Following Purple Rain, Prince’s Around the World in a Day album marked what appeared to be a radical sonic and thematic departure. Many critics hastily labeled it “Prince’s Beatles album,” continuing the practice of crediting musical innovation to whiteness. This presentation challenges this persistent mischaracterization and instead situates the album within the lineage of psychedelic soul music. By reframing the album as a continuation of the innovative work of artists such as Charles Stepney, Norman Whitfield, Funkadelic, The Chambers Brothers, and Sly and the Family Stone, this discussion highlights the ways in which Prince was not imitating white psychedelic rock but rather expanding upon the work of his Black musical influences, who have been historically overlooked.

Blending funk, soul, blues, gospel, and rock with sophisticated orchestration and social commentary—both overt and coded, Around the World in a Day is more musically varied and thematically complex than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band album, which is frequently and inaccurately positioned as its primary influence—despite Prince, himself, stating that it was not. On this album, Prince, like his Black predecessors, used psychedelia as a space for cultural critique, escapism, and sonic experimentation. This analysis firmly positions Around the World in a Day not as a departure from Black musical tradition, but as a progression of it—an affirmation of its limitlessness.

Kamilah Cummings is a writer, editor, and visiting senior lecturer at DePaul University in Chicago. She has presented on Prince at Purple Reign, the first academic Prince conference (University of Salford, UK), and polished solid Prince symposia at New York University, Spelman College, and online. She has also presented on Prince at The 2021 Pop Convergence (PopCon). 

Her work on Prince has been published in the Howard Journal of Communications, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, AMP: American Music Perspectives, and Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (Bloomsbury). She has also created the course, Prince: A New Breed Leader. 

A House music researcher as well, she created the course The House Chicago Built, has presented on House music at Black Portraiture[s] IV (Harvard University), and appears as a featured speaker in the documentary The Woodstock of House. She is passionate about exploring the intersections of race and identity in media and pop culture, with a particular focus on centering Blackness in the narratives of Black people.