Day 271: Prince – Dirty Mind

I intentionally avoid Prince a little bit, I’m concerned I’ll read something about him that’ll fully stop me from enjoying his music ever again after reading about him beating up Sinead O’Connor. But the man is dead and me streaming therefore won’t put any money in his pockets, so let’s listen to Dirty Mind.

Album cover courtesy of Warner Bros

Prince is one if those artist who I don’t think I need to introduce – if you’re reading an album review blog, you know who Prince is. He released Dirty Mind as his third album in 1980. About half of the album was written when he was opening on Rick James’ tour, and it was recorded in a makeshift studio in his basement. Prince played almost all of the instruments on the album and gave himself engineering credits under the pseudonym Jamie Starr.

One thing Prince is not is coy, and you can guess the subject matter of the album from the title. He’s very much not holding back on Dirty Mind, and it’s an album of clean and simple funk and new wave paired with some absolute lyrical raunch. The album itself is so sharp and punchy that it’s impossible not to feel swept away with it, and Prince’s horny falsetto singing is fun to listen to.

But you can’t really talk about this album without also discussing “Sister”, a punk song that proclaims the joys of incest. Critics apparently said it’s Prince’s elaborate joke at our expense and just a funny way of provoking people, but Prince himself said he wasn’t kidding:

“Sister“ is serious. “Head” could be taken as satire. No one’s laughing when I’m saying it so I don’t know. If people get enjoyment out of it and laugh, that’s fine. All the stuff on the record is true experiences and things that have occurred around me and the way I feel about things.

Holy moly, it’s a horrible song. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever heard, and I think people are giving him way too much credit by saying it’s a joke, it’s a song about his experience of sexual abuse if anything. The fact that it made it onto the album baffles me – surely someone somewhere at some meeting should have said “maybe let’s reconsider the song about the sister”.

Hard to rank this one. Musically, it’s such a great example of why Prince was one of the all-time greats, with its lo-fi sound and grittiness really working with the subject matter of the album. But the simplicity of it leaves a lot of space for the lyrics, which can be either great or absolutely terrible, depending on the topic. I know other people rate this album very highly, but let’s just call it an 8/10.