Like the good lovemaking he celebrates, Prince is both subtle and forceful. His voice is a high, tinkling soprano that curls into
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delicate squeals when he's excited and dips into a scratchy murmur when he's figuring out his next move. As if to offset the ingratiating hesitancy of his vocals and phrasing, Prince comes on like a cocky boy wonder. Just barely twenty, he's written, produced and played all the instruments on each of his three LPs.
Prince's first two collections (For You, Prince) established him as a doe-eyed romantic: i.e., his carnal desires were kept in check. Though the chorus of his first hit single was "Your love is soft and wet," the raunchiest interpretation permitted by its slightly damp melody was that perhaps the object of Prince's love had been caught in a sudden rainstorm. And while the song that made him a star, 1979's "I Wanna Be Your Lover," snuck the line "I wanna be the only one you come for" onto AM radio, the singer delivered it with coy innocence, as if feigning ignorance of what the words meant but confident they'd please his lover.
Nothing, therefore, could have prepared us for the liberating lewdness of Dirty Mind. Here, Prince lets it all hang out: the cover photograph depicts our hero, smartly attired in a trench coat and black bikini briefs, staring soberly into the camera. The major tunes are paeans to bisexuality, incest and cunnilingual technique, each tucked between such sprightly dance raveups as "Partyup" and the smash single "Uptown." Throughout, Prince's melodies peel back layers of disco rhythm to insert slender, smooth funk grooves and wiggly, hard-rock guitar riffing. In his favorite musical trick, the artist contrasts a pumping, low-toned drum sound with a light, abrupt guitar or keyboard riff pitched as high as his voice (which is often double-tracked to emphasize its airiness). Though Prince is playing everything himself, the result isn't bloodless studio virtuosity. His music attains the warmth and inspiration of a group collaboration because it sounds as if he's constantly competing against himself: Prince the drummer tries to drown out Prince the balladeer, and so forth.
Dirty Mind jolts with the unsettling tension that arises from rubbing complex erotic wordplay against clean, simple melodies. Across this electric surface glides Prince's graceful quaver, tossing off lyrics with an exhilarating breathlessness. He takes the sweet romanticism of Smokey Robinson and combines it with the powerful vulgate poetry of Richard Pryor. The result is cool music dealing with hot emotions.
At its best, Dirty Mind is positively filthy. Sex, with its lasting urges and temporary satisfactions, holds a fascination t
One night in the mid-1980s, right after a Detroit gig, Prince called up a local DJ known as the Electrifying Mojo to chat on the air. "What's your favorite instrument?" Mojo wanted to know. "You play them all." "Mmm," Prince said. "Stewardesses!"
It seems quaint now to remember how when his third album, Dirty Mind, came out in October 1980, lots of people were wondering which way Prince swung. Who was this cat in a circus coat and a . . . jockstrap, singing about somebody else's bride telling him, "But you're such a hunk / So full of spunk / I'll give you - head." Onstage or on video, with his falsetto, coy struts and eyelash-batting, he re-feminized the pop world much as Jagger had in the Sixties and Bowie had in the Seventies.
It would be a stretch to call such a richly pop-y thing as Dirty Mind revolutionary. But this eight-song purple bouquet flung at the new decade certainly signaled some splendidly liberated music to come, not just from Prince (his Number One hit "Let's Go Crazy" was only four years away) but from his few peers, like Michael Jackson. Jackson's "Beat It" had its own monster footprint but shared with the best of Dirty Mind a mixture of rock guitar, playful synths and squealing R&B that seemed to spring out of a rib taken from James Brown.
Dirty Mind departed not just from Prince's first LP, of fairly conventional R&B, and his second, Hendrix-infused album, but from most of what else was out there -- not just the treacle (Captain and Tennille, Christopher Cross) but that year's frothy post-disco hits (Lipps Inc.'s "Funkytown," Kool and the Gang's "Celebration"). What made Dirty Mind so different -- beyond the songs poeticizing incest ("Sister") and oral sex (see above) was its almost New Wave spareness -- "When You Were Mine" coasted on a fluid synth, but the rhythm section could have been any white-boy power-pop garage band in skinny ties. And how sweet, in Prince's girlish falsetto, the mixture of lust and innocence, forgiveness and hurt: "I never was the kind to make a fuss / When he was there / Sleepin' in between the two of us."
He made the album with his own hands, well away from the prying label execs who oversaw the first two. He extolled his hometown of Minneapolis' night life ("Uptown") and trotted out his spacey millenarian streak ("You're gonna have to fight your own damn war," he chants on "Partyup"). This record from the Prince we formerly knew added up to just over half an hour and revealed a new household pop god. (RS 821)
FRED SCHRUERS
