go Crazy” behaves like a eulogy — and then the drum machine detonates, the guitars come down like a dropped chandelier, and the eulogy turns into the most joyous riot in pop history. Released in the summer of 1984 as the opening track of Purple Rain — the first sound of the album, and the first sound of the film — it became Prince’s second number-one single in America, topping the pop, R&B and dance charts simultaneously. It opened the Purple Rain Tour every night. Two decades later it opened the greatest Super Bowl halftime show ever staged. It is, by common consent, the definitive Prince overture: the sermon before the storm.

But an overture this confident was not born confident. It was fought for at almost every stage of its long life. Its central riff may not even be Prince’s — a friend and photographer maintained, decades later, that he had stumbled onto it while jamming and given it away for the price of an advance album. The song was recorded twice in four days in August 1983, once live in a Minneapolis club on the night a teenage guitarist debuted in the band, and once in a suburban warehouse, as Prince raced to build an album and a film at the same time. The finished master was then cut down by nearly three minutes so another song could squeeze onto the album. Its B-side became a scandal of its own. And a quarter-century after its release, “Let’s Go Crazy” went to court — not over anything Prince did, but because a mother in Pennsylvania filmed her baby dancing to it, and the resulting lawsuit rewrote the rules of fair use for the entire internet. A sermon, a riot, and a landmark legal case: these are the battles behind “Let’s Go Crazy”.

The Riff That Cost an Advance Copy

Most Prince songs have exactly one author, and he was famously litigious about the fact. “Let’s Go Crazy” carries a footnote. According to Allen Beaulieu — Prince’s photographer and friend, who stated it publicly in 2018 and whose account is recorded by Prince Vault — the song’s basic riff came out of a jam session between Beaulieu and Prince in the fall of 1982. Beaulieu, likely not realizing Prince would build a song on it, asked in return only for an advance copy of the 1999 album. If the story is true, it may be the worst trade in music history: the guitar figure that would open the defining album of the decade, exchanged for a free record that was about to be everywhere anyway. Prince Vault treats the claim with scholarly caution, and the song’s authorship is registered with ASCAP to Prince alone — the single’s label may have credited Prince and the Revolution, but the paperwork says Prince. The Beaulieu story survives as a reminder that even in the most controlled creative empire in pop, the raw materials sometimes walked in off the street.

What is documented beyond dispute is when the idea became a song. On May 18, 1983, at Prince’s Kiowa Trail home studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota, the basic idea for “Let’s Go Crazy” was committed to tape — a demo-stage recording, the riff parked in the workshop while bigger machinery assembled around it. The summer of 1983 was the season Prince stopped being merely a pop star with a film dream and became a production line: Warner Bros. had agreed, reluctantly, to finance a major motion picture starring him, putting up a budget of some $7 million, and he had told the label, in effect, that the movie deal was the price of his signature — finance the film or lose him. Over a hundred songs were written for the project; nine would make the album. “Let’s Go Crazy” was being groomed for the most exposed position of all: the beginning. Whatever opens an album and a film simultaneously has to declare the whole enterprise in its first minute. Prince built it like a man who knew that.

There is a pleasing symbolism in the song’s gestation, because “Let’s Go Crazy” is, lyrically, a sermon about refusing despair — an exhortation, as scholars of his work have noted, to follow Christian ethics and live fully before the “de-elevator” (read: the Devil, trying to bring you down) takes you to the netherworld. A riff nobody owned, found in a jam, became the vehicle for the most generous-spirited lyric Prince ever put on a hit single. The battles over who made it matter less than what he made of it. But the battles were only beginning.

One Night at First Avenue

On August 3, 1983, Prince and the Revolution played a benefit concert for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at First Avenue, the Minneapolis club that would become the film’s beating heart. It is one of the most consequential club gigs ever played. That night, with engineers David Z. and Susan Rogers capturing the show, the band recorded live versions of “Purple Rain”, “I Would Die 4 U” and “Baby I’m a Star” that — with overdubs and edits — became the closing sequence of the album itself, Prince’s first use of live recordings on a record. And they also recorded “Let’s Go Crazy”, live, four days before its studio version existed. The song was road-tested in public before it was ever properly tracked: the overture was premiered as a performance.

The night carried a second debut. The First Avenue show was the first Revolution performance by guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who had just replaced the departing Dez Dickerson. Melvoin was nineteen, one half — with her childhood friend Lisa Coleman — of the band’s harmonic and visual signature, and she was being thrown into the deep end at the exact moment the project turned into a film production. Listen to what the Revolution was becoming that summer and you hear the album’s whole argument: a band, not a backing unit. Doctor Fink would later say of the sessions that there was “a lot of influence and input from band members towards what [Prince] was doing”, and Melvoin recalled that the musicians were “absolute musical equals in the sense that Prince respected us, and allowed us to contribute to the music without any interference”. The “Let’s Go Crazy” that emerged from that week is a band record in its bones — credited to Prince and the Revolution, produced by Prince and the Revolution — even though its author held the pen alone.

There was practical pressure, too, of the unglamorous kind. The film’s performance sequences were to be shot at First Avenue that autumn; the band had to look and sound like the greatest live act in America on cue, for cameras, on a schedule. Rehearsing a new guitarist, cutting an album, and inventing a movie band simultaneously is the kind of workload that breaks groups. The Revolution instead fused. The First Avenue recording of “Let’s Go Crazy” sits in the vault as an unreleased version; the song would be remade within the week. But the blueprint — sermon, explosion, solos, release — was fixed that night, in front of a hometown crowd, by a band playing the most important club show of its life.

Four Days Later, in a Warehouse

On August 7, 1983 — four days after First Avenue, and one day before the band tracked “Computer Blue” — Prince and the Revolution cut the master of “Let’s Go Crazy” at the Warehouse in St. Louis Park, the Minneapolis suburb whose rehearsal complex served as the project’s headquarters. The personnel on the released recording is the classic Revolution in full: Prince on lead and backing vocals, lead guitar, piano and drum programming; Wendy Melvoin on rhythm guitar; Lisa Coleman and Doctor Fink on Oberheim synthesizers; Brown Mark on bass; Bobby Z. behind a hybrid kit of acoustic drums, the Linn LM-1 drum machine, Simmons electronic drums and a Pearl Syncussion. It is a lineup you can hear thinking in two eras at once — a rock band wired into a machine.

The sound they built is worth dissecting, because its construction is the song’s real subject: control and chaos in harness. It opens with that funeral organ solo and Prince’s eulogy, words overlapping each other in the mix on the single version, a preacher warming to his text. Then the track detonates into its distinctive drum-machine pattern — the LM-1 programmed with a clattering, syncopated insistence — over which Prince layers electronic drums, bass, whirring synthesizers and not one but two lead guitar solos, both his, before a climactic drum outro slams the door. Genre-tagging the result has kept critics busy for forty years: hard rock, funk rock, glam rock, garage rock have all been applied, and Cash Box settled it best at the time, calling the song “one of the finest fusions of jump rock and synth pump.” The A.V. Club’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine, ranking Prince’s essential songs in 2023, went further: “the hardest rocker Prince ever cut”, a record on which the Purple One preaches that we had “better live now before the grim reaper comes knocking on your door”.

That sermon matters to the song’s staying power. Prince’s lyric is not party music wearing a costume; it is a genuine piece of theology in miniature, the same faith that would run through his entire career. He addresses the congregation — us — as “dearly beloved”, warns that the elevator going down is a one-way temptation, and prescribes joy as a form of resistance. The purple banana aside, the call to find the “purple banana” until they put us in the truck — the hearse — is pure Prince: the sacred and the ridiculous sharing a couplet. In 1983, as the track was cut in a warehouse while a film crew prepared to turn this band into mythology, the sermon had an immediate local meaning too. This was a group of young unknowns about to be asked to carry a $7 million gamble. Get through this thing called life, indeed. Let’s go crazy, as a working method.

The Three Minutes That Were Sacrificed

The version of “Let’s Go Crazy” the world knows is not the version Prince finished. The full recording — the performance as tracked at the Warehouse, with its long instrumental middle intact: a chugging guitar riff, an atonal piano solo, muddled samples of the spoken introduction folded back into itself — runs seven minutes and thirty-five seconds. That complete version stood as the album’s opener on early configurations of Purple Rain assembled on November 7, 1983, and again on March 23, 1984. It is the version heard, slightly edited, in the film, where the song opens the story in a blaze of First Avenue stagecraft. But on the final album configuration of April 14, 1984, the track was edited down to four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. The reason was arithmetic. Prince had decided to include “Take Me with U” — a duet written for the Apollonia 6 album and reclaimed for the film — and a vinyl LP in 1984 held only so many minutes. Something had to give, and what gave was the middle of his opening track. Edits were made at Sunset Sound on March 22, 1984, and the full-length recording was exiled to the twelve-inch single, where it was marketed as the “Special Dance Mix” — a dance mix that was, in truth, simply the song as originally made.

The single edit cut deeper still. The seven-inch version, at three minutes and forty-six seconds, uses an alternate beginning with a shortened “Dearly beloved” speech; cross-fade edits for it were prepared at Sunset Sound on June 5, 1984. So by the time the song reached the public that summer, it existed in three official sizes: the single’s tight sermonette, the album’s four-and-three-quarter minutes, and the full seven-and-a-half-minute ceremony reserved for the film and the twelve-inch. Each edit was a small battle between Prince the album artist, who thought in arcs, and the marketplace, which thought in radio clocks — and, unusually for him, the battles split the honours. Radio got its edit; posterity got the album cut; and the complete recording eventually resurfaced in full on the Ultimate compilation in 2006 and on the Deluxe editions of Purple Rain, where modern listeners can finally hear the piano solo Prince sacrificed to make room for a duet.

There is no bitterness in the outcome, only irony. The cut material was not filler; the atonal piano break is one of the strangest, most exhilarating passages on any Prince record, a moment where the sermon briefly loses its mind entirely. That it was trimmed for space, not quality, says everything about the constraints of the vinyl age — and about how much music Prince was generating in 1983–84 that even his masterpieces had to queue for room.

Opening the Film, Opening the Era

Purple Rain, the album, was released on June 25, 1984, the soundtrack to a film that followed that summer and turned a regional phenomenon into a generation’s defining star. “Let’s Go Crazy” was where both began. In the film, the opening performance — the Revolution tearing through the song at First Avenue, Prince in ruffles and heels conducting the room like a revival meeting — is the thesis statement of the entire movie: before any plot, before the Kid’s pain and pride, the audience must understand what this band can do to a room. Albert Magnoli’s camera barely needs to move. The song does the work.

As a single, it was held back a deliberate beat. The album’s lead single was “When Doves Cry”, released in May, which became Prince’s first American number one and the best-selling single of 1984. “Let’s Go Crazy” followed on July 18, 1984, carrying a B-side that ignited a controversy of its own: “Erotic City”, a duet with Sheila E. whose murmured hook half of America heard as an obscenity and the other half heard as “we can funk until the dawn” — a genuinely ambiguous recording that radio largely could not touch and clubs could not resist. The pairing was Prince in miniature: a sermon on the A-side, a scandal on the B, each selling the other.

The sermon won its battle outright. By the end of September 1984, “Let’s Go Crazy” stood at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for two weeks — Prince’s second consecutive chart-topper — and it simultaneously topped Billboard’s Hot Black Singles and Hot Dance Club Play charts, a triple coronation spanning the segregated geography of American radio: pop, Black and club audiences, all claimed at once. It was certified gold by the RIAA. Abroad, it reached number two in Canada and the top ten in Britain — number seven, issued there as a double A-side with “Take Me with U” — as well as the top twenty across Europe, Australia and New Zealand. On Billboard’s year-end Top Pop Singles tally for 1984, the year of Purple Rain, it placed at number twenty-one. Prince and the Revolution now had the number-one album in America, a hit film, and an opening track that functioned as a national anthem for the purple congregation.

The Sermon and the Scandal Around It

No account of the song’s battles is complete without the storm that gathered around its parent album — because “Let’s Go Crazy”, the album’s moral voice, spent its chart life as the respectable face of a record under moral attack. The Purple Rain album drew complaints for the sexual explicitness of the “When Doves Cry” video, which network executives deemed too explicit for television, and, more consequentially, for the lyrics of “Darling Nikki”, which so alarmed Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center that the episode contributed directly to the adoption of Parental Advisory stickers on albums. The PMRC’s campaign would define the politics of pop for a decade. And in the middle of it stood Prince’s catalogue, accused of corrupting the youth of America — while its biggest rock single was, on inspection, a Sunday-school exhortation to resist the Devil and cherish life.

The contradiction was not lost on Prince, who spent his career insisting that the sacred and the sensual were not enemies but neighbours — that the same God who made the body made the spirit that had to govern it. “Let’s Go Crazy” is the purest statement of that philosophy ever to top the charts: a gospel sermon delivered at hard-rock volume by a man the censors were simultaneously trying to sticker into silence. The song’s defenders could simply play it for the prosecution. Whatever else the album contained, its opening track was a preacher warning the congregation, over a Linn drum machine, that the elevator to the netherworld makes only one stop.

Time has sided with the sermon. Purple Rain spent twenty-four consecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200, sold some twenty-five million copies worldwide, won Prince and the Revolution Grammy Awards for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and Best Score Soundtrack, and was eventually inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. The sticker war faded into a cautionary tale about moral panics. And every copy of the album, in every format, in every decade, still opens the same way: an organ, a eulogy, and an explosion.

The Overture Takes the Road

Prince understood before anyone that “Let’s Go Crazy” was not merely a song but a machine for starting evenings. When the Purple Rain Tour opened at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena in November 1984, the show opened with it — the eulogy rolling out over arena darkness, the band detonating on cue — and it held the opening slot across a tour of ninety-eight shows that sold 1.7 million tickets and ended at Miami’s Orange Bowl in April 1985. The definitive document of that era is the March 30, 1985 performance at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, broadcast live by satellite and filmed for the Grammy-nominated concert release Prince and the Revolution: Live — reissued in remixed, remastered form in 2022 — where “Let’s Go Crazy” opens the film of the concert just as it opened the album, the film and the tour.

What is remarkable in Prince Vault’s performance records is the song’s unbroken service record. First performed live at that First Avenue benefit on August 3, 1983, it was still in his sets more than three decades later: a fixture of the Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy tours, of the Diamonds and Pearls era, of the Musicology comeback, of the twenty-one nights at London’s O2 in 2007, of the Welcome 2 tours on three continents. In 2013, with his all-woman band 3rdEyeGirl, he rebuilt it as the slower, heavier “Let’s Go Crazy Reloaded”, interpolating Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” into its frame and streaming rehearsal footage from Paisley Park — a fifty-something’s deliberate raid on his own overture. Its last documented live performance came on February 21, 2016, at the State Theatre in Sydney, Australia, during the Piano & A Microphone period — the sermon still being preached, alone at the piano this time, two months before its author’s death.

Very few hit singles survive thirty-three years of their creator’s setlists; fewer still survive as openers, the most demanding slot in any show, the moment when an audience must be seized. “Let’s Go Crazy” was designed for seizure — that was its job in the film, on the album and on tour — and it never stopped doing the job. The overture outlasted the opera’s original cast, its composer’s many reinventions, and eventually its composer. That is not nostalgia. That is engineering.

Grammys, the Hall, and the Rain

Three performances in the 2000s fixed the song’s place in the permanent record, and each was a kind of coronation. The first came on February 8, 2004, when Prince opened the 46th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles with Beyoncé, in a medley that ran from “Purple Rain” through “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Baby I’m a Star” into her own “Crazy in Love” — the reigning queen of the new century formally receiving the torch from the king of the old one, on his song’s terms, in his song’s opening slot. Five weeks later, on March 15, 2004, Prince was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, introduced by Alicia Keys and Outkast’s Big Boi and André 3000 — and he opened the entire ceremony the only way he knew how: “Dearly beloved”, then a medley of “Let’s Go Crazy”, “Sign o’ the Times”, a breath of “Soul Man” and “Kiss”, before returning at the night’s end to detonate his now-legendary guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in tribute to fellow inductee George Harrison. The hall of fame had come to him; he responded by preaching the sermon one more time.

The third coronation is the one the whole world saw. On February 4, 2007, at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Prince headlined the Super Bowl XLI halftime show — a twelve-minute performance now ranked the greatest halftime show of all time by Billboard, Rolling Stone, CBS Sports, Vulture and essentially every other jury empaneled on the question. After an introductory fanfare built on Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, Prince rose on a stage elevator, in a turquoise suit on a stage shaped like his own symbol, and played “Let’s Go Crazy” — the first full song of the set, with an ad-libbed call-and-response worked into it, before the Florida A&M Marching 100 joined for a medley and the rains came down for “Purple Rain”. It was the first rain in halftime history; there were live electric guitars, high heels, a soaked symbol-stage, and real hazard. Those involved later reported that Prince, informed of the downpour, asked if they could “make it rain harder”. His album sales more than doubled in the week that followed, his digital sales jumped from 59,000 to 102,000 tracks, and his Amazon sales rose by some 700 percent.

The pattern held abroad, too. At the BRIT Awards in London on February 15, 2006, Prince closed his appearance with a four-song medley that travelled from new material through “Purple Rain” and landed, as his biggest evenings so reliably did, on “Let’s Go Crazy” — the British industry on its feet for the same warehouse recording. And at the hinge of the century itself, when Prince staged his millennial pay-per-view concert, Rave Un2 the Year 2000, at Paisley Park on December 18, 1999 — the year his own “1999” had prophesied since 1982 — the sermon was in the set, the preacher greeting the future he had spent two decades predicting. Other artists’ signature songs become obligations. Prince kept treating this one as an instrument: wherever the occasion was largest, the eulogy came out.

Consider the through-line. Madison Square Garden or a Minneapolis club, 1984 or 2007: when the stakes were highest and the audience largest, Prince reached for the same four minutes. The Grammy comeback, the Hall of Fame induction, the most-watched concert slot on earth — each began with the song he had cut in a warehouse in August 1983, the overture doing its original job on ever-grander stages. Songs are rarely load-bearing structures. This one held up a career’s biggest nights for twenty-three years without cracking.

One Song, Three Radios

Underneath all the song’s other fights runs the one that defined Prince’s whole career: the fight over which America he belonged to. American radio in 1984 was a segregated map. There were Black stations and pop stations and rock stations, and the industry sorted artists onto them by race and genre with bureaucratic confidence. Prince had spent his career refusing the sorting. 1999 had forced its way onto pop radio and MTV; Purple Rain was designed, from its band to its artwork, as an occupation of every territory at once — a Black auteur fronting an integrated, mixed-gender band, making music engineered to be un-fileable. “Let’s Go Crazy” was the occupation’s spearhead, and its chart record is the sound of the map being redrawn.

Read the peaks as battle reports. The song reached number one on the Hot 100 — the pop chart. It reached number one on Hot Black Singles — the R&B chart, its home turf holding firm. It reached number one on Hot Dance Club Play — the clubs, where Prince’s earliest cult had formed. And then, the statistic that would have been unthinkable for a Minneapolis funk artist five years earlier: it climbed to number nineteen on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, the preserve of album-rock radio and guitar bands. A song could top the Black chart or crack rock radio in 1984. Doing both, at once, with the same recording — a sermon over a drum machine, played by a band with two women guitarists and keyboardists in a genre that treated synthesizers as heresy — was not supposed to happen. It happened because the record was engineered to be undeniable in each dialect: the LM-1 groove for the clubs and R&B radio, the twin lead guitars and garage-band attack for the rock programmers, the eulogy hook for everybody.

The band itself was part of the argument, and Prince knew it. The Revolution’s very billing on the album — the first of his records credited to “Prince and the Revolution” rather than to Prince alone — announced that this was a group in the rock sense, with an identity the film then broadcast worldwide: Black and white, male and female, funk-literate and rock-convicted. Wendy Melvoin’s rhythm guitar and Lisa Coleman’s keyboards were not decoration; on “Let’s Go Crazy” the Oberheims whirr at the center of the mix and the rhythm guitar drives the verses. Rock critics responded in kind. Rolling Stone would come to describe the track as a glam-garage rocker, The A.V. Club as the hardest rocker its author ever cut — the critical vocabulary of rock, applied without qualification to a record that was simultaneously number one with Black audiences. That simultaneity was the victory Prince had been fighting for since Dirty Mind: not crossover as dilution, but crossover as annexation, on his own terms, in both directions at once.

It is worth remembering how temporary such victories usually are. The industry re-sorted itself soon enough; the late 1980s rebuilt the walls with new genre labels. But “Let’s Go Crazy” remains on the record books as the moment the sorting failed — four minutes in which American radio’s three separate kingdoms all crowned the same song in the same season. Prince didn’t ask any of them for permission. He just gathered them, dearly beloved, in one room.

The Dancing Baby Goes to Court

The strangest battle in the song’s history began in 2007, in Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, with twenty-nine seconds of home video. Stephanie Lenz, a writer and editor, filmed her thirteen-month-old son dancing in the family kitchen to “Let’s Go Crazy” — audible, tinny and half-buried under toddler noise — and posted the clip to YouTube. Four months later, Universal Music Group, which administered the song’s publishing, issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown, and YouTube removed the video. Lenz, backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pushed back: the clip was an obvious fair use, and she demanded its restoration. It took six weeks to return. She then sued Universal, arguing the company had acted in bad faith by ordering the removal of a video it had never seriously assessed.

The case — Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., the “dancing baby” case — became the most important fair-use fight of the internet age, and it was fought, at every hearing, over Prince’s song. In August 2008, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled that copyright holders cannot order a deletion without first determining whether the use is fair. In 2015, the federal appeals court affirmed the principle: Universal was required to consider fair use before sending its takedown notice. The practical consequence reaches far beyond one toddler. Every automated takedown system, every platform review process, every creator who has ever relied on fair use operates in a legal landscape that this kitchen video reshaped — and it reshaped it because the song in the background was one a mother reached for, instinctively, as the sound of a child’s joy.

There is a rich irony here, and Prince, one suspects, would have felt both sides of it. He was among the most control-minded artists who ever lived about his own recordings — a man whose estate-era caution about video is precisely why verifying clips of his work takes care to this day. Yet the song of his that ended up defending the little guy’s right to post was this one, his most communal creation, the sermon addressed to everybody. The courts did not rule on the music. But the music chose the case: nobody sues, all the way to a federal appeals court, over a song that doesn’t matter to people. “Let’s Go Crazy” mattered enough to fight about for a decade. The baby, presumably, kept dancing.

Why It Endures

Why does this of all openers endure — not as a period piece, but as a living ritual, covered and quoted and reached for whenever a room needs raising? Start with the construction. It is two masterpieces bolted together: a eulogy that functions as a invocation — pop’s most famous spoken introduction, a piece of liturgy any listener on earth can recite — and a hard-rock detonation that Erlewine calls the hardest rocker Prince ever cut, a fusion Cash Box praised in 1984 as one of the finest ever of “jump rock and synth pump”. Rolling Stone’s Joe Levy, surveying Prince’s essential albums, filed it as the “glam-garage rocker” at the head of his greatest record. The song’s afterlife in numbers matches the critics: after Prince’s death in April 2016, it re-charted on the Hot 100, climbing to number twenty-five by the chart of May 14, 2016, and by April 30 of that year its digital sales stood at 964,403 copies in the United States alone — a thirty-two-year-old single selling like a new release in a country saying goodbye.

But numbers and notices are the residue, not the cause. The cause is the sermon itself. “Let’s Go Crazy” is the rare party record with a philosophy, and its philosophy — get through this thing called life together, refuse the elevator going down, live now before the grim reaper comes knocking — is precisely calibrated to the moments at which the song keeps being summoned: beginnings. Albums, films, tours, comeback ceremonies, championship games, a career’s resurrection and a nation’s mourning all start the same way, with somebody having to say the first true thing. Prince wrote that first true thing in a Minneapolis warehouse in the summer of 1983, built it from a riff a friend may have given him for the price of a free LP, cut it down to fit a duet onto an LP, watched it preach its way to number one on three charts at once, and then spent thirty-three years opening doors with it.

That is the whole story in one sentence, and it is why the song will outlive us all. The beret girl got a story; the congregation got a liturgy. Whenever the organ swells and that voice leans in — dearly beloved — the room still comes to attention, exactly as it did at First Avenue. The battle was never really about charts or courts. It was about whether joy could be a discipline, preached as seriously as grief. Prince settled the question in four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, and the answer keeps starting the show.