Chapter IV: Down and Dirty: Prince Comes of Age
The change of direction, and the change of image - he now sported short, spiky hair and a rumpled raincoat - fit in with the then-emerging look of the New Wave movement, and his managers approved, both of the look and especially of the music, one of them pronouncing it the “best stuff I’ve heard in a long time.” This was, too, the first time that Prince began dabbling in pseudonyms for himself, crediting the engineer as “Jamie Starr”. Throughout his career, Prince would hide his light under various thinly-disguised bushels, perhaps anxious not to be either associated with the different music he would write, arrange or produce, or perhaps just so that it didn’t seem arrogant to the public at large, since he already did everything on his albums.
Warner, however, were another matter when it came to the album. Ready for a follow-up to the moderately successful eponymous album, they were in two minds about this one. They certainly did not like the overtly explicit lyrics, fearing disaster with no radio airplay, and if there are two things labels like it’s airplay and not too much change; if the formula worked on album one (or in this case, two) don’t change it for the next one. Or, to be more accurate, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But Prince thought it
was broke: the music he had produced on
For You and
Prince, he now realised, was not him at all, but what he thought people - including his label - wanted. And he had been right. But he wasn’t just a machine churning out hit singles (well, one proper one and a few dance ones): he was an artist, and he now showed Warner, and anyone else who cared to look, what an artist looked like.
Striding down corridors wearing the trenchcoat which graced the cover of
Dirty Mind, flapping open to reveal thigh-high high-heel boots and bikini briefs and not much else, makeup on his face, he was through being the quiet guy, the guy who nodded and obeyed, the label’s pet. Now he was determined to be his own man, and as his original contract with Warner was coming to an end, he wasn’t shy about showing it. He was no longer going to be grateful for the chance to make albums; now, he would be the one calling the shots, and pretty soon would make the label glad they had him, grateful to this emerging music phenomenon for hitching his star to their wagon, a relationship that would pay large dividends.
For the first time since he had begun recording music, he resisted the urge to clean up the tracks, forcing himself to leave them as they were even though many of them he was not that happy with. A perfectionist still, this was a hard thing for him to do, but he was determined the album would sound raw, stripped down, and if he began overdubbing and remixing everything it would lose that sharp edge he had sought when he had written the songs in the first place. While the album was a hit with critics and fans, sales figures bore out Warner’s fears: many record shops refused to even display the album, due to its cover, and radio stations shied from the explicit lyrics in most of the songs.
Dirty Mind would never sell millions of units. Even now, it stands at about half a million sold over thirty years, giving it a Gold certification but nothing like the quadruple platinum status of
1999 or the, wait for it,
sixteen-times-platinum Purple Rain, and it didn’t even make it into the top forty, only reaching half the position the previous album had. Nevertheless, it did what Prince had wanted it to do: made him stand out, showed he was a different artist, one not afraid to take risks and brave the tumbleweed of the desert of next-to-zero airplay, and one who, above all, would fight for his art against all comers. Prince would never be labelled a sell-out, and in later years would create, not follow trends.
Album title: Dirty Mind
Released as: Prince
Label: Warner Bros
Recorded: May - June 1980
Release Date: October 8 1980
Producer: Prince
Studio(s): Prince’s home studio, California
Chart Position: 45/61
Singles Released: ”Uptown”, “Dirty Mind”, “Do it All Night” (UK only)
Singles Chart Performance: (Note: Rather than keep writing out single titles (some of which are quite long) I’m from now on going to abbreviate them).
Uptown: 101 @ BH100, 5 @ BHSSC, 5 @ BDCS; DM: 65 @ BHSSC; DIAN: (unknown)
Sales: 500,000 (US only)
Immediately we’re in different territory, more new wave/electronic or even AOR than funk or soul. There’s a thick, driving beat behind the opener, and title track, and Prince’s voice is at its best falsetto, with the usual backing vocals of himself, his vocal delivery putting me in mind of early Ric Ocasek. The drum machine adds to the electronic, almost inhuman feel of the melody, though it’s still bright and upbeat and very catchy. In fact, if anything, I feel it’s something of a marker along the road to “1999”, definitely pushing him away from his legacy sound and into a whole new way of presenting his music. Were it, in fact, not for his distinctive vocal, you might not even recognise this as Prince at all. One of the first properly controversial (and intentionally so) songs is up next, with “When You Were Mine” reminding me of the best of Blondie or even The Pretenders, and referring to a menage a trois. A little more funky than the opener, it even features some quite sparse guitar but like the previous song mostly rides on new-wave synth flourishes and arpeggios.
The Farfisa organ-inspired riffs, though not made on that instrument, lift this right back to the heady days of seventies prog, making the song sort of straddle two decades, while not really being of either. The melody is in fact quite like a slower version of “Back on the Chain Gang” by Chrissy’s band, which I’ll have to check to see which came first. I must say, despite what it says about the song being about a threesome, I don’t hear it coming through in the lyric. “Do It All Night” goes back a little to the funk pop of his first album, with breezy, peppy keyboard stabs behind a cool funky guitar and sex smoulders in the lyric, even if the music is somewhat throwaway. Kind of reminds me of seventies Carole King in places. Odd.
“Gotta Broken Heart Again” is where things slow down, on a swinging Motown melody which recalls early Jackson to some degree as well as the stars of classic Motown such as Robinson, The Four Tops and The Temptations. Nice guitar licks here, and if this is mostly an album for white fans, then if you want to be pedantic about it, this could be said to be the track on it for the black fans. It’s quite short, too, and leads into the longest on the album, at over five and a half minutes. “Uptown” has a driving, pulsating funky beat which sounds like something Huey Lewis would later expand on in “The Power of Love” and “The Heart of Rock and Roll”, also echoes of The Crusaders here and later Rose Royce.
It’s a decent song but I feel it very much overstays its welcome; most of the last minute or so is just repetition, and I don’t see why it needed to be as long as it did. God only knows how long it went on for onstage! But now we get into the real controversial material, with “Head” up first (no pun intended), a dancing, hopping synth and funky guitar against Prince’s almost croaked lyric, the kind of thing he would do later on songs like “Kiss”. Infectious synth line running through it and it surely was great for dancing to, lots of handclap percussion, with the kind of acrobatics on the keyboards that might have impressed Keith Emerson, while “Sister” stays around for one and a half minutes, and features a hurried rhythm which is almost punklike in its speed and on which the vocal speed matches that of the music. Some hard guitar for the first time on the album, reminds me of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and takes us into the closer, “Partyup”.
A funky guitar (yes I know I keep saying it but how else to describe it?) distant ancestor again of “1999”, this bounces along with real energy and purpose, perhaps declaring a mantra or mission statement for party people who do little else with their lives. This is the song he wrote with Morris Day, the only other composition credit being given to the title track to Doctor Fink, who had laid down the original keyboard riff. You know, as a closer it’s okay but I don’t find “Partyup” to be anything special. The beginnings perhaps of Prince’s leaning towards more political and socially aware material, the song contains a closing refrain “You’re gonna have to fight your own damn war/Cos we don’t wanna fight no more.” Can’t argue with that.
TRACK LISTING
Dirty Mind
When You Were Mine
Do It All Night
Gotta Broken Heart Again
Uptown
Head
Sister
Partyup
A very different album from his previous two, it is kind of amazing that Prince could have changed so much in two short years, and not only that, but that he had his finger on the pulse, knew what was coming, knew what was going to be popular. Over most of the 1980s new wave and electronic music would explode over the charts and bands like OMD, The Cure, Blondie and The Sisters of Mercy would dominate the airwaves. Prince was making sure that he was right there among them, and would soon eclipse them all. More than that, though, he was, without selling out or changing his sound to pander to them, courting the white fans, crossing over for the first time properly from what was popularly termed “black music” into a more conventional, commercial and all-encompassing sound that would bring millions more fans into his orbit.
I can’t really comment on the lyrical content because, though I’ve read about it, I find that here Prince has yet to really make himself clearly understood when he sings. His high voice makes it hard, for me anyway, to hear the words, and I don’t know if that was intentional, but compared to something like “Let’s Go Crazy” or “Raspberry Beret”, really, he could be singing about anything. So I’ll defer to the experts, but can’t personally make any comment on the lyrics. One thing I do note is that there doesn’t seem to be too much of them in each song, and the music more or less does the talking here for him.
Prince may have titled the album
Dirty Mind - and he certainly had one, as we would see - but really that mind was more cunning and calculating than dirty, and in some ways quite cold too. While he wanted to create his own sound, he wasn’t averse to all but turning his back on his own fanbase and shooting off in a new direction, probably hoping they would come with him but perhaps not being too broken up if they didn’t. For Prince, even at this early stage in his career, it was all about appealing not just to one section of the music-buying public, not to one colour skin, not to one social class, but to everyone.
Soon enough, that dream would be realised, and this album was the first step along that relatively short path.