Back in the day, I was a Prince fan in good standing. My favorite song was, and still is Purple Rain. My best friend was a Prince fanatic though. She went to concerts, traveling to Minneapolis from Chicago to see him, and read every last word she could find about him through the press and fan clubs and whatever else she could dig up.
And she never reported this factoid to me, and she definitely would have, had she run across it.
Now, I was perusing Cracked on the bus today, and they casually report this piece of trivia about one of my favorite songs.
I tried looking up other things on the internet about whether this was true. Granted I didn’t search very long because my bus stop was coming up. But other than a comment from Mumia on the occasion of Prince’s death, I couldn’t find a thing linking Purple Rain to Mumia.
So, is Purple Rain about Mumia’s incarceration? Don’t bother trying to argue about whether Mumia’s plight is right or wrong. I don’t care either way.
Maybe it was just a throwaway joke by Cracked? But it wasn’t all that funny.
I call BS. Easy enough to do with Cracked’s notion of how facts work. The wiki has a fairly good explanation of what Prince said it meant/was inspired by and nary a mention of Mumia.
Unless some previously unknown notes have turned up in Prince’s files, this appears to have been invented from whole cloth.
Here is how the “information” about Prince and the movie Purple Rain are presented:
Then there’s a picture of the movie poster for Purple Rain with the caption
And for some reason, the OP ran with this as if it were real, actual information and not an inserted bit of snark for humorous effect (even tho it appears on a site that bills itself as “America’s Only Humor Site Since 1958”).
The only reference to Prince is the caption “Prince wrote Purple Rain as an extended allegory of Abu-Jamal’s story.” under a picture of the Purple Rain album cover. 99% of the time on Cracked, picture captions are meant to be jokes.
It wasn’t Alec Baldwin, it was an Alec Baldwin Impersonator. Who looks so much like Alec Baldwin that they could pass for the same person? The mind, it wonders.
Also, Cracked is trash. If they said the sky was blue, I would have to find a window.
you know how John Oliver will deliver a lot of expository information and then pause, adopt a different tone to his voice and then crack a one-liner before returning to his argument/exposition? As muldoonthief said, the pictures in a Cracked article are the equivalent of Mr. Oliver’s one-liners.
I agree that this was perhaps not their best work, but the sheer over-the-top absurdity of how, exactly, Purple Rain could possibly be an allegory for Mumia abu Jabal’s life is what makes the humor work for me. YMMV, obviously.
“Clouds in my coffee” is a line from Carly Simon’s song You’re So Vain, which she has stated is about 3 (self-absorbed) men in her life, the only one of whom she’s ever named publicly: Warren Beatty.
No, the line is supposed to remind you of the song, which is widely known to be about Warren Beatty (at least in part; he thinks the whole song is about him, natch).
The line “he thinks the whole song is about him” is another reference to the song, in case you missed that.
That’s not irony. Irony has to do with twists of fate. Like that story about the woman who sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain, when he had already sold his watch to buy her a fancy hair comb.