When Prince released Around the World in a Day as the left-field followup to his transmedia blockbuster Purple Rain in April 1985, music critics widely drew connections between the artist’s new sound and 1960s psychedelic rock–in particular, the Beatles’ epochal 1967 “concept album” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So pervasive were these comparisons, in fact, that Prince would single them out for dismissal in his oft-cited September 1985 interview with Neal Karlen for Rolling Stone, stating, “The influence wasn’t the Beatles. They were great for what they did, but I don’t know how that would hang today.” As ever with Prince, however, the reality was a little more complex; and reading between the lines of various statements from the artist and his collaborators–as well as many of the artistic choices he made before, during, and after his mid-’80s psychedelic era–reveals a nuanced and dialectical relationship between Prince as a self-conscious standard-bearer for the Black musical tradition, and the Beatles as exemplars of the predominantly White “classic rock” canon being actively shaped through critical and commercial discourses in the 1980s.

Zachary Hoskins is the author of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, a song-by-song blog examining the music of Prince in chronological order. His essay, “Rude Boy: Prince as Black New Waver,” was published in a special issue of Spectrum, A Journal on Black Men (2020), and his presentation from the Prince #1plus1plus1is3 virtual symposium (2021), “I Wish We All Were Nude: Prince’s Controversy ‘Shower Poster’ as Aesthetic Linchpin and Artifact,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. His presentation from the #EroticCity40 symposium (2024), “No One Wants to Talk about Apollonia 6,” will also appear in a forthcoming issue of JPMS. Zach has presented and appeared on roundtables at other @polishedsolid symposia, #Come30 (2024), #TripleThreat40 (2023), #SexyMF30 (2022), and #DM40GB30 (2020), as well as the University of Minnesota’s Prince from Minneapolis symposium (2018). He holds an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Arizona and B.A.’s in Film & Video Studies and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan.