As a Prince fan, it would be churlish to object to the use of two Purple Rain tracks in the season 5 finale of Stranger Things. I mean, I get why the Duffer brothers did it. You can't get more '80s iconic than "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain," and even just seeing that beautiful 33" on the turntable sparked a flutter in my heart.
Ross Duffer makes an excellent point on this permissions win: “What is also very exciting about it is it just has not been used. [Prince’s] estate does not generally allow that song to be licensed outside the Purple Rain movie.”
So that's a coup for the Duffers and a blessing for any poor soul who has not been exposed to this album and is being educated for the first time.
I get that our heroes were playing one side of the album, and so the show's scenes corresponded with the first and the last tracks of side 2, and that's how we arrived at "Doves" playing over the final cruise out of the Upside Down and "Purple" playing over the final farewell between El and Mike. I get it.
Still.
I just...
"When Doves Cry" is just a weird choice for that final cruise out of the Upside Down. It's too disconnected—to cool and aloof to work for a scene about beauty mixed with destruction. "Purple Rain" is a slightly better fit with its scene, but I wasn't prepared for how that particular flavor of dramatic stacked on top of the a-bit-too-much melodramatic El-and-Mike montage somehow would add up to less than the sum of its parts. Really, can anyone besides Prince himself appear on a screen and visually match the psychotic auditory greatness of Prince?
If I could have picked the music for that first scene, I would have picked "Cities in Dust" by Siouxie and the Banshees. There's no way to make this work with the story setup unless there is some way they could have made a mix tape cassette trigger explosives. "Cities" is the last track on that album, not the first.
Not my problem. My problem is needing to rewrite in my mind the soundtrack of those scenes. Keep in mind also that the music would need to have been released around mid-1987 or earlier to work with the storyline.
I guess for the goodbye scene between El and Mike, I halfheartedly pick "Don't Dream It's Over," by Crowded House. Admittedly, this might be too uninspired. I'm open to other suggestions that fit within my little fantasy of becoming a music supervisor and having sway over the finale's music myself. But in that scenario, can I really lie to myself and say I wouldn't have taken the inaugural opportunity to license Prince recordings for a hugely anticipated show finale?
I cannot.
In that case, the question becomes whether any other Prince music released before 1987 could have stood in for side 2 of Purple Rain. Fellow fans, I submit to you side 2 of Parade, with "Mountains" as the exit-from-Upside-Down track and "Sometimes It Snows in April" as the goodbye track.
Right?
It's not "iconic" in that hit-'80s-album sense. Neither of those songs got much, if any, radio play. They're just better audio companions to what's onscreen.
If you like to ruminate on pointless shit like this as much as I do, please comment with your thoughts!!
