“America” is the name of the fourth and last single from "Around the World in a Day" and, crucially, it's the first song on the album’s second side. Whenever Prince cast his reporter’s eye out his window, he saw a world crumbling and about to end. Prince played with apocalyptic rhetoric, in part, because in the early 1980s the apocalypse truly seemed to be around the corner all the time. Society is falling apart, war is all around us, the leaders are power mad and myopic, war is imminent, the sky is turning ominous colors, and in Prince’s world, in their last moments before the end, people are dancing. It’s more of a spiritual protest that involves turning our back on politics. There’s not a slacker ethos at play: Prince proposes we do something it's just that something has nothing to do with political protest.
“Everybody’s got a bomb./ Could all die any day.” How cynical. “Life is just a party,” Prince sings, “and parties weren’t meant to last,” so it figures that this would happen. We can ask painful questions like, “Mommy? Why does everybody have the bomb?” But, instead of imbuing the song with a sense of hope or resistance, it’s resigned to its fate. Because we’re smart enough to be apathetic we know we can’t change this. Then Prince and his bandmates sing, “Tried to run from my destruction./ You know I didn’t even care.” What a seminal line for Gen X. Our nuclear nightmares are fully realized. In this song, the apocalypse has arrived - bombs are overhead, the sky is all purple and people are running for their lives. This was something from which we could do nothing but unplug. This was not something we could march to change. In the face of that, the optimism of the 1960s seemed downright Pollyannaish. Who, in this climate, could respect authority? Surely, the people running the world were moronic if they were inching us to the brink of mutually assured destruction. We had less faith in government and authority than any generation before us, which just deepened our sense that politics was meaningless fools’ play. It came out in 1982, two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term, when the Cold War had reached a fever pitch and we seemed closer than ever to the brink of nuclear war. It was a perfect Gen X dance song built on the idea that the world’s about to end so, to hell with it, let’s dance.
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The oldest Gen Xers were in high school when Prince arrived on the national scene with his fifth album and a single that spoke of the funkiest armageddon scene you’ve ever heard of: 1999.
So, it makes sense that the first Prince song to capture a giant audience and become his first monster hit was a song about apathy and apocalypse. This, against a backdrop of events like the rise of a mysterious sexual plague and a powerful drug ruining society and harbingers of the end of American global dominance: All of that had the feel of the beginning of the end of days. And Gen X Americans have lived within a negative political climate our whole lives, causing widespread alienation, disaffection and apathy. It’s indisputable that there’s a large group of Americans who are molded by the cultural, political, economic and sociological things that happened in the 1970s and 1980s and as the result of being the small, apathetic generation that followed a large, optimistic generation that attempted to revolutionize America. Even if we had a different name, the touchstones would still be there, and that’s what shapes us. However, some of that hate is wrapped up in hating the presence of a name and the attempt to explain who we are in a pithy way, so no matter what name we had, it would be hated. Many in my generation hate the name and that’s fair it’s not a great name, but we’re stuck with it. It’s not a false grouping imposed from the top. Excerpted from "I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became An Icon"
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