The first time I heard Mr. Prince Rogers Nelson was on local radio stations, where “I Wanna Be Your Lover” was getting some airplay. It didn’t make much of an impression on me, to be honest; it was the time when a lot of R&B like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and group acts like the Commodores and Earth, Wind, and Fire were on the airwaves a lot, and it didn’t seem to be all that different to me. But in 1980, Rolling Stone published a glowing review of his then-new album Dirty Mind, and this piqued my curiosity; before I could get around to buying, though, I happened to catch him on Saturday Night Live. The first song he did, with the Dez/Fink/Lisa/Andre band (see above), “Uptown”, was fine. Later that night, though, he encored with “Partyup”, which was nice and funky, but then at the end when chanting “…we don’t want to fight NO MORE” he slapped the mic, knocking it flat on the floor, and stomped off the stage- and I was, as our Brit friends say, gobsmacked. Went out and got the Dirty Mind record the next day, and thus began my fandom, which lasted for a really long time. Continuing this series, I’m going to try to write a little about, and grade, every Prince release that I’m familiar with. I will admit that in the mid-2000s I lost interest; he was skipping from one record company to the next, putting out multiple records both on his own via his website at the same time, cleaning out his closet by the look of it, and none of it was really grabbing me so I stopped keeping up. Of course, I did still watch and listen once in a while, and I will say his passing (especially coming as it did when so many music heroes like Bowie had died as well) affected me quite a bit. It’s sad, the lengths some performers go to in order to entertain us. Still can’t believe the l’il fella is gone. The Estate has seen to several releases since then that I’m not so sure Prince would have wanted out, they’ve been of varying quality but have been interesting to hear nonetheless.
OK, OK, I’ll get started.
For You (1978) - I suppose, for me, the most extraordinary thing about his debut is that Warners allowed him to go into the studio and do his one man band thing right off the bat. He did have a little help; his eventual drummer David “Z” did advise, and others such as Patrice Rushen did some programming and whatnot. But make no mistake, this is all Prince. Warners tried to saddle him with an executive producer, but the e.p.’s suggestions were mostly ignored, much to the e.p.’s consternation. Say this much for Prince, he was as he was from the beginning. This record, which I’ve never been moved to purchase (in the interest of full disclosure), didn’t really make much of an impression on me. It’s well sung and played but pretty much basic R&B; Prince was still working out his voice and vision. A little Stevie here, some Earth, Wind and Fire there, none of it bad, really, but nothing especially memorable either. C+
Prince (1979) - At the time, there was still no indication that Prince would go on to be the artiste he became, but this batch of songs shows definite improvement. One thing that helped was a stronger emphasis on his guitar; “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” and “Bambi” (“It’s better with a man…”) were funk-rock stompers. There’s more coy sexy stuff too, “Sexy Dancer” with its heavy breathing interludes, for example. The hit from this one was “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, a fine R&B track that went to #11 on Billboard. Songwriting was stronger, too; “I Feel For You”, the years-later Chaka Khan hit cover, is on here, and the ballad “With You” was covered very well by his mid-80s protege Jill Jones on her eponymous Paisley Park album. Even so, nobody really knew what to make of this guy with the falsetto vocals, DIY aesthetic, and his guileless bare chested cover photo; the back cover, a blurry pic of a naked Prince on a winged horse was even more confusing. He didn’t care; it would get even blurrier on the next album. B+
Dirty Mind (1980) In which Prince looked away from Stevie and Maurice and went into P-Funk, Sly, and New Wave territory. Another one man band effort, albeit one with random contributions from his touring band, it has a spare, demo-ish sound that makes it sound all the more immediate, and perhaps the biggest shift was away from the naughty coyness of the previous two albums into really explicit sexual content. He toured opening for Rick James prior to recording this, one has to wonder how much this influenced him; maybe he listened to a bunch of Betty Davis too, who knows. We get a horny come-on in the title track, with throbbing synths and electronic drums; track two, “When You Were Mine”, is about a menage a trois situation that hasn’t turned out quite as well for the singer as he’d hoped. “Head” gives us the story of how the singer swaps cunnilingus with a bride-to-be on her wedding day; she winds up marrying him instead. Yeah. “Sister” features the singer sleeping with his sister and hey, it’s not that bad, he says… the relatively innocent “Do It All Night” pretty much sums up the slant of this groundbreaking record. Of course, it’s not all R-rated material; “Gotta Broken Heart Again” is a winsome ballad, and “Uptown”, along with “Partyup” function as perhaps-naive-but optimistic rallying cries for the multi-racial/multi-sexual/anti-war community of upright party people he (and Sly, let’s face it, too) envisioned. This album didn’t hit the charts as hard (no pun intended) as its predecessor did (Billboard #45 was its peak), but its impact and influence was felt far and wide throughout the early 80s music scene. A
Controversy (1981) More or less a continuation, content-wise, of Dirty Mind but less focused- which is not to say that it was a bad album, just a refinement of sorts of the themes Prince would carry forward for years to come. “Controversy” finds him addressing the questions he was being bombarded with in the wake of the preceding record; “Am I black or white/am I straight- or gay?” among them. Of course, he doesn’t really answer, what’s the point of that, and chanting the Lord’s Prayer at the end just makes it weirder. I’m sure it amused him greatly. Doubling down on this, we next get “Sexuality”, a hopped-up mission statement of sorts, then one of his most steamy come-on songs, “Do Me Baby”, a long but not draggy track that features quite a workout of that falsetto. After the rather lightweight pop-song album-side 2 opener “Private Joy”, best described as “bouncy”, he dips his toe into the socially conscious waters with “Ronnie Talk to Russia” and “Annie Christian”, the former espousing naive observations about the world stage with a rally-cry type accompaniment, and the latter a weird guitar noodly rumination on violence and murder with the titular being at the core of it; I’ll give it this, it’s moody and atmospheric. Sandwiched in between is another bouncy number, “Let’s Work”, less about labor and more about getting busy if you know what I mean, then it concludes with the amusing rocker “Jack U Off”. Controversy isn’t a bad album, but it just sounds like things hadn’t quite coalesced yet for the Artist. Next time out, the picture would get more focused. B+
1999 (1982) The years 1981 into 1982 were really busy ones for the increasingly prolific Mr. Rogers Nelson. Not only did he have a new group, The Time (featuring several of his Minneapolis pals, like Morris Day and Jesse Johnson), with two albums of songs he wrote, he also had a girl-group called Vanity 6- also with an album out of Prince-written songs. Production credited to “The Starr Company”, it was all mostly Prince, with vocals and other minimal contribution from the groups. Even the b-sides were no longer album cuts, but non-album original songs, pulled off the shelf. He was on fire, as they say. So, even though Controversy didn’t really break him like many hoped, the first video from 1999, the title track, hit and everybody paid attentiion. The lyric “Year 2000 zero zero party over oops out of time/So tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999” resonated with the faithful, like yours truly. But the single only peaked at #44 US Billboard…then, “Little Red Corvette” was released in February and that one hit big. Working car metaphors (not dissimilar, actually, to “The Stick”, an album track on the Time’s first LP) and double entendres, this one really struck a chord and it made it to #6, and things went into the stratosphere. Follow up single, the squiggle-synth jitterbuggy “Delirious” went to #8 but didn’t achieve the same perennial status as its Little Red predecessor. Other choice cuts include “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”, the fourth single that peaked in the 50s on Billboard and is a hopped-up pop-dance track in which Prince pitches woo to someone, summing up that while he doesn’t mean to be nasty, he sincerely wants to “fuck the taste out of her mouth”, eventually giving us his philosophy of life and religion towards the end… it’s a bravura track, one of many in which he would say in song what most of us wouldn’t dare (and probably shouldn’t dare) to say in real life. “D.M.S.R.” is another long extended and funky as all get out track, the title acronym representing dance, music, sex, and romance, encouraging all of us party people listeners to “strip right down to your underwear”. “Automatic” is a spacey synthed-up cut with odd BDSM overtones and a coyly staged S&M scenario in its video, same for “Lady Cab Driver” with Jill (“J.J.”) Jones receiving some corporal punishment at the hands of the worried and anxious author in the name of several random causes including women, God, and “Yosemite Sam and the tourists at Disneyland” (yeah, it’s pretty crazy), and “Free”, which is an anthemic side closer, a melodic utopian vision that expands on Prince’s inclusive views. Not everything works; the tuneless, synth-heavy tracks “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” and “All the Critics Love You in New York” sit uneasily among the other tracks. “International Lover”, the album closer, got him a Grammy™ nomination even though it wasn’t a single… but while it’s a nice enough song it never really resonated with me. Still, what a landmark record this was, and remains. A
OK, that’s it for now. Next time, things get even more purple.
Listen to For You on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Prince (1979) on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Dirty Mind on the streaming service of your choice.
Listen to Controversy on the streaming service of your choice.