If you were a child of the ’80s, once you heard Prince, all bets were off. Though he was as ubiquitous on the Top 40 as Madonna and Michael, he seemed to broadcast from another planet. The precedents for Mr. Nelson were plentiful—James Brown’s funk, Hendrix’s wild guitars, The Beatles’ baroque pop—but they did not define him. He was his own being. But once Purple Rain (the film) dropped, the mysteries of his rise (no matter how formulated) were revealed and the Minneapolis sound was no longer a secret.

Still, there was so much more to that story, so much more in the fabric of the city, and with Purple Snow, an exhaustive and deluxe survey of that Twin Cities sound, the Numero Group succeeds in putting the pieces together to show what came before Prince and the boom that occurred after he became the center of the universe. Save for the 1975 demo of 94 East’s “If You See Me,” though, Prince is noticeably absent from this collection. Instead, we find his contemporaries, his colleagues, and fragments of his evolution spread amongst the four records in this set. Given the evidence here, the argument of Prince as plagiarist can certainly be made, but contrarily there seems to be no hard feelings in the liner notes and his ascension only served to bolster a community of musicians carving out a singular niche within the pop spectrum.

Purple Snow starts from the absolute beginning. The Twin Cities of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were not yet hot spots on touring circuits, and there was a dearth of black music on the radio and in the clubs. In essence, the Minneapolis sound was built from virtually nothing. While cultivating their own scene, the denizens who started up septets, octets, and even a nontet, showed that it wasn’t that popular culture was slow to make it to this satellite, but that transmissions were coming from all points. Be it Motown, Philadelphia, the Mothership Connection, or even the Woodstock generation, it all had a place. The earliest bands—Haze, Cohesion, and Jimmy “Jam” Harris’ prescient Mind & Matter—were essentially dealing in live disco. It was a show as much as it was a musical workout for both band and dance floor. Eventually studios opened, small labels were formed, records were pressed, and venues around the city catered to this emerging sound.

From the jump and no matter the mettle, there was a penchant to be bigger than life by extending their guitar solos, getting aggressive with their funk, and making their synthesizers sound cosmic. Perhaps the scene’s turning point was when Harris hooked up with Terry Lewis and created Flyte Tyme, who would shorten their name to The Time and be featured in Purple Rain. Their dual-synth attack became the blueprint for the Twin Cities sound as they produced many of the records being made by their contemporaries—from the sharp strut of Alexander O’Neal to the proto–Vanity 6 diva aesthetics of should-of-been-famous Sue Ann Carwell—before continuing on to a decade of pop hits with everyone from Janet Jackson to the Human League.

The collection’s second half is where those diamonds in the rough, those germs of what ’80s pop became, reside. It seems Minneapolis was at once a collaborative town where borrowing ideas and sharing members was common, but it was also a place where one-upmanship was a civic duty. As a result, the drum machines got increasingly frenetic and futuristic, and the synths on tracks like Steven’s “Quick” and Ronnie Robbin’s “Contagious” wiggled and squirmed around rubbery basslines more than ever before. But while things appeared to get stranger and more aligned with the Purple One, pop hooks were always at the center. One of Purple Snow’s many highlights comes towards the end with “Somebody Said” by Prince protégé Andre Cymone, who is emblematic of the fate of this bustling scene. In Minneapolis they already had the “hits,” the pulse of future-pop, but up until now, it was shrouded in a mighty big shadow.