Prince & The Revolution
Around the World in a Day [40th Anniversary Edition]
PRINCE ESTATE/WARNER/LEGACY
Between the glorious tin gospel of Purple Rain in 1984 and the showy, sultry funk of Parade in 1986 Prince—with Wendy & Lisa and the rest of the Revolution—recorded what still stands as his strangest effort that isn’t The Black Album: the clotted-crème psychedelia of 1985’s Around the World in a Day. Tense with impenetrable, obtuse pop that always managed to be contagiously melodic, and crammed with cabalistic cryptic lyricism rife with holy-goofball metaphors for God, gods, monsters, and mysticism, Prince’s big Day is the exacting answer to the question “What would XTC have sounded like if Todd Rundgren chose to record 25 O’Clock as opposed the gentle, damning Skylarking?”—all, oddly enough, around the same time period as Prince’s oracle-branded work.
Produced by Prince to sound as if the entire project had been recorded in a bottle, every moment—from its buggy guitar histrionics (“Paisley Park”) to its prissy funk-lite looks at star-making machinery and hip-swiveling (“Pop Life,”Tamborine”) to the string-filled blowsy gospel of “The Ladder” (think “Our Destiny” meets “Young Americans”)—is precisely rendered. Name a more icily constructed pop treat than “Raspberry Beret,” or a more exquisite mid-’80s psych-soul ballad than “Condition of the Heart.” Sure, the whole thing sounds like a paranoid mess on Prince’s part, but so what? As a vocalist and as a lyricist, Around the World is also the most naturalist and within-his-own-skin he ever sounded.
Other than hearing a beautiful, crystal-clear album scrubbed cleaner, the mass of remixes and extended mixes that fill the 40th anniversary reissue of Around the World in a Day is bested by having “She’s Always in My Hair” and the super-elastic, bubble-plastic, looong take on his social studies lesson “America.” At nearly 22 minutes, Prince’s United States are just as Hendrixian as shirtless Donald Glover’s is, and twice as grotesque. The singles box set designed for Record Store Day’s 2025 Black Friday edition also has as its feature the wooly, serpentine R&B “4 the Tears in Your Eyes,” which Prince contributed to the We Are the World album in lieu of having to stand next to Michael Jackson during Quincy Jones’ recording studio party.
Any extra Prince track is an attractive concept, even when it’s not a great song, so we’re fortunate that the long-ass “America” and “4 the Tears in Your Eyes” are worthy vessels. As for Around the World 40 years on? It’s still a good day.
