Dirty Mind (1980)


  
1. Dirty Mind 2. When You Were Mine 3. Do It All Night 4. Gotta Broken Heart Again 5. Uptown 6. Head 7. Sister 8. Partyup

 

Had Prince decided to keep going in the same direction as his first two albums, there’s no reason not to believe that his third effort could have been something close to a masterpiece. Well, for whatever reason, Prince takes a 180 degree turn, does something completely original, and manages to produce a masterpiece anyways.

This album is hard core, pulsating, in-your-face funk. And it funks hard. This is one of those albums that grabs you quick and refuses to let you go. The first two cuts, the title cut and When You Were Mine are both so incredible and addictive, that had the rest of the album been garbage, you could still feasibly call this a great album. Well, let’s just say that nothing on this record is sub-par. In fact, the only thing that might be considered a drawback is its relatively short running time. The whole album clocks in at barely thirty minutes. Since the experience is so incredible, however, you can’t really look at this somewhat short album as a liability. Plus, we now know that Prince would release albums and songs at a level that no one could keep up with, so there was never any lack of material.

You could argue that in many ways that this record helped set the tone, and the standard, for albums during much of the 1980s. Oh sure the 80s would be remembered for a lot of unpleasantness in the music department, but all decades have their bright spots as well, and this album emulated that the decade had stuff to be proud of as well. Aside from the hard core funk, the only song here that seems a bit out of place is Do It All Night that doesn’t quite have the bite as the rest of the songs.

Lyrically, well Prince would always have a reputation for being quite explicit in the love and sex department, and this album also represents his forage into the territories that caused many middle age parents to cover their children’s ears. With songs like the title cut, the above mentioned Do It All Night, the song about blatant incest (Sister) and the, lets-leave-nothing-to-the-imagination title Head, you could see the foreshadowing of things such as Parental Advisory Stickers. As later years would prove, Prince would suffer years of wild eclectic styles and bizarre behavior that would, in many cases, overshadow whatever music he was releasing at the time. This record, however, could be viewed as the start of his glory years that would take him through most of the decade of the 1980s. You’d have a very tough time finding any artist that was as successful during this decade, from start to finish, as this man. Not only is this album incredible, you could always argue it’s incredibly addictive.

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