Over at BBC Travel, I’ve got a new story up about Prince Locations around Minneapolis: The US city throwing an epic party for Prince

This week is the 40th anniversary of the release of the album Purple Rain. Next month is the 40th anniversary of the movie, purple rain.

From the vantage of 40 years, it’s now clear that Purple Rain was a kind of high water mark in pop culture. The year 1984 was one of monster hits (Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Like a Virgin), huge albums (Born in The USA, Bon Jovi, 1984), and blockbuster films (Footloose, The Karate Kid, Gremlins). Rollingstone Magazine called it “pop’s greatest year.” It was the kind of monoculture that younger generations will never know.

There was a lot of noise that year. But amid the din, Prince Rogers Nelson struck a perfect chord. In his book on the making of Purple Rain, Let’s Go Crazy, journalist Alan Light wrote that, “given the splintering of the music audience that followed its colossal success, it seems likely that we will never again agree on anything the way we agreed on Purple Rain.”

This story has a few of the places you can go if you want to hear that chord one more time. And if you want to walk in Prince’s footsteps, there’s this: In the Footsteps of Prince: Downtown Minneapolis Walking Tour.