Song of the Day 3/19: Prince, “Purple Rain”

Malign techbro Peter Thiel is a world-class loon, as he’s been demonstrating by trotting around the globe giving lectures on (checks notes)…the Antichrist. (View the photo above that linked article and tell me it’s not Niedermeyer.)

As the New York Times summarized it,

Mr. Thiel, an investor in artificial intelligence, says he is drawing on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential risks like nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence only to bring about something worse: one-world, totalitarian government.

Translation: They’ll try to take away his money.

Unsurprisingly, Thiel was raised in an evangelical household, and claims his worldview centers on his Christian faith. He is, like most so-called Christians, of the cafeteria sort – he calls himself heterodox, a more benign term for the same thing – because he’s also gay. In his defense, so are a lot of the evangelical preachers who rail against homosexuality, so he’s no more hypocritical than they are.

Prince was another world-class loon obsessed with the apocalypse. Did you realize “Purple Rain” was about the end of the world? Me either, until he explained that “purple rain” was a reference to the end times.

“When there’s blood in the sky… red and blue = purple. Purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/God guide you through the purple rain.”

Um, yeah, sure it does. I’ll just be edging out of the room now, kthxbye.

Unsurprisingly, Prince, too, was raised in a household where a loonball religion, in his case the Seventh Day Adventists, held sway. Like St. Augustine, the young Mr. Nelson wallowed in the pleasures of the flesh for a while before reinventing himself as a Jehovah’s Witness – he actually went door-knocking for a short period, pressing issues of The Watchtower on those unfortunate enough to answer the doorbell. I’m sure his victims were entranced by his theories about blood in the sky.

If you ignore what he says the song is about, it’s actually rather catchy, though it’s preposterous to think that Rolling Stone was doing anything but brown-nosing by proclaiming it the 18th-best rock song of all time. Maybe the vicious loonball relatives who control the Prince estate might have threatened to sue them if they placed it any lower. It reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 1984.