Between 1978 and 1982, Prince released five albums that steadily built his reputation from prodigy to superstar. Then came 1984, the year he became a legend. On June 25 that year—a year that experts would later call the greatest in pop music history—Prince released Purple Rain, an album so remarkable and genre bending that some people forget that it was a movie soundtrack, the sonic bookend to the semi-autobiographical film of the same name that packed theaters starting July 27 and put America on notice that forever more, no one would forget the virtuoso from Minneapolis

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