Rolling Stone

 

• Prince

• Dirty Mind ****1/2

 

By Ken Tucker   |   February 19, 1981

 

Dirty Mind is a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement: entirely, ditheringly obsessed with the body, yet full of sentiments that please and provoke the mind. It may also be the most generous album about sex ever made by a man.

Like the good lovemaking he celebrates, Prince is both subtle and forceful. His voice is a high, tinkling soprano that curls into 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 that drives the singer to extremes of ribald fantasy. "When I met you, baby/You were on your way to be wed" is how he begins "Head," a jittery rocker about the pleasures of oral sex. In Prince's wet dream, no woman is forced to do anything she doesn't want to do: her lust always matches our cocksman's. As the guitar groove of "Head" winds tighter and tighter, Prince brings off the young bride in a quick interlude en route to join her fiancé at the alter. She is more than eager to return the favor. By the time Prince yelps, "You wouldn't have stopped/But I came on your wedding gown," the entire album has climaxed in more ways than one. This is lewdness cleansed by art, with joy its socially redeeming feature. Dirty Mind may be dirty, but it certainly isn't pornographic.

Somehow Prince manages to be both blunt and ambiguous — and occasionally just dreamily confusing. "When You Were Mine" (in which the line "I used to let you wear all my clothes" is offered as proof of our man's devotion) blithely condones infidelity of the most brazen sort — "I never cared .../When he was there/Sleepin' in between the two of us" — as long as the artist can be sure that the woman continues to love only him. Yet in "Sister," Prince notes that his female sibling is responsible for his bisexuality, a word whose syllables he draws out with lascivious relish. Little more than a brisk pop-funk riff, "Sister" forces the pace, making it build, until the singer finally blurts out a jabbering confession: "Incest is everything it's said to be." What can you do with a guy like this?

Love him, obviously. If Prince indulges his appetites with a bold and lusty vigor, his pleasure is always dependent upon his partner's satisfaction. In a reversal of the usual pop-song aesthetic, the artist's crisp, artfully constructed compositions are a metaphor for the care and consideration that inform the lovemaking detailed in his lyrics.

Less obviously, Prince deserves our admiration. Though Dirty Mind is an undeniably apposite title, the LP might just as accurately have been called Prince Confronts the Moral Majority: except for "Uptown," "Partyup" and the loping "Gotta Broken Heart Again," none of Dirty Mind could make it onto the most liberal radio-station playlists these days. In a time when Brooke Shields' blue-jeaned backside provokes howls of shock and calls for censorship from mature adults, Prince's sly wit — intentionally coarse — amounts to nothing less than an early, prescient call to arms against the elitist puritanism of the Reagan era. Let Prince have the last word: "White, black, Puerto Rican/Everybody's just a-freakin'."

 

 

 

 

 

The Village Voice

 

Robert Christgau

 

Dirty Mind [Warner Bros., 1980]
After going gold in 1979 as an utterly uncrossedover falsetto love man, he takes care of the songwriting, transmutes the persona, revs up the guitar, muscles into the vocals, leans down hard on a rock-steady, funk-tinged four-four, and conceptualizes--about sex, mostly. Thus he becomes the first commercially viable artist in a decade to claim the visionary high ground of Lennon and Dylan and Hendrix (and Jim Morrison), whose rebel turf has been ceded to such marginal heroes-by-fiat as Patti Smith and John Rotten-Lydon. Brashly lubricious where the typical love man plays the lead in "He's So Shy," he specializes here in full-fledged fuckbook fantasies--the kid sleeps with his sister and digs it, sleeps with his girlfriend's boyfriend and doesn't, stops a wedding by gamahuching the bride on her way to church. Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home. A

 

 

 

 

 

Los Angles Times

 

(Johnson, Connie. December 7, 1980) review of Dirty Mind (1980):

 

"DIRTY MIND." Prince. Warner Bros. BSK 3478.

One look at his album cover is the first tip-off that Prince is not your standard black R&B star. Clad in a metal-studded trench coat and bikini briefs, Prince seems to revel in be- ing the rebel with a dubious cause. The music inside the jacket is another sur- prise for the uninitiated. It's roll 'n' roll, leaning toward new wave. Prince's third album is his best to date. Prince tours with five other musicians but produces, arranges, composes and. performs his albums alone. Here, Prince's musical world is populated by pretty, sexually precocious girls who wear his clothes ("When You Were Mine") and wonder if he s gay ("Up- town"). AM radio, both black and white, probably won t touch much of this music, which also spins tales of incest and three-in-a-bed. Still, the songs all bene- fit nicely from hypnotic, wildly - ed riffing and Prince's perpetually adolescent falsetto. Prince really shines on the high-tech title song. With its synthesized multi- tracked vocals, the song becomes a per- vert-in-space fantasy. If he keeps this up, Prince is destined to become a reign- ing aristocrat of punk/funk.

 

 

 

 

 

PopMatters

 

Prince: Dirty Mind

By Charlotte Robinson

 

In the 1980s, there were three pop stars who were inescapable: Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince. While Madonna’s musical significance is debated to this day and Jackson’s primary talent is integrating and refining established musical styles, Prince is the one who is the true visionary, a reluctant celebrity whose challenging, sometimes insular work has made him a superstar in spite of himself. Even today, Prince’s 1980s albums sound fresh, inventive, and not at all dated. This is because Prince wasn’t following the trends of the decade—he was inventing them.

 

While Prince has made several groundbreaking albums, 1980’s Dirty Mind, which was only a minor commercial success, still provides the most satisfying listen. By the time of its release, Prince had already put out two albums (For You and Prince), but their eccentric R&B sound barely hinted at the bold artistic statement that Dirty Mind would make. Comprised of recordings that were originally intended to be demos, the album features sparse production straight out of post-punk, and marks one of the few instances when a funk/soul record wasn’t overproduced. In both its production and its musical content, Dirty Mind bridges the gap between funk and alternative music. Instead of fearing the changes that were taking place, Prince embraced them, not only adopting the new genre’s production values, but incorporating synthesizers into his melodies while reclaiming the power of the organic guitar-bass-drums rock sound, one which had been abandoned by many soulsters in favor of disco. In doing so, he set the stage for funk to come out of the shadows and become an important element in mainstream pop music.

 

The level of Prince’s accomplishment is exemplified by the track “When You Were Mine”. Most of what is great about the Dirty Mind album gels in this one song. The guitar and drums are prominent due to the bare-bones production, and Prince’s simple, frantic strumming sounds like something that would have fit in with the B-52’s. Prince also inserts a weird, wavering keyboard solo that, along with his uncomfortably high vocals, lends even more of a sexually ambiguous edge to gender-confused lines like “I used to let you wear all my clothes” and “I never was the kind to make a fuss / When he was there / Sleeping in between the two of us”. Ironically, the song remains enough of a catchy pop tune that it was covered by both Mitch Ryder and Cyndi Lauper, and even popped up during a break-up scene in “The Drew Carey Show”.

 

Dirty Mind marked the only time that Prince expressed his sexuality without the religious repentance that bogged down (but also complicated) later albums, but the lyrical frankness earned him considerable criticism. Some of the lyrics went beyond the implied gender-bending of “When You Were Mine” into much more taboo territory, and it was this, rather than the album’s sonic adventurousness, that got people’s attention. Four years later, when Purple Rain was ruling the charts, songs from Dirty Mind were still making tongues wag, including those of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which often mentioned “Sister” during its campaign to protect kids from “filthy” music. With lines like “My sister never made love to anyone else but me” and “Incest is everything it’s said to be”, the song was meant to be provocative, but only a prude would fail to see its humor.

 

To point out the most sexually explicit passages is a fruitless exercise, not only because Prince handles the topic with wit and originality, but also because they make up the minority of his lyrical concerns. So what is the main preoccupation of Dirty Mind, if not the carnal? In this critic’s opinion, it’s a celebration of the possibilities of music itself: its effectiveness as a means of exploring one’s values, and its ability to bring different kinds of people together. It may be overly simple, but Prince says it best on “Uptown”: “White, Black, Puerto Rican / Everybody just a-freakin’” and “It’s all about being free”.

 

 

 

 

 

No Ripcord Magazine

 

Prince, Dirty Mind

(Warner Brothers)

 

I suppose I should wait for some kind of deluxe re-issue to write about this here, one of my favorite albums ever.  I was inspired, however, by Alan Shulman's words in the feature on over-rated albums (and a re-issue would doubtlessly be crammed with demos, b-sides, live tracks and the like that would negate the point).  Albums, by the way, are not the completely organic perfect package for pop music statement we like to pretend they are.  Like every other convention of pop music, they are technology-driven constructs.  3 1/2 minutes is the ideal longest length for a pop song because that was the capacity of one side of a 45 rpm single.

With albums, the concept of concepts didn't come into it for awhile.  On a single 33 rpm LP, there was about 48 minutes (24 on each side), that one could cram onto a record with decent sound quality.  For the longest time, this meant packaging the three or four songs a label was marketing on a platter completed with covers and filler.  It wasn't until the mid to late '60s that artists figured out they could market themselves through "albums" as a cohesive collection and treat that as the primary medium, with singles as an afterthought.

Anyway, that is why so many works of the '60s and '70s stand as flab-free, perfect objects, because they tend to be between 35 and 48 minutes.  By design, they limit the ability of the artist to fuck around in their own personal pleasure zone and give the listener the heat, the really good stuff.  As rock and pop corporatized and the hottest artists became gods, the double and triple LP became common, but that at least laid down a physical gauntlet the artist had to justify.  If a slice of indulgence didn't deliver the goods, it would not get spun.

It is perhaps a shame in the compact disc era (I know we're past it and everybody picks and chooses online, but the CD (-R) is still the common physical medium) that artists feel a musical package must get fairly close to 80 minutes.  This is where the Shulman theory becomes relevant.  He suggests that serious questions should be asked and an unforgiving editing factor should step in the moment an album goes over 40 minutes.  He's right, as 40 is close to the magic number of vital, good content the average good album delivers, just as 90 is for film.  This idea would save us so many extraneous skits, remixes, and gratuitious guest appearances that pop music would get better immediately just through judiciousness.

Prince, one of my favorite musicians, is an indulgent artist to say the least, and he has dabbled frequently in the long album murky waters.  He did it brilliantly on double albums like 1999 and Sign O' The Times.  When he finally got his melodramatic liberation from label obligation in the '90s, however, he completely abused his freedom with multidisc misfires like Emancipation and Crystal Ball.

Mind you, both releases have, within them, an enviable quantity of fine material.  There is, in fact, enough within either of these releases to make a stirring 40 minute playlist, or one could say the album he should have released.  B-sides and boxed sets are great for collectors, but making 3 or 4 disc initial releases overwhelms the good moments with at best respectful yawns.  Epic releases without a need to be epic needlessly deteriorate the passion and interest of even the most forgiving and dilligent music lover.

Sign O' The Times happens to be my favorite Prince album, and not coincidentally one of my favorites ever.  It is one of the rare longies that justifies its length with both the abundance of wonderful songwriting and the breadth of musical style.  Still, it seems like he got the wrong idea for it.  Where Sign O' The Times was a great double along the lines of Stevie Wonder''s Songs in the Key of Life that captured a soul legend jumping into whatever pool he feels like at his indefatiguable peak, it wasn't a great rubrik to expand upon in later, less inspired years.

This is where we finally get to the disc this review is ostensibly about.  Prince has found a modicum of AOR renewed relevance in semi-focused single disc releases like Musicology, 3121, and Planet Earth.  His recent triple pack, meanwhile, seems to be alternately laughed at, lamented, or ignored.  The single discs were a good idea, but still suffered from the freedom and bloat of the CD format.  If Prince really wants to matter again, I would suggest he spend a year making something as concise and irresistible as Dirty Mind.

Dirty Mind, at the dawn of the '80s, was the album that, at least for the geeks, established Prince as more than a ridiculously talented R&B prodigy and announced him as an iconic star for the decade (everybody else became aware with the double punch of 1999 and Purple Rain).  Dirty Mind, though it doesn't boast those TV commercial compilation pop hits, has not died and has in fact grown stronger in stature in that fluid pop canon we all float in.

Many music critics before me have jizzed over its revolutionary alchemy of rock, new wave, funk, disco, futurisim, soul and whatever sonic designation you want to latch onto, so I'll try to restrain myself.  That is, in fact, why this album stands up so well, its ability to restrain itself and earn those hosannas simultaneously.

The title track laid the minimal (but unconceived of at the time) foundation that would be exploited by such iconic '80s hits as Van Halen's Jump and Springsteen's Born in the USA, with an insidiously catchy synth riff pushing an inspired song endlessly forward.  Of course, Prince's prototype was much more sticky and sexual.  When You Were Mine has been covered a few times because it is one of the best pop songs in the book.  Indie rockers took the depressing lyrics and made it into a dirge, missing the point entirely.  Only Cyndi Lauper realized that doing such a sad song as a bouncy dance tune made the melancoly so much stronger.  There is, ironically, a greater honesty in reflecting self-justification by doing such a self-lacerating call to an ex-lover in an upbeat fashion.

Do It All Night and Sister manage to find a level of ecstatic joy and intensity that mere rock referents could not possibly muster (and the latter is all about incest).  Prince brought the possibilities of funk to bottle and shake up sexiness to rock and pop.  Gotta Broken Heart Again is a reminder that Prince could compete with the best of the pre-disco soul men, showing a fine voice, syrupy composition, and enough mundane/profound everyday detail to make a Teddy P redundant.

Uptown is perhaps the best and most ecstatic expression of post-hippy, new wave youth individualism.  There was a sneaky comformity to that '60s movement (which Prince would one-up on Around the World in a Day).  On Uptown, Prince would decimate the residual hierarchical Woodstock scene with simple lines delivered with utmost confidence.

"Our clothes, our hair/We don't care/It's all about being there"

This is the encompassing second tier city counterpoint to the Studio 54 snobbery that pissed off Chic so much.  Head is rather over-written-about, but just think of the impact of such a pro-oral-sex pop jam in the late '70s.  The whole thing wraps itself up in a tight little bow with Party Up.  Given the audio overload that has preceded it, it becomes more than a vacant encouragement to hedonism, and winds up culminating a call to disregard musical (and, more explicitly, carnal) prejudice from any angle.

The point is that this masterpiece clocks in well under 40 minutes.  Both modern albums and Prince himself could learn a lesson from it.

 

20 May, 2009 - 15:03 — George Booker

 

 

 

 

 

Pitchfork Magazine

 

Prince
Dirty Mind
[Warner Bros; 1980]

 

No one ever made the combination of gender ambiguity and panting sexuality seem as right and natural as Prince, an outsider stuck in a mid-sized midwestern city with the balls to sport heavy makeup, thigh-high stockings and bikini briefs while opening for the Rolling Stones. Dirty Mind is the Purple One in stark black and white, as yet untouched by the spiritual heaviness that would color his work as the 80s wore on. At this point, all he wanted was to get down, in both senses of that word. The music is unbelievably lean, with the dry recording and minimal production serving as the perfect foil to the decidedly wet and lush physicality of the subject matter. Catchy electro-pop meets danceable electro-funk, Dirty Mind stands as Prince's first great album. --Mark Richardson

 

 

 

 

 

AllMusic

 

Prince

Dirty Mind

 

• AllMusic Rating *****

 

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

 

Neither For You nor Prince was adequate preparation for the full-blown masterpiece of Prince's third album, Dirty Mind. Recorded in his home studio, with Prince playing nearly every instrument, Dirty Mind is a stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock. Where other pop musicians suggested sex in lewd double-entendres, Prince left nothing to hide -- before its release, no other rock or funk record was ever quite as explicit as Dirty Mind, with its gleeful tales of oral sex, threesomes, and even incest. Certainly, it opened the doors for countless sexually explicit albums, but to reduce its impact to mere profanity is too reductive -- the music of Dirty Mind is as shocking as its graphic language, bending styles and breaking rules with little regard for fixed genres. Basing the album on a harder, rock-oriented beat more than before, Prince tries everything -- there's pure new wave pop ("When You Were Mine"), soulful crooning ("Gotta Broken Heart Again"), robotic funk ("Dirty Mind"), rock & roll ("Sister"), sultry funk ("Head," "Do It All Night"), and relentless dance jams ("Uptown," "Partyup"), all in the space of half an hour. It's a breathtaking, visionary album, and its fusion of synthesizers, rock rhythms, and funk set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early '80s.