At the dawn of the 1980s, young black musicians were pretty much doomed. After disco brought forth the most racially integrated moment popular music had seen since Kennedy was shot, the ensuing backlash was fierce, and radio finally got fed up with the club scene telling it what to play. So once the airwaves declared dance music dead at the very tail end of the ’70s, African-American stars who didn’t have hits that predated disco—which was just about all of them, besides Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Kool & the Gang—had to either drastically change their game, face instant obsolesce, or only play to black audiences.
Prince wasn’t about to take option two or three. When he signed to Warner Bros. in 1977 , he told A&R head Lenny Waronker: “Don’t make me black.” Then the multi-instrumentalist proved his hard rock bona-fides on the guitar-shredding “I’m Yours,” from his 1978 debut For You, and “Bambi,” from 1979’s Prince, just as surely as he served notice of his disco cred with that self-titled album’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a major pop and chart-topping R&B hit. But still, his vibe on those early wailing solos wasn’t any hipper than that of any other geek who spent his lonely teen years mastering byzantine jazz-fusion wankery.
Prince’s Dirty Mind, his first fully actualized album, changed all that in 1980—though it isn’t the thorough break from his brief past that it’s generally made out to be. It starts with the most blatant disco throb in his entire discography on the title cut, and his second-heaviest thump pounds through “Uptown,” which opens Side B. At 30 ultra-tight minutes, a length that allowed for more walloping vinyl, Prince’s sole slow-jam-deficient album is pretty much an unrelenting dance party that pointedly invited New Wavers to boogie down alongside funk bunnies and dancefloor fashionistas. It’s one of the key records that truly initiated the ’80s.
It’s all there in what’s not. Whereas Prince’s ’70s albums proclaimed his virtuosity, here he achieves much more by confining himself to the simplest, boldest strokes. Like Krautrock’s motorik beat, Prince’s opening “Dirty Mind” rhythms are just about as close a human can get to a metronome; no tom-tom fills, no accents on the high-hat, just an occasional syncopation on cheaply recorded cymbals that suggest a drum machine’s hiss. Like Chic or the Cars, Prince makes the album’s inaugural guitar so staccato it’s nearly a percussion instrument, and much of the arrangement’s tension and release is located in just how much he lets its nearly solitary chord ring out. Halfway through, “Dirty Mind” breaks down in quintessential disco fashion, but right after it builds back up, four descending key changes are offset by ascending, churchy organ: a particularly Prince-like juxtaposition that offers a peek-a-boo glimpse into the convolutions—sexual and otherwise—of his psyche. The composition denies consummation in favor of suspended anticipation.
Because so much of Dirty Mind’s instrumentation is expressed in prickly masculine terms, Prince’s vocals feel that much more free and startlingly girly. His generation grew up with falsetto soul men—Motown’s Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks in the ’60s, Philly’s Stylistics and other harmony acts of the ’70s—and it can be argued that they scored with white audiences because their higher, more ecstatically female frequencies made their race and sexuality less threatening. But it can’t be underestimated how much Prince quite threateningly set off gaydar—particularly with this positively giddy album. Later on, he’d become a superstar singing in his regular range on most hits from 1999 and Purple Rain, but here he establishes his confrontational persona by ramping up the sighs and squeals. Although Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman—LGBT members of Prince’s peak-era band the Revolution—pretty much nailed it when they deemed Prince a “fancy lesbian,” folks of every persuasion still argue about his sexual identity to this day.
That ambiguity is played to the hilt on the track that cemented Prince’s New Wave connection, “When You Were Mine.” The music evokes Elvis Costello’s bitter rigidity, but the lyric wanders way beyond that songwriter’s cuckold comfort zone: There’s the sharing of the clothes and the voyeuristic, nearly-bi way his post-breakup attention shifts from the gender-indeterminate object of his affection to his ex and her/his current steady guy. And, of course, the zinger: “I never was the kind to make a fuss/When he was there, sleeping in-between the two of us.” Whether it was sung by Prince or Cyndi Lauper, who memorably covered the song without changing its nouns on 1983’s She’s So Unusual, that line caught everyone’s attention. Only a new kind of person could do it justice.
Dirty Mind’s second side is unquestionably Prince’s most propulsive suite. It begins with “Uptown,” which ranks alongside Vanity 6’s Prince-penned-and-produced “Nasty Girl” among the most daring R&B radio hits of the ’80s. But its topic is even more singular—how homophobia constricts even heterosexuals. The song celebrates a boho utopia where fag-bashing, racism, misogyny, and all other trifling shit doesn’t exist: While minding his own business, a passing hottie asks him point blank, “Are you gay?” But instead of blowing his cool, Prince reasons, “She’s just a victim of society and all its games.” To school the dame, he takes her to Uptown, a real-life Minneapolis counterculture haven back in 1980 that’s subsequently been gentrified. There, she loses her uptight ways as the track’s grinding disco-funk gains momentum; the overwhelming freedom acts as an aphrodisiac, and the once-scorned weirdo gets “the best night I ever had.” Everybody’s happy.
The tempo downshifts slightly but significantly on “Head,” one of the earliest fully realized manifestations of Prince’s quintessential style. The song features another scenario perfectly archetypal of The Purple One: He meets a virgin (played with drawling deadpan glee by Coleman) on the way to her wedding, and she gives him what the song celebrates. This results in a Bill Clinton maneuver on her gown, so she dumps her plans and marries him instead. As suggested by his thorniest, most authoritative early groove, this isn’t necessarily a wise choice; Prince vows, with not a small amount of matrimonial menace, to “love you till you’re dead.”
Right before the onslaught of AIDS, “Head” was mighty strong stuff, but even it couldn’t compare to the next track: a 93-second punkabilly ditty that abruptly cuts off right as its bridge peaks, as if caught in flagrante. “Sister” celebrates incest like the rest of the record toys with sexual identity; it’s blatantly performative, yet Prince invests so much into it that it’s impossible to definitively conclude whether he fucked his sister or is merely fucking with us. The music matches this instability; his trebly guitar chords may be fast and furious like the Ramones, but the time signature keeps flipping to trip up ears and feet.
The final kiss-off, “Partyup,” denounces President Carter’s 1980 reinstatement of draft registration. Prince’s fury is both straightforward (“How you gonna make me kill somebody I don’t even know?)” and efficiently metaphorical (“Because of their half-baked mistakes/We get ice cream, no cake”). Meanwhile, the track—in-the-pocket on the bottom but liberatingly loose on top—finds the pleasure in getting thoroughly pissed off, especially during its ’60s-worthy closing chant: “You’re gonna hafta fight your own damn war/ ’Cause we don’t wanna fight no more.”
“Partyup” earns its “revolutionary rock‘n’roll” self-proclamation even though it, like most everything else on the album, is pretty much uncut funk with louder guitars and tunes so catchy you can’t deny the pop. Yet the attitude on this homemade landmark album, which was originally intended as a demo, couldn’t be purer punk: Dirty Mind rejects labels, restrictions, and authority. That’s why, despite its many colors, the music comes across so gloriously black; why Prince’s aura is so righteously flaming; why the singing wraps its pervy purple raincoat around what’s feminine. Prince was the kind of guy who couldn’t be boxed in by anything, so Dirty Mind has him rebelling against even his relatively ordinary and modest early success.
That may have lost him a few fans. The album never went platinum in the U.S. like its predecessor or 11 of the albums that followed, and even “Uptown” narrowly missed the Hot 100. But his willful aberrance also earned him a new kind of audience, one that would also support the Clash, Grace Jones, Culture Club, Rick James, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, Frankie Knuckles, and all the other super freaks of ’80s rock, soul, pop, and dance music. Disco’s so-called death resurrected and radicalized Prince’s already restless definition of self. Here, he becomes everything.
