Prince's follow-up to
Dirty Mind is pretty much where I found myself getting fully on board the project (along with the Time's second release, the comedy album
What Time Is It?).
Controversy doesn't add much to the turf staked out in the previous album, but digs in and makes clear he's in it to win it, whatever the hell "it" was. The title song, in fact, sounds remarkably in form like the title song for
Dirty Mind, but with the expedient addition of an unexpurgated Lord's Prayer at the bridge, intoned with all due solemnity over a pulsing beat and powered up by funk guitar. The track that impressed me most and brought me full into the fold was "Sexuality," a pinpoint-perfect exercise that revs up and works out like a finely tuned machine. I learned the throwaways by heart, and came to believe that once you have the timing to them down, to the point that your voice is indistinguishable from Prince's as you chant along, that you become, for those few moments, Prince himself (interestingly, the
same effect may also obtain with Buddy Holly): "We live in a world overrun by tourists. Tourists—89 flowers on their back. Inventors of the Accu-jack. They look at life through a pocket camera. What? No flash again? They're all a bunch of double drags who teach their kids that love is bad. Half of the staff of their brain is on vacation." And later this lovely admonishing mot: "What's to be expected is three minus three. Absolutely nothing." This album comes in closer to 40 minutes than 30, but with the same number of songs as the last, which meant only that Prince was letting himself stretch out—trying to avoid the word "indulgent" here—a foreshadowing of what was to come next.
Controversy is anything but even across its offerings. I could do without "Do Me Baby," "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," "Annie Christian," or "Jack U Off," and already that's half the tracks. Even when the album was a full-on daily obsession it involved a lot of lifting and moving of the needle. Then again, "Controversy," "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," and "Annie Christian" all evince a bracing willingness not just to flout convention but to outright attack it, in a style that
seemed, anyway, to find its sources in the hippie ethos of the '60s. Who
was this guy? Why was he saying and doing the things he did? And where was it all headed? Most importantly, damn, that's some fine funk.
This is where I got on the bus, too, but maybe for different reasons. I liked Dirty Mind but when I heard it the standard of comparison, for me, was Michael Jackson, Cameo, contemporary RnB and at that game Prince was good, fresh, bright, aggressively sexual, but still not something entirely exceptional. On Controversy, I heard something else, psychadelia, art pretensions, more rock. In one way I think of Dirty Mind as more of a song album and Controversy as more of a sound album. I love, love “Private Joy” but most of Controversy worked for me as a continuous song cycle. I couldn’t even follow most the lyrics, which seemed some crazy mix of street corner preacher and pimp, but loved the concept-- yeah, whatever that was-- and “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “Annie Christian” were essential to the concept, an essentially political concept not entirely foreign to what the Stones were doing in ‘68: decadent, hedonist, on the tip of something happening all around.
ReplyDeleteControversy I think is indicative of Prince's lesser '80s albums in that a huge chunk of it doesn't really work yet all of it is still damn listenable and fun and daring. I still prefer the sweaty abandon of Dirty Mind but Prince didn't really figure himself until he threw together the best of these two records into 1999.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jack about the Stones, and that was a point I made in my own tribute. Where the Beatles were sonic explorers, the Stones navigated the '60s viscerally, and it's funny to think that all the Stones fans who supposedly came on-board because of that confrontational hedonism booed Prince off the stage when he opened for them. Says a lot about how rock bands are neutered not by the artists running out of inspiration but the fans growing complacent. That's why you need people like Prince every 10 years or show to shake everything up (Bowie was a Stones disciple too, of course, and look what all he did in the '70s)
Jake, that's a great point about how fans conspire to hem in their objects of adoration, and all too true. Out of curiosity, who do you see taking the roles of sexual liberator in the '90s and '00s? Or is the role maybe played out post-AIDS? Hard to imagine but at the moment can't think who fits the bill...
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't think anyone came along in the '90s or '00s who dominated the way Elvis, The Beatles, Bowie and Prince did. Not that there weren't many great bands, just no ringleaders for those decades. And I think sex ties directly into the biggest mainstream acts. As you say, after AIDS, I don't think anyone stepped in to fill the role. Plus, I don't think Prince gave anyone much room to expand in terms of boundary-jumping experimentation. Gaga tries too hard and can't back up her effrontery with truly great music, even if it is catchy. Much as she tries, she's too much of a follower where people like Prince and Bowie and the Beatles added something to their wholesale appropriation of inspirational acts.
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