Most folks get one chance to make a big impression. If anyone bought 1999 for ten variations on the title track — and surely there were thousands who did — they were in for a disappointment. It fell to Purple Rain to be Prince’s grand pop exclamation, a near-perfect marriage of worldview and sonic construction. And, of course, he didn’t rely on the record; there was also Purple Rain the film, a heady little origin story that put his magnetism (if not his acting chops) on full display. Also appearing in the film’s several concert sequences — nothing gets you cred like being the star onstage — are the Revolution, credited on a Prince record for the first time, appearing on a whopping five tracks, three of them initially tracked in concert.

And what tracks they are. “I Would Die 4 U,” slotted after the sweaty fatalism of “When Doves Cry,” offers a kind of divine uplift, a perpetual ascent over industrial sixteenths and swooning synth stabs. As a statement of deity (he’s a dove, he’s a messiah, if you’re evil he’ll forgive you by and by), it was much more threatening to the established order than “Darling Nikki,” the song that actually caught the horrified eye of Tipper Gore. But the arrangement twitches and Prince consoles; it winds up being the most human cut here. “Purple Rain” could be the decade’s greatest power ballad, with a perfectly modulated vocal terminating in a heartswell of a chorus. His classicist guitar solo and gorgeous, wordless falsetto are related dialects; together, they’re the transcendent peak of an already-formidable catalog.

After the rampant id-eology of his last few years, Purple Rain was a baldly calculated offering. There’s nary an ounce of fat in the compositions; the perturbing sexual monologues are gone; “Darling Nikki” excepted, the horniness has been swapped out for a more familiar eroticism. It’s yet another credit to the man that he could, essentially unassisted, back his way into a pop powerhouse. All this without masking his idiosyncrasies, just adjusting their levels. Two of Purple Rain’s evergreens are a Sunset Strip punk ‘n’ roll rage against apocalypse, and a sexually charged tableau that morphs into familial psychodrama. No one has made a record like this, before or since.