My Top 20 albums for 1980 No 11

Dirty Mind (1980)
1980
Tracklist
Dirty Mind 4:11
When You Were Mine 3:44
Do It All Night 3:42
Gotta Broken Heart Again 2:13
Uptown 5:30
Head 4:40
Sister 1:33
Partyup 4:24

Personnel
Prince - all vocals and instruments, except as noted below
Lisa Coleman - backing vocals on "Head"
Doctor Fink - synthesizer on "Dirty Mind" and "Head"

His first major work, these love songs, sex songs and pseudo-political anthems were originally recorded as demos, mostly at Prince's home. He then decided to release the demos rather than beautify the songs in an LA studio, paving the way for Rick James' "punk funk" movement. Lyrically he pushed the envelope to the extreme, with the incest-themed "Sister," concert favorite "Head" and the title track. But what's often overlooked here is the brilliant songwriting: every tune is memorable, particularly the classic "When You Were Mine" (since covered by everyone from country singers to Cyndi Lauper) and the hit "Uptown." And despite the stripped-down sound, he throws in some neat gimmicks, like the massively amplified guitar ending "Gotta Broken Heart Again." For the first time, Prince used other musicians: Matt Fink plays an interesting keyboard solo on "Head" while new band member Lisa Coleman speaks some of the track's more controversial lyrics. (DBW)

Dirty Mind (1980) ****1/2

He most certainly does. I've never had a sister, but if I did, I don't believe I'd sleep with her (unless it were a Brady Bunch situation in which she was only my foster sister, that is to say a girl my own age [completely unrelated save for the technical, divorce-age sense] who by accident wound up a few doors down from my room, especially if she were as hot as Marcia...shit, if one of the girls in my highschool had lived in the room beside me back in the day, right now I'd be swigging a six pack in front of the tube and cussing out my illegitimate children in the trailer park. Luckily I was a nerd in highschool, and now I'm making it, and all you cool people are losers living off welfare! Ha Ha Ha!). This stripped down funk inspired a number of people like Rick "Crackhead Sodomite" James, but I'll let that slide. Originally intended as demos that would later be laid down by a real band, Prince decided not to bother 'cause it sounded good enough already, and boy was he right. This would constitute his best-ever album if only it were a wee bit longer and had more stylistic variety. "When You Were Mine," is Prince's best ever song, and one of the early '80s sharpest singles, clearly establishing him as a tunesmith to be reckoned with. Zooming by at 30 minutes, this is one of those perfect party albums that you can slap on and no one will not dance to, and it's quickly over before anyone's sick of it. It's a bit, err, obvious to seduce that lil' sweet thing you convinced to come over with, unless kids today are much more sexually explicit than when I came of age. For instance, the title "Head", but I guess subtlety has never been Prince's forte, and lord knows he's had many more beautiful vixens than I'll probably ever see.

Rev 3
Dirty Mind
Prince’s first fully actualized album is an unrelenting dance party, its kinky ambiguities blurring lines between genres and genders and pretty much everything else.

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.

Dirty Mind
Prince
[Verse 1]
There's something about you, baby
It happens all the time
Whenever I'm around you, baby
I get a dirty mind
It doesn't matter where we are
Doesn't matter who's around
Doesn't matter, I just want to lay you down
[Verse 2]
In my daddy's car
It's you I really want to drive
But you never go too far
I may not be your kind of man
I may not be your style
But honey, all I want to do
Is just love you for a little while
[Verse 3]
If you got the time
I'll give you some money
To buy a dirty mind
Don't misunderstand me
I never fool around
But honey, you got me on my knees
Won't you please let me lay you down

When You Were Mine
Prince

[Verse 1]
When you were mine I gave you all of my money
Time after time You done me wrong
It was just like a train
You let all my friends come over and meet
And you were so strange
You didn't have the decency to change the sheets
Oh girl, when you were mine I used to let you wear all my clothes
You were so fine (so fine) Maybe that's the reason That it hurt me so
[Chorus]I know (I know)
That you're going with another guy I don't care (don't care)
Cause I love you, baby, that's no lie
I love you more than I did When you were mine
[Verse 2]
When you were mine You were kinda sorta my best friend
So I was blind (so blind) I let you fool around
I never cared (didn't care) I never was the kind to make a fuss
When he was there Sleeping in between the two of us
[Chorus]I know (I know)
That you're going with another guy
I don't care (don't care) Cause I love you, baby, that's no lie
I love you more than I did When you were mine
[Bridge] When you were mine
You were all I ever wanted to do Now I spend my time
Following him whenever he's with you
[Chorus] I know (I know)
That you're going with another guy
I don't care (don't care) Cause I love you, baby, that's no lie
I love you more than I did When you were mine
[Outro] When you were mine, yeah, oh no
Love you, baby x2
When you were mine

Do It All Night
Prince
[Verse 1]
Pardon me, I want to talk to you
I may be kind of shy But I just got to tell you
What I'm going through
Someone over there says He wants to get to know you
I don't care because I really want to hold you
And I'm so scared
[Girl], he might do something
To you that you like
Now I've been waiting
Such a bloody long time
Just to get this close to you
Now that you're near me
I want you to hear me
I'll tell you what I want to do
[Chorus] Oh, I want to do it Do it all night
I want to do it Do it to you right
[Verse 2]
Giving up so easy Is something that I never do
But I'm so easy, so easy
When it comes to loving you Can't you understand that I want
To hug and kiss you
I'll do anything I can just To give you happiness
And I drown, baby, drown, baby In your arms, come on baby
Can't you get to this?
I've been waiting such a bloody long time
And you're talking to someone else
Now that I've got your attention
There's something I want to mention

Gotta Broken Heart Again
Prince
[Verse 1]
I've got broken heart again
Because my only supposed-to-be friend
You see, he stole my old lady away from me
And now I'm just as blue as I can be
[Verse 2]
I've got broken heart again
Because I ain't got no money to spend
You see, I spent it all on a long distance phone call
Begging her to please come home, yeah, yeah
[Ad lib]
Ah, yeah
[Verse 3]
It doesn't matter what I do
I can't stop, ah, thinking bout you
The little things you said
The things you do to me in bed
Oh baby, I can't get you out to my head
Oh, oh, got a broken heart again, yeah
This time it's serious
It feels just like the end
Because once your love has gone away
There ain't nothing, nothing left to say

Uptown
Prince

[Verse 1]
She saw me walking down the streets Of your fine city
It kind of turned me on when she looked at me
And said, "come here"
Now I don't usually talk to strangers But she looked so pretty
What can I lose If I just give a little ear?
What's up little girl? I ain't got time to play
Baby didn't say too much She said, "Are you gay?"
Kinda took me by surprise I didn't know what to do
I just looked her in her eyes And I said, "No, are you?"
Said to myself, said
She's just a crazy, crazy, crazy little mixed up dame
She's just a victim of society And all its games
[Pre-Chorus] Now where I come from
We don't let society, tell us how it's supposed to be
Our clothes, our hair, we don't care It's all about being there
[Chorus] Everybody's going Uptown That's where I want to be Uptown
Set your mind free Uptown Got my body hot Get down
I don't want to stop, no
[Verse 2]
As soon as we got there Good times were rolling
White, black, Puerto Rican Everybody just a-freaking
Good times were rolling She started dancing in the streets
Girl, she's just gone mad You know, she even made love to me
Best that I ever had I don't usually talk to strangers
This time it's all right See, she got me hot
I couldn't stop Good times were rolling all night
All night, yeah
[Pre-Chorus] Now where I come from We don't give a damn
We do whatever we please It ain't about no downtown
Nowhere bound Narrow-minded drag
It's all about being free
[Chorus] Everybody's going Uptown
That's where I want to be Uptown
Set your mind free Uptown
Got my body hot Get down
I don't want to stop, no
[Interlude] [Outro] Uptown x2
Everybody's going, everybody's going
Everybody got to, got to Uptown
Got to go, got to go-go-go
Got to go Uptown Uptown
All now Uptown Got to go-go-go
Baby, got to go, got to Uptown
Come on, come on
You, you have to, you got to go
Uptown Yeah

Head
Prince
[Verse 1: Prince and Lisa Coleman]
I remember when I met you, baby
You were on your way to be wed
You were such a sexy thing
I loved the way you walked the things you said
I was so nonchalant
I didn't want you to be misled
But I've got to have you, baby
I got to have you in my bed
You said: "But I'm just a virgin, and I'm
On my way to be wed But you're such a hunk
So full of spunk"
[Chorus: Prince]
I'll give you head till you're burning up
Head till you get enough
Head till your love is red
Head, love you till you're dead
[Verse 2: Prince and Lisa Coleman]
You know you're good, girl
I think you like to go down
You wouldn't have stopped
But uh, I came on your wedding gown
And you said:
"I must confess
I wanna get undressed and go to bed"
With that I jammed, you fool
You married me instead

Sister
Prince

[Verse 1]
I was only 16, but I guess that's no excuse
My sister was 32, lovely and loose
She don't wear no underwear
She said it only gets in her hair
And it's got a funny way of stopping the juice
My sister never made love to anyone else but me
She's the reason for my, uh, sexuality
Showed me where it's supposed to go
A blow job doesn't mean blow
Incest is everything it's said to be
[Chorus]
Oh, sister Don't put me on the street again
Oh, sister I just want to be your friend
[Verse 2]
I was only 16 and only half a man
My sister didn't give a goddamn
She only wanted to turn me out
She took a whip to me until I shout
"Oh, motherf**ker, sister, motherf**ker
Can't you understand?
[Chorus]
Oh, sister Don't put me on the street again
Oh, sister I just want to be your friend
[Outro]
I'll do what you want me to do
Don't put me on the street and make me blue
Oh, sister, ooh sister, ooh

Partyup
Prince
[Verse 1]
We don't give a damn We just want to jam
Party up That army bag
Such a double drag Party up
Party, got to party down, baby
Revolutionary rock and roll
Going uptown, baby
How you going to make me kill somebody
I don't even know?
They got the draft, uh uh
I just laugh
Party up
Fighting war
Is such a f**king bore
Party up
Party, uh uh, got to party down, babe
Ooh, it's all about what's in your mind
Going uptown, baby
I don't want to die
I just want to have a bloody good time
[Chorus]
Party up
Got to party up
Party up
Got to party up